I love you so much

Wearing a dress again. I know most people aren’t as freaked out by dresses as I am, but my god, they terrify me. So why in the last two months have I worn one on no less than 4 occasions? Beats me.

I called my friend Sara when it first happened and told her in hushed tones that something was really wrong but I couldn’t figure out what it was, all I knew was I kept delving in to the lady-clothes vault in the plastic bins at the back of my closet and it was starting to worry me.

A dress used to feel like power to me, but now it feels like shackles. The difference in the way people treat me in a dress astounds me. People get really excited, they tell me how “nice” and “pretty” I look. I feel like if I turned the sound down and I translated their words I would be hearing, “oh look you fell in line! You look so much MORE like a girl, good job on that.” Also, maybe I am paranoid. It is very likely in my current life where I work with the same group of people from 8am to 10pm most days of the week, that any difference is worth commenting on and a strange relief. Also the people in my life these days love me and they’re probably just telling me I look good. So thank you everybody, I love you too.

When I put on a dress I feel like there is one function to me and it’s all about sex I’m not looking for. I’m not trying to condemn dresses, they are obviously allowed any meaning you wish to give them, but at this moment in my life that’s what they mean on my body.

I think I feel okay talking a little bit about my history with dresses though we’ll see how far I get.

When I was younger I met a boy who terrified me the moment he walked in the door with a mass of red roses. It is one of the clearest moments of my teenaged years. A boy handing me flowers and my whole body clamoring, “NO!” while I reached out my hands to receive them.

No one taught me it was okay to make people uncomfortable, even for a moment. I’ve spent most of my life since that afternoon with the roses trying to negotiate the part of my personality that wants to perform for you ALL THE TIME no matter what. Even if we’re having a cup of coffee I want you to feel welcome, comfortable, understood and listened to. I have a hard time answering the question, ” What do you want?” I’ve made a life for myself leading other people towards their own discoveries and wants and needs. I direct plays, that’s my job, and it’s funny for me to think that in a rehearsal room I have no trouble saying, “This is what I want,” because we are talking about my one true love: plays. But if you asked me personally, I’d just pass the ball back to you, I don’t really want to talk about it.

So the boy with the flowers. It’s probably no surprise that every cell in my body was right and the mechanism in my brain that told me to behave myself and play nice was wrong. One of the hallmarks of the next year and a half of my life was wearing dresses. Because the boy with the flowers told me to, insisted in fact, demanded I do it. So I did. What it meant when I agreed to long skirts and hair kept neatly tied back is in my bones and my skin and pounds in my blood every time you ask me what I want.

These days the ghost of that time in my life is visiting me in the quiet hours at my kitchen table and I have to invite it to sit down and haunt me. I have to deal because I am finally getting too old to be afraid of ghosts. I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t know what this particular form of Daria related drag is supposed to be doing for me, but I guess if you see me in a skirt give me a hug. These demons may be well dressed but that doesn’t make them any less nasty.

Changing your name involves a lot of paper work. There are emails to update, voicemails to change, licenses, mailboxes, social security cards, return addresses, etc etc. Six years ago, that to-do list became a series of 21st century rituals. Each one erased another old habit, and another old fear, I came into my own with each new signature.

I got married at 24, so Daria Davis was power to me, it was growing up leverage. Being married meant I got to look back on my childhood from the vantage point of Davis. It opened up the possibility of repairing what I wanted to repair and freed me from the obligation to fix it all.  

When the state of California allowed Paul and I to become our own little legal ship of matrimony, I washed my hands of the trepidation and victimhood that had marked my young life and decided Daria Davis was a bad ass who stood at the center of her own desires and made shit happen. In a definitive way, marrying Paul, becoming Daria Davis is the reason I finally came out. I needed my marriage and Paul’s partnership in order to transform.

People seem slightly turned off when they hear I’m “keeping” Paul’s name. It’s so strange that verb, “keeping,” in the same way that it was strange to me when six years ago people asked me if I was, “taking” Paul’s name. 

I was raised by one of those second wave feminists whose advice to me about relationships was, “Never do another man’s laundry.” 

