#move2014 in photos [what it says on the tin]

So we've moved.

I'm headed back to our old place one more time today to pack up the fridge and a few left-over things so the cleaners my parents are paying for can come and do the final scrub down. Then, hopefully, new people will come along soon and find Old Number Twelve a good place to live, as we did for many years.

Meanwhile, I promised pictures -- so here they are!

This is a lot of what the last ten days have been about.

The cats liked all the piles of clothes and bedding to sleep on.

I think they were worried we would leave them behind, so kept trying to get us to pack them!

There was a lot of turning around and finding this.

How did we fit all this stuff in one 535-square-foot apartment?!

The BEST THING about the move was when the movers -- Patrick, Mike, and Damian -- arrived.

They took the things away and packed them so swiftly!

While Hanna waited with the cats at our new place, I was left to "supervise" the departure by drinking my latte and taking pictures of the emptying apartment.

The last box...

... Of serials, naturally. We're librarians after all!

Books will be our biggest logistical hurdle. Here they are stacked up in the Inner Sanctum (what will eventually be Hanna's meditation/yoga space (and our guest bedroom! ... plus books).

These bookshelves (and three more) are already filled.

This is the new living room space (with a study nook to the right of the frame).

As predicted, Teazle and Gerry LOOOOVE this long hallway for chasing one another (particularly at night). I'm standing in the living room, and the room at the end of the hall is our kitchen. Off the hall to the right are the master bedroom, bathroom, and Inner Sanctum.

The movers put our bed back together, people!! It was the first room we made usable, after the kitchen.

Our kitchen has a table for eating! And gorgeous appliances.

Hanna found this photograph in the back of one of the cupboard drawers. Worrying? Charming? You decide! It now lives on our fridge.

We share our second-floor porch with the next-door neighbors and their cat, Jelly, whom Gerry and Teazle have only met through the window so far. Our plants are very happy outside, and we can dry out laundry out there as well! There are five huge maple trees shading the back lawn (And sheltering our house from the worst of the summer sun.

And not to brag or anything, but THIS is our new walk to work...

More house-proud pictures once we've actually had a chance to settle in and Teazle has finished the unpacking and investigatin'.

unfinished thoughts about putting down roots

The Fens from Charlesgate, Boston
(December 2007)

As we lay the groundwork for locating and moving to a new apartment, and possibly a new neighborhood of Boston, later this year, I've been thinking a lot about what it means for Hanna and I to be putting down roots in this city. We both moved here for graduate school and have stayed for the professional opportunities Boston's cultural institutions have offered. Moving within the city -- out of the apartment Hanna originally selected with her grad school roommate -- feels like choosing or re-choosing the city as a place we want to live in, make a life in.

I find myself inhabiting the city with new eyes and new investment. I'm no longer thinking about it as a space I move through as an observer. Rather, I've become a participant. Although I'm still learning what it means to me to participate in the life of this city that has become our chosen home.

A short list of things I've (we've) been doing that feel like part of that learning process:

• Walking, biking, taking public transit. Hanna and I are both committed to using the city "at ground level" if we're going to be living in it. We map the neighborhoods by foot and measure our progress in coffee shops passed. While I don't think owning a car precludes one from belonging to the city (clearly many drivers are Bostonians!) not having a car means we're more reliant on public infrastructure within the core urban area, and that space and time get measured differently. By necessity, we need to shop for groceries, pick up our library books, visit our doctor's office, meet up with friends, get our hair cut, all within a three-mile radius and ideally between point A (home) and point B (work). This is a fundamentally different way of experiencing the geography of one's life than when life requires daily driving -- I lived the first twenty-seven years of my life in a car-dependent town, so I've experienced this shift first-hand.
• Supporting local non-profit organizations. It probably says something fundamental about our socioeconomic backgrounds that as soon as Hanna and I reached a sustainable level of income and could start thinking about charitable donations, the first thing we did was become members of our two local NPR/PBS networks (WGBH and WBUR). It was reflexive: this is what adults do. Yes, National Public Radio is a nationwide network, but each station is local too. We wake up to the local weather forecast and enjoy the broadcasts of America's Test Kitchen (filmed in studios next door to one of our favorite coffee shops!). We currently give (tiny!) monthly gifts to WGBH, WBUR, and Classical New England, all of which broadcast out of the Boston metropolitan area. We've also chosen to provide ongoing support to Black Cat Rescue, our favorite no-kill foster cat program here in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Food Bank. I'm also starting to get involved on a volunteer basis with our community health center, Fenway Health, which provides nationally-renowned health services to LGBT folks, women, at-risk teenagers, and the elderly of the Fenway neighborhood and greater Boston.
• Relying on local non-profit organizations. There's a lot of high-level philanthropy around Boston, including at the institution where I work, and I've been thinking a lot lately about the notion of "charitable giving" and the distance it implies between those who selflessly give to those in need. That kind of giving (hopefully with no strings attached) obviously has its place, but I also like the immediacy and intimacy of providing support for those whose services we need now, or in the future: our health center, our public library, the social safety net. I've been doing a lot of research lately into housing programs here in Boston, both grass-roots advocacy organizations and government-funded programming. In doing so, I've have the opportunity to reflect on the importance of using as well as passively supporting social services of various kinds. Even though Hanna and I are (at least temporarily) middle class professionals, it seems important to me to know how my city cares for the marginalized; how we could be cared for if we became marginalized.
• Learning local history. When in doubt, turn to books! I've been reading, reading, reading up on the history of the Boston area and learning how its past has shaped our present and will continue to shape our future in the decades to come. 

