Identity in Four Parts

My brain is broken. Maybe that’s why I don’t write so much anymore. It’s as if the words dry up as they leave my wet brain and refuse to be born of paper. Maybe they won’t be born at all, for some other mechanical or organic reason. Maybe it is less scientific than that. I fear I don’t want to put anything more on the record than I already have. I think I might not be the person who wrote these words a few days, or months or years from now. It’s as if the keyboard is solid, in all its black and white, and I am liquid. I am of less substance than what Apple delivered to my door. I am in motion, too quickly dissolving one version of me into the next to commit to any one sentence or another. I need an identity to speak from, if I am to speak at all.  I see myself standing in line at the Rent an Opinion Store waiting to be served, waiting for something I can hold on to and sell out there. Something that fits, even just for now. I am still waiting. As a good friend once said, who do I have to fuck to get some service here?

***

Identity Part I

I fell in love with a woman this summer. Not remarkable for many, but a shock to me. I have only loved men, worshiped them at times, bound myself to them with abandon and regret and been nearly annihilated by them. Only men.  I have slept with them and chased them, to the point of exhaustion, and have lamented them, with my friends over drinks and Kleenex and so many times we said, without humor, we should have been lesbians. It sounded like visiting a faraway land where you didn’t have to worry about your bikini line or how much you cried, as everyone had the same burdens. Of course, these are stereotypes, but it was fun to think about. Then I fell in love with a woman in my forties. She somehow became more than a friend right in front of my eyes. I was nervous and excited, even giddy, which is not a word I typically use to describe myself. I was unmoored around her and began to fall for her—hard. I read all I could on coming out late in life, planned stories about a slow burning love that lit my pilot light after years of feeling lost and exhausted. She and I went on vacations in my head, even though I don’t like to fly. I thought, this is it. I am gay. It all makes sense now. All the longing and the loneliness made sense when I thought I had been shopping in the wrong aisle all this time. I was exploring new markets—I was free. I went on Amazon looking for rainbow bracelets and flannel shirts, because I read that’s what lesbians wore (I actually researched this). I pinned asymmetrical haircuts on my Pinterest board, because I figured that would demonstrate my commitment without words to my new squad. I read that keys on the belt was overkill, so I skipped that part.

Then it ended. She didn’t end it. She didn’t even know how I felt about her. It just ended. I stopped daydreaming about her, stopped thinking about what it might be like to be hers, stopped trying to imagine moving my hands over the foreign landscape of this beautiful woman. I just stopped. I felt sad when I lost her, like we broke up, and I lost more than just the relationship. I felt darkly morose when I realized that while I am definitely not straight, I am also not gay. I am somewhere in that muddled middle where life choices have made me who I am, not who I might have been.  I am pretty sure it kicked me into perimenopause, because ever since then my periods are irregular. It’s as if my ovaries ramped up all that estrogen to turn me gay, then just said screw it, if you aren’t gonna hold up your end of the deal, we quit. I settled back into my existing and stable life, my known sexuality, like the worn seat of the back of my first boyfriend's car and waited for it. I waited for the love I know, of a man. The comfort of who I am in my day-to-day life matching who I said I was, and I forgot that I had ever wanted something different. I came back to my life but left the new parts of me behind. I swear I can see lesbian me waiving in the rear-view mirror when I drive home, wearing cut off shorts and a flannel tied at the waist, smiling like she knows a secret. I worry I like lesbian me better.

***

Identity Part II

I spend a lot of time on ancestry.com, looking into the past. I am not sure what I am looking for, other than a familiar face in the crowd. Maybe there is validation in the sheer number of names. I see my family name, vaulted years into the past, and I think I can have that too someday, a legacy, a life that was evidenced. I can leave a mark. At least the Mormon genealogists will find me somewhere when they go to baptize me against my will, even if I can’t find myself. There is relief in that.

When Nat Geo came out with their DNA testing kits, my parents and I all sent ours in. My mother’s results came back that she was 1% Ashkenazi Jewish. I was thrilled! Having always been obsessed with Israel, the Mossad, and the struggle of the Jews I was nothing short of elated. I ran around the house singing songs from Yentl and The Jazz Singer. It was all the Jewish heritage I could access, but I belted the songs at the top of my lungs. I told friend and family I had found my people, my true religion, and that I always felt I was meant to be a Jew. It was like Christmas morning, without the baby Jesus.