She used to say this to me all the time, sometimes, while folding my father’s laundry. Giving her the benefit of the doubt in those moments, I decided there must be a great metaphor in, “Never do another man’s laundry.” As a child I came to understand that women who don’t do other men’s laundry also don’t take the names of their husbands. They are also not cheerleaders, the do not wish to play the ingenue in the school play, they listen to Joni Mitchell not whatever crap is on the radio and they abhor pink. 

I could see that for the most part my mother was right, one should never do another man’s laundry. So I spent High School learning how to build sets for plays, choreographing”contemporary” dances to Tracy Chapman and hanging out with “the boys” while wearing their clothes. I remember the year we did GUYS AND DOLLS,  I played Adelaide in hot pants and a corset and was totally obsessed with how wrong it was to prance around singing Bushel and a Peck. 

This is my blog so I can take as long as I like to make a point, but this is a long way of saying I never intended to change my name, I was too afraid that is would make me a housewife in all the ways my mother warned me it would.

 It turned out Davis opened up a new chapter of my life, Davis became the two way street where I was safe enough to ask questions and hear the answers. Davis became a magic word.

In keeping Davis I’m not being robbed of my individualism or my agency. I am not afraid to stand on my own feet at the end of my marriage, I am not beholden to Paul. Davis is like a perfect tattoo. It encapsulates and celebrates a great moment of change, it is fuel for the fire, it has become my engine.

Let’s lighten the mood a bit here.

This is a story I’ve been telling randomly for a few years called: Me and Richard Gere.

This is how it goes:

 In the fifth grade I had a good friend named Julia Mora. Probably she was the first girl I had a crush on but I didn’t know that then.

I went to her house for a sleep over birthday party. There was dancing and the yelling and I think maybe spin the bottle, though I was mercifully spared- in fact I have never played. Missed opportunity? I don’t know.

At a certain point we nestled in a pre-pubescent mass in her living room and watched PRETTY WOMAN. Let it be known I have not seen that movie since this pivotal moment in the 5th grade so what I recall here should not be scrutinized for total PRETTY WOMAN accuracy. Also let it be known that I was raised by hippies in the woods and  up to this point had seen very little TV, let alone the kind of soul sucking low-brow pandering films that would star Julia Roberts as a hooker with a heart of gold… channeling my mother there for a minute.

Anyway. This is my memory:

As I recall there is this scene where Richard Gere is sitting in a fine drawing room in the hotel lobby. He is impeccable in a Tux- maybe a little bit of a rogue, even coarse grin on his face- but this is all fine because he is displaying his innumerable talents at the piano. Turns out this high powered… whatever he was, is also a poet, and a soulful musician.

If I were to watch the film now I would note that this little solo interlude of Gere’s is the director’s way of showing me a new side of Gere. Maybe a side I haven’t seen in the story thus far, maybe I am learning that he is a bit of a fish out of water in his high powered… whatever job, maybe this is where he misses his mother or channels the only gift his father left him- a love for stroking the ivory keys. Whatever it is, I know it’s a solemn undertaking.

SO

In walks Julia Roberts. I am not sure what she’s been up to. Maybe contemplating what it means to fall in love, maybe wondering if she is Eliza DoLittle in some way, maybe brushing her teeth in a huge penthouse hotel sink, I have no idea. 

But in any case she comes drifting down the stairs in a red dress.

 Small aside: If the dress was not red, I do not want to hear about it. In my memory it is a red dress and she looks Fucking Stunning.

SO

She sees him at the piano and is mesmerized by this man with his bow tie loosened around his neck, his shiny expensive gentleman shoes insistent on the piano’s pedals. 

She goes to him and without looking up, he moves his hands in one lion-like gesture from playing, to her perfect body and lifts her up onto the piano’s keys. Then he kisses her and she responds in kind and then they are making out like the classy movie stars that they are, the kind of kisses you plan, the soul kisses. They let the groaning piano speak for them as Julia’s rump glides up and down the many octaves of the keyboard.

Yeah. That’s my memory.