What are the ways that you've gotten to know the place(s) where you (have) live(d)? What components need to be in place for you to feel like you belong to and are invested in a place, a community?

snowbound in michigan [an update with photos!]

Since last Thursday's post, our flights out of Michigan have been cancelled twice more due to weather, and now we're scheduled to return to Boston Tuesday evening - closing in on a full week longer than we anticipated being away! 

We're thankful to be safe and warm and not paying for hotels or on stand-by at the airport. It's also wonderful to have parents/in-laws we get along with, a flexible cat-minder, and understanding co-workers.

This afternoon, following the third postponement of our departure, Hanna and I were feeling a little punch-drunk and decided to walk down to New Holland Brewery for lunch. I took the camera, so here are some pictures from my snowy home-town!

The obligatory couples' portrait-taken-at-arm's-length on the front lawn. The new knit hats from my mother-in-law have really come in handy!

Hanna bundled up outside the church on our block.

The wind and snow-blowers have combined to make intriguing drifts around the trees.

The iconic Dimnent chapel at my alma mater, in the snow.

The brewery, as one of the few gathering places open on a Sunday downtown, was hopping. The snow was very picturesque from inside the pub!

Hanna and I have been admiring the Christmas decorations on main street this year, which depart from the usual red-white-green spectrum.

There wasn't enough traffic out and about to keep the snow off the roads. This is a view across the intersection of River and 10th, looking toward Centennial Park (dedicated in 1876).

The snow-melt network under the sidewalks was only keeping up with the snowfall under awnings, like here in front of the Park Theatre. No one had been out to brush off the public benches.

And this a view of the Holland Museum, where I got my start in public history twenty years ago. When I was a child, the museum was actually housed in what is now a B&B on the other side of the park, originally Holland's first hospital. The building pictured here was our post office until the late 1980s, and now houses the museum and archives. 

When I was twelve I used to deliver the daily paper to a very sweet, elderly Dutch couple who lived in this house. I doubt they live there any longer, but Hanna and I both agree that its location directly across from the public library can only add to its charm.

Wish us felicitous weather for safe travels Tuesday afternoon as we are scheduled to fly home to Boston!

in the deep midwinter, looking forward

Our home for the past half-decade.

Last week I wrote a bit about how 2013 treated us. Today's post is a look at what 2014 may have in store.

In many respects, we're hoping for a continuation of the stability that has characterized life since last December. Neither of us plan to change jobs, start a new academic program, or pursue radically different activities from this year. We'll still be very much married (in an ever-increasing number of states in this nation!) and look forward to only completing two instead of five tax returns this year. We very much hope for no health crises in 2014 and a continued baby-step-by-baby-step improvement to Hanna's depression and anxiety.

At the same time, we do have a few things on the horizon, so here's what's on our plate (at varying levels of certainty) in the months to come:

Financial Planning. Exciting, right? I guess it's a measure of my nerdiness that I actually do find this kind of paperwork and discussion stimulating. Now that Hanna and I are a couple of years out of graduate school and our income has more or less stabilized (*knock on wood*), and we've got things to think about like 401(k) contributions and renting vs. owning our living space, we decided it was time to meet with a financial planner. We'll be doing the consultation in early January, and I'm hoping she'll be encouraging and clarifying, with perhaps some refinements but no real curve balls (unless they're the good one -- I'll take good ones!)

