I'm not the only girl in the world.
Birthday musings on discomfort with celebration, and on non-monogamy as intergenerational healing.
What was your mother living through at the moment of your birth? Who was there for her? Who was not? How was she treated by the people tasked with caring for her, and for you, through the chaos of this quotidian and miraculous event?
Today is my birthday. At 4:44am on April 10th, 1984, I arrived earthside.
My mother tells me that, in the immediate aftermath of the very traumatic C-section that brought me here, my father left. Even though her body had an adverse reaction to the procedure – she couldn’t stop shaking for days afterwards – he left her. Left me. He had to go on a business trip, he maintained. But my mother knew, and would later confirm, that the “business” to which he had to attend was one of the many extramarital affairs that he would have over the course of their relationship.
The circumstances of our mothers’ lives during our gestation and entrance into the world shape our nervous systems. We swim in a sea of our mother's feelings, of all that she experiences in her body, before we emerge. We are both formed by and conform to her reality. It’s all we know. And this knowing is the basis of what will become our internal world. Our relationship to ourselves.
It was my 8th birthday. My family had recently moved to a new house, the nicest house we’d lived in to date, in Cheltenham Township, a small suburb bordering Northeast Philly. The move was a stretch financially. My parents invited our local family members from my father’s side over for a birthday party, but the gathering also served as a de facto housewarming. And then, the birthday-housewarming exploded into a house-swarming. Family members invited friends, unbeknownst to my mother. And those friends invited more and more friends. Our house was overflowing with people we didn’t know and would never see again. My mother, who had prepared more than enough food for our invited guests, now found herself in a frenzy, rummaging through cupboards and venturing deep into the freezer in an attempt to feed all of these people. And there I was, floating through a house of strangers who didn’t know and couldn’t care less that it was my birthday.
I don’t remember cake, don’t remember if anyone sang, don’t remember receiving a gift. I’m sure those things happened at some point. What I do remember is learning that my birthday was not about me. That, on the one day meant to celebrate me, I did not matter.
I also remember the way that my mother, who would remain angry and resentful about this incident for years, accommodated everyone with a smile. Made it look effortless.
What is the balance between the communalism that motivated my mother to perform this miracle, feeding an ever-growing crowd of unexpected guests, and the individuation that would have allowed her to recognize her own limitations? To acknowledge that a day meant to celebrate her daughter had now become about pleasing everyone but her daughter, and driving herself to exhaustion in the process? What would I have learned if she had held a boundary that honored both her and me?
We often hear people say that they want to be with a partner who makes them feel like they're the only girl/guy/person in the world.
Perhaps we feel like we need this because most of us only experience it when we’re infants or small children – if we ever do at all. We hope that our partners will be the ones to give us what we’ve lost, or what we never had.
Under the old hierarchical systems that are now crumbling, we believed that we wouldn’t be safe as adults unless we held this status in someone’s life. We didn’t know how to trust that we would be cared for otherwise. The invention of the nuclear family, and the manner in which this construct served capitalism, made it so that we only received what we needed as children if our parents were present, willing, and able to give us this level of attention and attunement. And, because of said systems, many (if not most) of our parents, to varying degrees, were not.
But there have been other times. And there are other places. There exist other ways of relating to children. We don’t have to live in a society that immediately encodes in a baby’s nervous system that they’re only safe if they’re one person’s sole priority. There are ways of raising children that allow them to know that they’re safe because they exist within a web of nurturance. To know that everyone in that web cares for them, including their parents, and will choose to show up for them. To know that everyone is responsible for and accountable to everyone's children, rather than one person being solely responsible for theirs.
We can choose to be creative about our ways of forming relationship and family as we live through the end of capitalism and create something new. We can know that it’s safe to be a part of our partners’ webs of connection and affection, as we are each ourselves similarly connected. And we need not rely on one person to offer us all of what we need.
Asking people to show up to celebrate me runs completely counter to my wiring. I rarely gather folks for my birthday for this reason. I presume that I’m asking for too much, assume that no one actually wants to extend themselves for me.
The one time in my life when I knew that I was allowed to ask for this was when I got married to my now ex-husband, about a month after my 29th birthday. The hetero-mono-normative construct preps us, as women, for this day, the most important day of our lives, when we’re the center of attention. I went along with it all even as the pressure made me sick. The people who complimented me on how “good” (code word for “thin”) I looked on my wedding day had no idea that my weight loss came not just from all of the running and yoga that I was doing in preparation for having all eyes on me, but from months of an anxiety-induced lack of appetite and a vicious stomach virus the week before the festivities.
The first moment of the weekend in which all eyes were literally on me was at our rehearsal dinner. My then-fiancé and I stood to give a brief toast acknowledging all of the family and friends gathered to participate in ceremony with us. When it was my turn to be seen and heard, I looked around the room and felt a surge of love. I began to speak, my eyes welling and my voice cracking as I named how beautiful it was to see people from different stages of our lives all in one place to support us. I wasn’t ten seconds into my remarks when my soon to be father-in-law cut me off.