So here’s what happened in that living room while my 10 year old colleagues dozed and I, unused to so much stimulus in the dark, couldn’t tear my eyes away from the drama on screen:

I got totally weirdly, newly, for the first real time, turned on.

As I am sure most people report, it felt perfect and wrong and definitely a secret. So being an emotional compartmentalizer already at 10 I promptly buried the feeling.

Oh but it wormed it’s way slowly to the surface over the following 7 years. Like an echo, or a ripple in the water, a sign of something deeper, a current from the center of the earth faintly disturbing the surface. 

 I would remember that insane feeling when my closest friend came out to me in the 10th grade. When it occurred to me that a teacher of mine had adopted a baby with another woman, when I read the weirdly erotic parts of Clan of the Cave Bear and The Mists of Avalon in the 8th grade ( I mentioned I was raised by Hippies in the woods right?)

Right up until the 12th grade I was pretty clear about what had turned me on in this now hush hush fantasy ( all my friends were the next generation of dirty punk boys, being groomed to listen to Black Metal in the coffee shops they would soon staff. My interest in even a second of PRETTY WOMAN would have been met with uncomprehending derision). 

It was somewhere on the freeway back from a Weezer show or a Rancid show or something equally angsty in San Francisco that the truth dawned on me. 

I had a very serious boyfriend then, we were in the kind of love it takes three years of college to get over. And though our relationship had been something hovering on perfect up to that point, it didn’t make me feel like this half formed dream.

I had no anxiety about it though, I was pretty certain that the way I felt about my boyfriend was the way all girls felt about their boyfriends, plus he was my closest friend and somewhat of a personal savior- though we’ll get to that story another time.

My friend Scott was driving and my fantasy announced itself unbidden while the city receded behind us and maybe Alkaline Trio filled the car.  I don’t know what made me invert the image or flip the switch or whatever, but I was suddenly flooded with the realization that there was nothing so terribly hot about Richard Gere. He was to be admired for sure, super classy in his Tux and all, but I couldn’t say there was anything I could imagine under his fancy suit that held any lasting interest.

 The object of desire in this fantasy was Julia in her red dress. The deep longing, the years of puzzled desire  was not to be picked up and placed on a piano, but to do the picking up. 

Oh MAN, I wanted to be Richard Gere. 

Oh YES, I wanted to be that fucking smooth, that in charge, that powerful. I wanted a beautiful woman to wander down the stairs called by my music, WANT in her eyes. I allowed my mind to reverse the image further, to put my hands in Gere’s, imagine the cool perfection of a dress under my fingers, the smooth skin of a bare lady shoulder… when Scott swerved into the neighboring lane with his eyes half closed.

Scott was going on his third straight day awake at that point, I have no idea why now, but he was not doing awesome in the driving department and it became clear it was my job to keep him AWAKE. 

So I told him, not about Richard and Julia, but the strange feelings I had about my best friend who had come out to me as Bi a year or two earlier. I told him to keep him awake and focused on the road, what 17 year old dude wants to look their only close female friend in the eye at a time like that?

 And in that car, erratically headed back to Santa Cruz, I chose my identity for the first time. I chose something that seemed benign and acceptable, something that would continue to keep at bay the terrible circumstances surrounding an earlier boyfriend ( I’ll have to get in to that some other time too, but don’t hold your breath).

I thought Bi was a decent thing to be, an okay thing to tell Scott and tell my boyfriend. It seemed safe and seemed just about right. By the time Scott dropped me off he was wide awake and I was a newly minted me. It took me the following 9 years to undo that hasty decision in the car but I still think about Gere and covet pianos in hotel lobbies.

And now you all know what to get me for Christmas.

As we’ve navigated this separation over the past year, it’s been very important for Daria and I that we do it gradually, organically, openly, without giving into the natural but toxic fears that consume so many relationships during separations. We’ve allowed our relationship to evolve in a way that feels right to us both—to not force things into a predetermined pattern, impose some decisive split when it didn’t feel right. To continue honoring our love and devotion to one another, no matter what shape that might take. Not once have I doubted or second-guessed this process. The vows we made in our wedding ceremony are no less relevant now than they were nearly four years ago.