Maybe Moving. As I believe I've detailed here before, we had a household meltdown earlier in the year that resulted in a mutual decision that it was really, honestly, absolutely, we've-waited-too-long time to look for a new living space. This little one-bedroom has served us incredibly well, and I will recommend our management company to anyone who asks -- but we're outgrowing what was initially rented by Hanna in 2006 as a graduate-student space, shared with a roommate. We want a bigger kitchen, more-efficiently-arranged common spaces, maybe a guest bedroom/office, and a mud room where the cats' litter box can live. We're ready to be in a neighborhood that isn't dominated by students. We'll be looking at both renting and buying (see "financial planning" above), although my suspicion is that we're not at the buying point yet.

motive Project. For the past half-year I've been poking around at the intersection of queer history, history of American Christianity, and history of education with a project on the Methodist Student Movement's motive magazine during the 1960s. I had a paper proposal accepted for Boston College's biennial on history of religion, taking place in March, so during January and February will be working intensively on the paper. I'll be doing a close reading of motive from 1963-1972 and thinking about how gender and sexuality are explicitly and implicitly presented within its pages. This is one small slice of a larger project that I hope will shed light on how and why left-leaning, mainline-evangelical Protestant Christians struggled with the question of homosexuality during the mid twentieth century.

Cats. Geraldine and Teazle will continue with their regime of napping, wrestling, climbing, napping some more, and demanding tuna. We also hope that, once we move into a slightly larger place, we will be able to offer our services fostering cats for our favorite local shelter, Black Cat Rescue, the group that brought us Geraldine.

Fenway Health's Community Advisory Board. I've recently applied to join the community advisory board of our awesome community health center, Fenway Health. If the current membership accepts me, I'll be serving a three-year term as part of the team of patients who support and consult with the staff on programs and services. I'm excited about this possible opportunity to give back to, and participate in, an organization that has been so good to us.

Travel? The past years have been intense travel years for us, and we learned a lot about how we do (and don't) like to organize our traveling experiences. We've talked about renewing our passports this spring and planning an end-of-2014 expedition to England, but the feasibility of that will depend in some measure on how the moving project falls in place. If we don't go to England, we're hoping to take a just-for-us week somewhere quiet (Cape Cod maybe), during the off season, to relax and recoup.

Long-form Blogging? The words haven't been coming easily the last six months for me; I'm not sure why. I certainly haven't stopped having the thoughts I used to share through blog posts, or reading the books I used to review in-depth. Part of it is sheer time. Part of it has been a need to limit the amount of time I spend on the computer when not at work. Part of it has been a lower feeling of urgency when it comes to voicing my particular perspective on issues on the internet (I certainly still share my thoughts in private correspondence and conversation). I am hopeful this is just an inward-looking time that will grow into a slightly new kind of online presence. I'm just not sure what that will look like yet.

In the meantime, you'll be getting more cat pictures and short-form book reviews! I hope you enjoy both.

Less anxiety, fear, and exhaustion. Hanna's struggled a lot this year with overwhelming feels of the nebulous, negative variety, and we'd like to see less of that as time goes on. It's no fun.

I look forward to following all of your own 2014 ups, downs, and in-betweens in the twelve months to come. It's a pleasure to be here, and elsewhere, with all of you.

a year to carry on carrying on

Gerry practices her balancing skillz on Hanna's lap.

Looking back on the past year with my therapist on Thursday, I realized that this is the first year in over a decade (for both Hanna and I) in which no major life-transitions have taken place.

Neither one of us began or ended a relationship (yay 1st anniversary!).

Neither one of us began or ended a job (or moved to a different position within our workplace).

Neither one of us began or ended an academic program.

We began and ended the year in the same city, neighborhood, and apartment.

We began and ended the year with the same two companion animals.

With the exception of my grandmother, Marilyn, in June, we had no major illness or death on either side of our immediate extended family.

Cats, they give no fucks for your life accomplishments.

Of course, many other things did change in the past year. The Defense of Marriage Act was ruled unconstitutional. We got new tattoos. We witnessed the wedding of our near and dear friends Diana and Collin. Hanna delivered a conference paper at the Northeast Conference on British Studies. I briefly served as a guest blogger for Family Scholars Blog. Teazle learned to scale the drying rack; Gerry learned to be a lap cat.