Okay, that’s enough, can we just eat? he groaned, loud enough for everyone to hear.
A moment of tense silence passed before I smiled and acquiesced.
Let’s go ahead and eat, then, I said. Cheers.
No one - not my partner, not my friends or family - challenged my father-in-law and affirmed my right to take up a minute of space at my own wedding rehearsal dinner. A space in which all I wanted to do was tell everyone how much I loved them, how much it meant to me that they were there. And I certainly didn’t know how to support myself in this way by challenging him. My internal world once again projected itself outward, reflected itself back to me in my external reality. It served as further confirmation that my special days were not, and never would, be about me.
When I was younger, I wanted to have a partner who made me feel like I was the only girl in the world. I, like so many of my peers, believed that this was a true measure of how much I was loved. I recognize now that this desire wasn’t really about love. It wasn’t even really about me. It was about my nervous system, formed in the belly of my mother’s shaking and abandoned body. It was about all that she needed and didn’t have, all that it signaled to me about what I would never prove myself worthy of receiving.
In more recent years, I’ve entered into non-monogamous connections knowing that I'm not the only person that a partner of mine loves and is intimate with, as they are not my only. And I’ve learned that this knowledge in itself does not make me unsafe. I’ve experienced deep compersion and no jealousy to speak of when my partners were interested in or connected with someone new. What did feel unsafe to me was a lack of care, communication, and consistency in a connection. And these qualities can be lacking whether a relationship is monogamous or not.
If monogamy were our innate relationship orientation as humans, I’m not sure that I understand why so many people struggle to love in this way. We’ve created morality around monogamy in order to enforce compliance. We’re told that to be monogamous is to be good, mature, righteous - and to be anything other than that is not. I suspect that we wouldn't have to create these constructs to enforce our adherence to one way of relating if this way came to us so naturally.
I don't offer these thoughts because I aim to convince you to renounce monogamy. That is not my birthday wish for the world. My birthday wish for you is to love in exactly the formations that are aligned for you. And my birthday gift to myself is the knowledge that I will never again hide how I love. Because I no longer believe that there's anything shameful about it.
Austin, Texas will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s where I spent my first post-divorce years, where I found myself welcomed into a web of queer community and chosen family for the first time, where I experienced in practice what a network of care actually feels like.
My 34th birthday, the last one I spent in Austin before moving to Oakland, is one of my favorite birthday memories. It wasn’t that the celebratory activity itself was so special. My friends and I went out to drink and dance at Cheer Up Charlie’s, a popular gay bar that we frequented. It was the gift I received from my village.
My friend Lauren organized the people who loved me to co-create this necklace, handcrafted by my friend Michelle. I was deep in my crystals as special interest phase. And my friends each chose stones based on their loving intentions, their wishes for me in my new year.
In this place, in this interconnected care web, I encoded in my body for the first time what was possible for me to experience on my birthday. I learned through experience that people could willingly choose to extend themselves to offer me something so sweet. So uniquely suited. So all about me. I learned that I was allowed to feel special.
I’ve never cheated on a partner. I’ve never been cheated on, either – at least, not to my knowledge. My feelings about all of this are not filtered through a lens of personal experience in my own romantic life. But I come from lineages rife with unethical non-monogamy. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles.
Part of how I’m supporting the healing of this intergenerational wound is by demonstrating to my lineages that there’s nothing morally wrong with non-monogamy. That we can be honest, hold ourselves and others with kindness and integrity in this practice.
When I shared with my mother that I had been practicing polyamory, she did what she tends to do when presented with information about who I am that doesn’t align with her vision of who she believes I must be as a reflection of her – she shut down, ignored it, never brought it up with me again, hoped it would go away. I understand her response as a manifestation of her own feelings about her own experiences in relationships.
When I shared the same information with my father, he responded with genuine curiosity. He said that ethical non-monogamy made a lot of sense to him. I bet it does, I said in my head, a little pissed off, remembering just how highly unethical his own non-monogamy had been. But I just as quickly recognized that no one had ever told him that non-monogamy could be ethical. To see his youngest daughter - a person that he knows to prioritize her convictions, her sense of justice, her innate motivation to be kind to all beings – choose polyamory modeled possibility for him.
As my father told my mother that he didn’t want to be married anymore, he offered her the option to stay legally married, to allow her to continue to benefit from the lifestyle that his job afforded her, as long as it was clear that he no longer wanted to be in a relationship in which he was expected to be monogamous. He wanted to renegotiate their agreement, to share some aspects of a marriage but not others. To continue to live together, merge financial assets, and co-parent their children. To have those things be the basis of a relationship, but without romantic and sexual exclusivity. My mother received this offer as the ultimate affront, and their lengthy and messy divorce process ensued.