It’s been roughly a year since it became clear that we couldn’t continue operating as husband and wife indefinitely into the future as we’d once hoped and believed, and in this past year, we’ve taken many short steps to separating. Many of them significant—no longer having sex, no longer sharing a bed—but ultimately incremental. There is, of course, a loss of a certain sort of intimacy when you cease having sex and sharing a bed, but we remained so emotionally open to one another that that didn’t seem like such a jarring loss. A core of emotional intimacy continued to bind the two of us.

But now, as we plan to move out of our house we’ve shared for the past year, the fifth home we’ve shared over the past six years (sixth, if you count the car we drove around the country for five months in,) it’s clear that this is the most drastic change yet.

Neither of us want to take this step, but we know we have to. It’s the hardest yet, because it feels like the most artificial change we’ve had to impose upon ourselves. We’re both aware that the creature comforts of sharing a house have allowed us a certain amount of emotional stasis that we both know is emotionally unhealthy to remain in indefinitely. We both realize this separation is essential for our continued emotional growth and health as individuals. But these concepts are abstractions, and from a day-to-day experiential perspective, have little bearing on our non-traditional, yet very real, continued domestic bliss.

The late-night dinners I cook for Daria when she comes home from rehearsal, the casual conversations in the kitchen about what we’re working on and thinking through, discussions of prehistoric giant wombats and snow cone-chomping yetis, lying on the couch and watching programs together, walking to the lake, talking to our cat—these are the experiences that are so precious to us. And they threaten to become less immediate when our living situation changes.

But we made a vow to love and support and remain emotionally available to one another for life, and we both continue to hold the vows we made as being as relevant and true as ever, no matter the shape of our relationship in the days, months and years ahead. When we move into our own separate homes in a few weeks, we’ll lose some of the physical availability and emotional intimacy that comes from sharing space, and it’s frightening to not know how our relationship will change as a result. I have no doubt we will continue to keep our vows in the years ahead, but that will require, as always, care and attention.

I’m cleaning out my closet. Before this metaphor gets even slightly out of hand let me say that I’m trying to prepare myself to move and the plan here is to try and shed as much as possible before I strike out on my own. 

This is what I have in the closet: Dresses. Dresses from Galas, dresses for cocktail parties, dresses from work, dresses for Holiday parties, dresses from the 5 years I spent on my self imposed,” All dress format.”

Here’s what else is in my closet: Skirts. Pencils skirts, high wasted A line skirts, floor length skirts, skirts with a ruffle at the hem, short black skirts, skirts from the year I spent working that “Librarian” angle.

Here’s what else I have in my closet: In a sheer plastic bag I have a floor length, blush pink, silk, empire waist dress. There is gold beading on the bodice, pleats at the back and demure sleeves to the elbow edged in lace. 

There are a pair of flats dyed the same color in the bag, and both the shoes and the hem of the dress are caked in a dried mud applied almost 4 years ago on a Fall day in Big Sur California.

This dress was made by a recluse of a woman in Oak Park, Illinois. She had a side business as a breeder of “Russian Blues,” some of the most beautiful cats I had ever seen. She’s the one who told me the dress had to be pink while sorting through box after box after box of trim in her cat-lady apartment.
When the dress was finished, I packed it in a sheer plastic bag, flew to California and married Paul in it. That piece of gold trim, a final touch, was from the dressmakers wedding. Something for good luck.

I feel sick about so many things. 

Staring down this dress: the dress of dresses, the ultimate dress, the dress I insisted on being made just for my body, just for this day.I feel sick about how blithely I got married when so many people are not afforded the same legal right.
People like me, the queer person I knew I was, very much in the closet except to a handful of friends and to my husband to be.
I feel conversely sick and grateful for the mud smeared on this dress. That mud is like a suspended verb.  An arrested moment, collected from all that giddy dancing in the woods. 