But overall, this was the most uneventful year I have had since turning eighteen.

And I can't say I'm disappointed with that.

on being out day [a belated post]

This Friday, October 11th, was International Coming Out Day.

I thought, in passing, about writing something but I was distracted by trying to get things done at work and by the fact my wife was getting a chest x-ray for pneumonia. And then picking up antibiotics (thank goddess for antibiotics) for her. And remembering to feed the cats. And pick up something for dinner.

Hanna in the redwoods (Sept. 2013)

So this is a belated post on the theme of coming/being out. I don't have anything particularly original to say, except that I am grateful to all of the people throughout history, past and present, who have conspired to make International Coming Out Day an unremarkable occasion in our day lives. Hanna and I live in a time and place where our bisexual inclinations and same-sex relationship are known and largely honored structurally in our workplaces, with our landlord, at our health center, in our city, state (and now, finally, the federal government), by our friends and relations. We hold hands and kiss in public, speak of things sexual while dining out, review queer porn, blog about being dykes.

We don't fear being evicted, fired, blacklisted, jailed, physically attacked, disowned or disinherited, treated as sick because of our sexual selves, or otherwise grossly discriminated against. And if any of these things were top happen to us, we would have advocacy organizations and a network of supporters to turn to for aid.

In many ways, our security is exceptional: many queer folks still live in the toxic closet, or cover aspects of their identities, for fear of social and material marginalization. The young and the old, the gender non-confirming, trans folks, queer people in nations that still actively persecute sexual minorities.

There is obviously still work to be done.

But this week, I'm grateful in my own small domestic way for the work of activists and the kindness of those people in our lives who together made it possible for my Friday to be, in part, a story about leaving work half an hour early so I could get to the pharmacy and pick up Hanna's antibiotics. A story about a boss and colleagues who sent well-wishes for Hanna's quick recovery. A story about a health clinic that knows were a couple and has no problem letting me pick up her medications.

A story about going home to my wife.

six years ago today [obligatory Boston anniversary post]

Simmons College Library, September 2007
self-portrait

Six years ago today, I arrived in Boston a bright-eyed youth of twenty-six, with a rental car full of worldly belongings and paperwork confirming my enrollment in Simmons' dual-degree history/archives program.

Within a week of this self-portrait taken at the Simmons library, I had met my future wife, within a month I had remembered why I loved history and hated school, and within the first semester I'd resigned my position as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble to work as a library assistant at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Arnold Arboretum, May 2013
photograph by Joseph Tychonievich

The world is so often an unexpected and adventuresome place.

Update: For the interested, here are my posts from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

death-of-doma-day tattoos! [photo post]

As previously mentioned, Hanna and I had a date with our new tattoo artist -- Thomas Gustainis -- on the afternoon of the day the Supreme Court released its opinions in Windsor and Perry. Which means that one part of the multi-faceted meaning of these tattoos, at least for me, will be entwined with memories of the day DOMA fell.

The color on Hanna's lotus is as vibrant as the most brilliant Michigan autumn.

And I couldn't be happier with my juniper branch, even if the placement means I only really get to see it in photography like this!

The day after I had the work done, a volunteer at the Massachusetts Historical Society asked me, with slight alarm (though also no small measure of admiration) if I ever thought about what I would think of my ink when I was her age, in my 70s.

Yes, I said. Because I have.

But I wasn't sure how to explain to her, from there, that to me the tattoos on my skin are like scars or freckles or laugh lines. Yes, they're voluntary. Yet over time they become, literally, a part of my embodied self. They will grow old with me, and change meaning and character as they (we) do.

This is my body now, I say to myself, when I look in the mirror every day. My physical self is a running, changing record of my life in this world. And the ink is, indelibly now, a part of that record.

Maybe it's my historian-self that has learned to embrace such traces in the skin.

tattoo no. 3

artwork by Thomas Gustanis

Even in the midst of this Boston heatwave, I'm starting to get excited about the appointment Hanna and I have tomorrow for our new tattoos! They will be, respectively, her fourth and my third pieces -- and our first projects with our new tattoo artist, Thomas Gustanis, the husband of one of Hanna's colleagues at the Center for the History of Medicine.