I understand why she felt this way, at that stage of her life, after all that she had already given and forgiven over the years. But there is a world in which people like my parents could decide to shift their relationship in this way without any moral judgement placed on it. There is a world in which the person with whom you co-habitate, raise children, and merge financial assets need not also be a person with whom you have romantic and sexual exclusivity, or even any romantic or sexual connection at all. There is a world in which my parents could have negotiated this from the start.
My father has said in recent years that he always felt like their marriage was much more of a friendship than a romantic partnership. Unfortunately, he was the only one operating under that understanding. But in the absence of compulsory monogamy and the imperative of the nuclear family, my parents could have talked about and come to an agreement from the beginning that they were going to have a co-parenting, co-habitating partnership that allowed them both to ethically experience sex and romance in other connections. Or, if he had felt able to voice from the start that this was the kind of relationship that he wanted, my mother could have made it clear that she was not aligned with this desire. And they could have wished each other well and gone their separate ways, without leaving decades of pain in the wake of their encounter.
This past weekend, my ex-partner - who is my best friend - took me to LA to see Cleo Sol in concert, as a gift for my 41st birthday. She’s one of our mutual favorite artists, top five in both of our Spotify Wrapped rankings, and someone we’ve dreamed of seeing live for years. A younger version of me wouldn’t have known how to accept this offering, wouldn’t have felt worthy of his effort and investment. Especially because we’re not together anymore. But ours is a unique bond, perhaps only legible to and understood by us. We’ve renegotiated our relationship enough times over time, practiced enough love in enough varying shapes, that we both know that our no longer being partners doesn’t mean that the magnitude of our love must shrink. I’ve learned from him that it can be possible to stay in deep and healthy connection, to not be abandoned, even if our desires for a romantic partnership no longer align.
On Saturday, I’ll gather with a small group of friends for a bonfire at Ocean Beach. Under a full moon, people who love me will show up to celebrate my life. It’s the first time in years that I’ve done this - felt a desire to throw a birthday party for myself, and followed through with it.
Extending this invitation didn’t feel easy to do. But it did feel safe.
I’ve aligned with a new timeline in which my birthday wishes can come true because my nervous system finally feels safe enough to want them, ask for them, receive them. This new season of receptivity, of learning that people want to be there for me, is not just about me. Like so much of what I’m healing, it’s also about my mother.
“Promises,” from Cleo’s 2021 album entitled Mother:
As descendants of enslaved people, as people who have survived colonization and racial capitalism, we know in our bodies what it is to have our closest connections, the loves of our lives, the people who are our whole world, ripped away from us by the state. We know what it is to be told that these ruptures are our fault, that we’re deserving of this because of some moral failing. And the impact of generations of this violence gets flipped and projected back onto us.
We’re told that there’s something pathological about our communities, about any of us who don’t fit into the dominant norms of the nuclear family. So many of us have internalized this, have told ourselves that we must have a picture-perfect love and family life in order to prove these stereotypes wrong. If we have a child out of wedlock (what a wild expression! Do you hear it? WedLOCK?), if we have multiple children with multiple partners, if we don't have children at all, if we've been divorced more than once, all of these become markers of our immorality. Many of us force ourselves into molds that don't fit us, were never made for us, were created in order to control us, because we fear the repercussions. Of course people are going to act out under these circumstances, in ways that hurt others and themselves.
I hold my father accountable for how his lack of honesty and integrity impacted our family. The circumstances of my birth, the two decades of cheating, it all affected my mother. It affected me, too. I also place his behavior within this broader context, recognize the shared roots of this collective pattern. And I view both of my parents through a lens of compassion.
I’m transmuting my family’s history of unethical non-monogamy by honoring my own relationship orientation. I choose ethical non-monogamy both because it’s what feels most aligned for me, and because of my understanding of how my choice is a rejection of the confines that have restricted our capacity to love for centuries.
I love the fact that my freedom frees my lineage. And I also choose this freedom for my own sake. I allow my way of loving to be, first and foremost, about me.
I’m not the only girl in the world. I’ve always known this because, from the moment of my arrival, I wasn’t. And my mother wasn’t. One might assume that my orientation toward non-monogamy is because my body doesn’t trust that I’m worthy of a loving, healthy, monogamous partnership. Because of what my father chose, what my mother endured. On some deep, dark level, that may be a piece of the truth.
What I haven’t always known, and what I’m now learning, is that I’m not required to desire nothing, swallow hurt and disappointment, smile in the face of a crossed boundary, in the moments that are meant to be about me. I’m allowed to ask for and expect people who love me to be there to celebrate the anniversary of my arrival on this planet. To affirm their investment in supporting my existence. To show me that they care.
I may not be the only girl in the world. But I am the birthday girl.
thank you so much 😭❤️🔥
happpyyy solar return 💞may this new year bless you in the ways your words do for my path. 444 how special 🥹🫂