I wouldn’t have traded that day for anything, I wouldn’t now, I never will. Marrying Paul was the best decision I ever made. I know I would have found my way out of the closet eventually but my marriage was the first safe relationship I was ever in. The first relationship that allowed me to be brave and honest.

One thing brave and honest means right now is that I slick my hair to the side- parted mad men style. It means I am a walking cliche of checked shirts, dark blue denim and scuffed boots. I’m becoming me, one garment at a time. Looking for the balance, listening to the sound of a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another, seeking out a middle, some shade of grey.

But in the midst of all of that is my closet full of dresses, an impending move date and a broken heart. I marvel at how far I took a simplistic metaphor of womanhood in these clothes. How deeply and naively I tried to belong by dumbing down feminity to some 1950’s cliche of a house wife. I can’t put these back on, no one would ask me to, but days like today make me want to slip into this old self. To cross my legs like a lady, grin, and bear it.

What better night to start it than a Friday night in which I’ve just finished weeping uncontrollably on the sidewalk with a tupperware full of cat food singing a brokenhearted song to the tomcat that has disappeared into the gutter. Yes, this seems like exactly the time to start this blog about my marriage…

It’s been a rough day. We adopted this cat two days ago and last night, scared witless by the horrid dog next door, our new ward managed to break free of our house and is now camping out in the gutter, scared and alone. I’d be scared and alone in a gutter, but maybe he’s okay… I wouldn’t know I’m not a cat.

For whatever reason this missing cat has broken my heart. I cried most of the day,  then I took a break and then cried most of the night. I’m not an idiot- I know I’m not just crying for the cat. I think I may have reached the breaking point, the place where the heft of my split ( in whatever way we’re defining that) with Paul has finally pinned me to the ground, or at least in a kneeling position over a cat filled drain.

Here’s the heart of it: Paul and I met in August 2005 while I was getting my wisdom teeth pulled, one last ride on my parent’s insurance.

In February he moved to Chicago from California

We were engaged the following Thanksgiving and married in October of 2007.

When I met Paul I knew. 

I knew that he possessed the quality of “the one-ness.”

Though I had always identified as Bi, though we are that unicorn of a success story called: open-marriage, something wasn’t right.

I’ll get to the where and the how some other time, but last July everything changed. In an earth shattering, message from god kind of way. And so as we packed up our Chicago apartment for an Austin bound truck I told him that I had to come out to him again, and he shrugged it off like old news, like a leaf in his hair, like nothing much.

Daria: Why aren’t you crying?

Paul: Cause we’re meant to be together, we just have to figure out what that means now.

Yes- he has ” the one- ness”

So that’s all we’ve tried to do, to figure out what being together means when there are ways we cannot be together.

I tell people I have the most successful marriage of all time. I promised Paul that my love for him would embolden him and encourage him to grow into exactly the man he wanted to be, and he promised me the same.

So here we are, loved into our potential.

 Here we are. At best this is not sustainable, at best we continue our small steps backwards away from our marriage. 

We tell people we’re seperated

we split up our bedrooms

we see other people

I go through that phase were I practically shave my head and wear all his clothes- you know- that phase- where you’re lovingly breaking up with your husband and you start commandeering all the clothes you bought for him over the years and spend an inadequate amount of time watching yourself button those shirts up in a mirror.

There’s great tragedy to all this, I did not marry Paul on a whim, I married him because I loved him, because I wanted to spend my life with him and now I have to dissolve that dream, that pact we made.

In the midst of all this we adopt a cat that will belong to US. That we will name and love and he’s currently rooting around in old sunday circulars and cobwebs in a gutter just ouside the light from our porch. 

I’ve never heard Paul cry like he did over our missing Gato, my heart shattered, seeing him so upset.

I can’t compare it to anything.

Then my heart broke again for this sweet tuff tomcat- whose climbed into my dog-loving heart. A thing I have always said I wasn’t in to- cats.

Maybe that cat is me, or it is Paul or it is the ever expanding definition of marriage at our house. But whatever it is, I want to coax it back to where it belongs and my deepest fear is that there is no such thing.

Good night Gato in the Gutter. Tomorrow morning I am coming with the Tuna fish.