We were excited to discover Thomas was building his tattoo portfolio, as our previous artist -- Ellen Murphy -- left the Boston area to work at Red Rocket in New York City.

*sad face*

But! Life (and tattoo art) move on, so we're looking forward to building on the addiction that Ellen jump-started with Thomas' developing style.

I had my first tattoo inked to mark the completion of my graduate degrees in January 2011.

Along with Hanna, I had my second tattoo inked in celebration of our marriage in August 2012.

When the opportunity to have a third tattoo completed arose I did not have an obvious design in mind, although I new I wanted something organic. After sitting with some possible designs and placements, I've settled on the lovely juniper branch Thomas sketched out (above), to be inked on the back of my right shoulder. The smell of juniper in the heat of summer sunshine is one of my strongest scent-memories from childhood: it grew as wild ground cover around the cottage in Leelanau, Michigan where my family vacationed every summer, and was also a pervasive scent in Bend, Oregon, where we regularly visited my maternal grandparents when I was young. Northern Michigan and Central Oregon are both deep parts of my geographically-rooted self, and I chose this tattoo to ground those spaces and memories within my bodily self.

It was only after I had selected the tattoo subject and finalized the design with Thomas that my grandmother, Marilyn, died in Bend. But I will be sitting for the tattoo tomorrow afternoon in her memory, and in thanks for the way she helped make Oregon a part of my Homeland.

minimalist wedding preparations [wedding post the fifth]

Well, folks, as hard as it is for us to believe four weeks from today we'll be getting married in our self-designed ceremony at a coffee shop, Tatte, here in Brookline, before a group of coffee-drinking witnesses! And as the date draws nearer, "plans" become "preparations" and items are slowly checked off the to-do list.

Here's a few items of note for the interested.

1) Our Marriage License. On Monday Hanna and I walked home via Brookline Town Hall and filled out the paperwork for our marriage license in the Town Clerk's office. The woman on duty over the lunch hour was chatty and nice, asking about Hanna's tattoos and sharing the secrets of the Best Water Bottle Ever Made. We wrote down all our identifying information in triplicate (name, birthday, birthplace, parents' names, etc.), signed all the forms, and then had to swear under oath we'd gotten everything correct. The clerk was impressed we were able to read aloud so well in tandem!

Hanna does subversive paperwork

I admit I had a few momentary waves of panic prior to going to the Clerk's office that they would refuse to issue us the license or just be weird about it. I actually had it all worked out in my head what I'd do if the person on duty was rude about it (be calm; request their supervisor or an alternate clerk; read them the riot act in letter to the town government later!). But all fears of homophobia were baseless in this instance, and things could not have gone more smoothly.

Anna and Hanna: Doing our best to destroy traditional marriage one piece of bureaucratic paperwork at a time!

I woke up in the middle of the night the day we went to file for the license thinking about how the 19th-century Boston Brahmins who pushed for civil marriage laws and vital statistics collection (marriage had previously been the province of the church). Those old white dudes, hand-wringing over the rising divorce rate, could not have imagined that two hundred years down the road their descendants would be utilizing laws that were essentially an expansion of government oversight to make claims for marriage equality and equal protection under the law. I love it when reactionary politics comes back to bite the conservatives in the ass (even if it takes two hundred years!).

Possibly I'm a slightly bigger history nerd than I previously imagined.

2) Flash Wedding! A couple of weeks ago, when Hanna and I were discussing what location we'd like to hold our solemnization at -- suddenly the office of our Justice of the Peace was feeling too impersonal -- it was Hanna who came up with the idea of getting married at one of our favorite coffee shops. Over our morning lattes. So we've settled on Tatte in Audubon Circle in Brookline, a tiny little storefront where we've been regularly stopping for coffee and pastries for the past three years. The manager was moved that we've asked, and we're going to meet with her next week to explain what we're envisioning.

3) Preparing the Space. We went with the notion of a "flash wedding" in large part so that we could keep it loose and casual, and minimize the performance anxiety. Nonetheless, we're going to do some preparation of the space -- both physically and on a more emotional level -- as a way of marking the transition into marriage. Hanna and I are assembling some objects for a table-top altar space, which we'll be setting up just prior to the exchange of vows (we plan to arrive a bit early and get some coffee to ease the nerves!), and we're going to speak with Tatte's manager about the feasibility of playing "Jesu, Joy of Men's Desiring" on the coffee shop sound system during the ceremony -- it's the piece my parents had for their wedding processional, and one Hanna is also fond of.