After finding my people, I began to research the DNA that linked me to the Jews. As I dug deeper, into the Founding Event and the diaspora, I found that my particular marker of DNA is not Jewish after all. Of the five women who are the mothers of all Jewish people on the planet, the Founding Event women, the one who did not produce a Jewish lineage is my greatest of grandmothers. I found my tribe, then lost them, and now it is me wandering in the wilderness. I wander not because I am not a Jew, but because I don’t have an answer for why I wanted it so badly to begin with.

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Identity Part III

June Cleaver never argued with Ward. That’s what comes to me whenever I think about being a woman. Of course, I think about childbirth and caregiving and fighting for our share of power, but I hate to admit that the image that comes to my mind is June in her A-line dress, carrying a tray of drinks to Ward and his friends. Why June? What the hell did I ever do to you June, that you keep shaming me with your spotless house and sensible heels? And what do you have to smile about all the time? I don’t smile like June, at least not at my Ward.

I never wanted June as a role model, just to be clear. I wanted an image of some fierce Icelandic modern woman who tells her man he doesn’t need a ring because she doesn’t need his promises. Iceland has some of the lowest marriage rates in the modern world. I wonder what they know that we don’t. Actually, that is not true.  I know all too well. They don’t want to fit into the corset of marriage, and neither do I. It’s only that after twelve years I truly do love my husband, and I am happy with my family and my home. I love what I have built around me, even though I would not make the same deal again, for any man. Men get heavy as we get older. No one told me that.

I don’t know what being married means, other than words of commitment and a legal document that separates our property.  It used to be that being married meant I was a wife, but I can’t remember what a wife feels like. Do wives feel like me?  I am committed to my man, but I don’t know what that means either.  Does it mean I am safe with him emotionally and forever? Does it mean I thought I would be once? Does it mean I am not the unicorn I thought I would be, different and unusual, and instead I am a box checked as Mrs. on a census? Maybe it means nothing, and that is what I am afraid of.

 ***

Identity Part IV

I am going to forget who I am. My mother has early onset Alzheimer’s, a bitch of a disease living in an angel of a woman. She is forgetting the near past, living in her life decades before. She was married a virgin, was always a good mother and good wife, so we now hear stories about her brothers and sisters and playing in the orchards and planting poppies on the roadside in California.

Her identity is that of her younger self. She was poppy beautiful and sweet, just as she should be, and now, with her lack of a present tense, just as she will always be. After I found out I shared the same gene, I first feared for my children, and what would happen if I too started to disappear in my 60’s. That was the first wave of fear, but the second was worse. I now fear that I will tell the truth like she does when I lose my own filter. She now says shit once in a while, which she never did before. That’s nothing compared to what I might say, let me tell you.

I worry that I will be regaling my children with stories of my drunken college days, banging bartenders, and letting a married man fingerbang me with my dress hiked up going 70 on a Las Vegas highway in my twenties. I worry that I will tell them the man I loved the most was a badly broken man, and was arguably a malignant narcissist, but my god how he made me feel. I question now what tense I live in. Do I live in my healthy, sanitized present as a wife and mother or is part of me living with my head thrown back, while this man pries open my legs and my soul on the Beltway, headed for the Strip? Why can’t what happened in my past just stay there? How will this work when most of my history should come with a warning label? Does love survive honesty like this? I just can’t confirm that the lucid me will do the talking if my DNA kicks in and I forget where I am. Will I be someone my children still respect if it all comes out? Will my past stories of love and intimacy break my beautiful husband’s heart? You can’t change who you were in the past, but with dementia you sure the hell can bring that person back. Maybe by then there will be technology to float between realities, to choose our own adventure, and manufacture truth and identity as needed. I would love that. I’d like lesbian me to be comforted by my Jewish faith and feel strong enough in who I am and who I was, to tell everyone about it.

Cyndy Cendagorta is working on a collection of short stories about broken things, including bodies, children, faith and love. She runs a policy consulting company in Reno, Nevada that specializes in social innovation, and is a special needs mother and advocate. She holds an MA in Political Science from Washington State University and is a past Women’s Research and Education Institute Fellow. Her work can be found in Cagibi, The Spectacle, Salmon Creek Journal, and Please See Me. She lives in Reno, NV, with her husband and three children.