Tatte

While the cafe will remain open for business during our exchange of vows, we're going to do our best to create a little micro-space either out on the front walk (if the weather is fine) or in the front corner of the shop (if it's not) where we'll use meditative silence and readings contributed by friends to move in an out of the sacred space of the solemnization.

4) Our Witnesses. We've invited three friends who live in the area to join us at the coffee shop as witness-participants on the 14th, and then again in the evening for a celebration dinner (place TBA) after we've scattered our separate ways during the day.* We've invited them each to bring a short piece of prose or poetry of their choice to share as opening and closing words, and one of them has bravely volunteered to take a few photographs so as not to disappoint the parents and friends who've threatened to drop us if we fail to provide material evidence of the nuptials.

And, as I've written previously, we're all going to be signing the document I've come to think of as the "witnessing document," our wedding contract with the vows handwritten by us, in turn, and then sent around the country to be signed by our nearest and dearest ... and then framed and hung in our homes-to-come along with, perhaps, a photographs or two and a copy of our marriage certificate.

All in all, I think we're well on the way to Making Our Wedding Day Matter. Melissa, our therapist**, impressed upon us at our last appointment the importance of making the day matter for us, regardless of how big or small the wedding itself was going to be. The importance of acknowledging what a Big Important Thing we're embarking upon together.

And I'm proud of us for doing just that.

Stay tuned for post-event coverage in late September, as well as a post breaking down what all this cost in the monetary sense. Because I think it's interesting to see what both the explicit and hidden costs of these life events can be.

---

*Hanna and I are hoping to get in for our wedding tattoos at some point during the afternoon, but we haven't had a chance to settle an appointment with our artist at Chameleon.

**I know. On the one hand, that sounds so terribly yuppie and self-indulgent to be saying, but a) it's true that we have a kick-ass therapist, and I think it's important to de-stigmatize mental health care by acknowledging that, and b) I'm grateful every day that we live in a state that mandates mental health coverage in all health insurance plans -- and, additionally, mandates health insurance. Even when Hanna and I were technically living below the poverty line (aside from student loans) we had state-subsidized health insurance that covered mental health care. Thank you former Governor Romney!

many happy returns of the day

It's Hanna's birthday today, the fifth I've been honored to share with her. She doesn't like the attention, and there are reasons this time of year is difficult for her, so I will just say I'm grateful every day to be a part of her life's unfolding.

photo by laura wulf

household economies [wedding post the second]

UPDATE: Molly's comment on this post made me realize I should make a point of saying that this post is about my own personal experiences and desires regarding shared finances, not meant to be a general statement about what "should" happen for couples, or what is morally "right" for all households, etc. Material security is a very, very personal thing. So all of the thoughts below are about me/mine -- not meant as a judgment of anyone else's life.

One of the first things Hanna and I did after we became a couple was go out and open a joint checking account.

Well, okay, it wasn't one of the first things -- but it was within a couple of months. And even though we'd been living together and sharing household expenses for a year and a half at that point, the shared account somehow seemed more possible, more right, to establish once we were in a sexually-intimate relationship.

Yeah, I know it doesn't make any rational sense when I put it like that. But at the time, that's how it felt. We were a couple, my logic went, and couples share material resources without keeping score. And the best, most efficient, way of doing that was an account to which we both had equal access.

And it's worked for us since then. So much so that, as we move toward our wedding in the fall, Hanna raised the question of consolidating finances further -- perhaps pooling our (frighteningly modest) savings, and more actively planning for a future down-payment or international travel. I agreed this sounded like a good move.

money love by cembas @ flickr.com

I got thinking about this last week when blogger blue milk put up a post about money and relationships, riffing on a New York Times piece on money-sharing in marriage. The comments on the blue milk post reveal a diversity of arrangements, and -- to my mind -- a surprising number of long-term couples whose financial resources are still fairly separate, or at least kept distinct.

It's not that I haven't known other options are out there for household finances, besides the single-financial-profile Hanna and I seem to be trending toward, but it's fascinating to me how many people (women particularly?) feel strongly about maintaining their financial independence even within stable, long-term relationships.

Generally-speaking, there seems to be a lot of angst and anxiety these days about establishing household economies. Which (me being me) makes me reflect on why I don't feel that level of angst and anxiety incorporating another person's financial expectations and spending habits into my life (and trusting another person with my own income). Was it weird, at first? A little. It's impossible to keep as tight a grip on the pulse of household spending when there are two of us -- unless either of us were willing to spend a lot more time tracking trends (we aren't). And I had to get used to Hanna making decisions with "my" money that I wouldn't necessarily make vis a vis discretionary spending ... but then again, she's had to do the same. For the past three years, my paychecks have been automatically deposited into an account that Hanna has full access to, and that's never really bothered me.

So the question becomes: Why? Why don't I worry? 

I think it has something to do with how material resources and respect for individual decision-making and personal property (the things of our lives) were handled in my family of origin.

I grew up in a family where there was one main source of income: my father's salary. My mother had done wage-work before we were born, and has picked up work-for-hire since we grew up and moved on, but didn't work for pay while we were growing up. Yet regardless of the source of income, financial resources were consolidated: there was one checking account out of which bills were paid and daily expenses withdrawn. It had both my parents' names on it. Their financial assets were theirs never "his" and "hers."

Us kids all got spending money when we were small, and were taken to the bank to open savings accounts once we were earning pocket money (and later more significant income). So as kids, we had money that was separate from the family economy. We were also, correspondingly, expected to take responsibility for our own discretionary spending as we were able.

And I think almost more important than the specific, technical, details concerning the flow of cash, is the fact that we had confidence in one another to be financially responsible. My parents have confidence in each other as financial decision-makers, and helped us kids gain a basic understanding of our own finances so that as we moved from familial inter-dependence into adult fiscal independence (contrary to mythology, a gradual and far-from-decisive process) we were able to communicate about economic needs and desires without moral judgment. Resources were finite, true, but decisions about how to work within those material realities was always pursued collaboratively

Perhaps because of this model, I felt little discomfort in pooling our financial resources. 

Neither Hanna nor I enjoy book-keeping. So it's way easier to have a single account for joint spending (virtually all our spending now) than it is to keep track of who's paying what bills, buying what groceries, or who should be responsible for paying the tab for the rental car. Or, as I've seen some couples do, pay one another back via the monthly rent check or something similar.

OH MY GOD THAT WOULD DRIVE ME INSANE. Actually, it drove me a little bananas when we were doing that, or trying to, for the first year and a half of our relationship. The endless "Who's turn is it to ..." and "How much do I owe ..." and "If I pay for, then you can get ..." At which point pooling finances seemed like a simple expedient to cut out all the white noise of negotiation and haggling.

Would I worry more about protecting my financial independence if I were in a heterosexual relationship? To some extent, perhaps. Like with marriage itself, I worry less about falling into heteronormative sand traps because our relationship is by definition already non-normative. I don't have the fear, for example, that my husband will just fall into handling the finances because social expectation and pressure encourages him to do so. In a relationship with two women, there is no "obvious" partner to coordinate the household economy. Rather than having social forces relentlessly pushing us toward integration, we have to move forward with deliberate insistence that, yes, this is what we wish to do. This is how we wish to live.

Which is not to suggest that hetero couples aren't making deliberate decisions. Just that the social pressure to fit heteronormative marriage ideals (male breadwinner, female home-maker) isn't applied so heavily when it comes to people who aren't in hetero relationships. We have to argue for the chance to engage in activities straight couples are pressured to do. So the experience of choice and agency is qualitatively different there.

Is part of my ease due to the fact that I am (though by a thin margin at this point) the primary wage-earner in our household? I don't have a complete answer to this. When I wrote in comments at blue milk about the fact that I don't resent the inequality in wage-earning because things even out overall in terms of domestic responsibilities, another commenter got on my case about the "regressive" nature of such an arrangement. She assumed that I was somehow implying that my wage-work was more valuable than Hanna's, when in fact I'd been trying to argue that wage- and non-wage work that contributes to the running of our household counts equally as far as I'm concerned, and as I said in my response to the critique:

With two (or more) adults in a family, you spread both wage-earning and other responsibilities around according to who is available to do what, who has what skills, and what feels fair to all people concerned. Too often, mainstream media reduces equality (and power) in household relationships to income and ignores all of the other aspects of running a household to which everyone in a family contributes.

To my mind, part of being in a marriage (or non-marital long-term relationship) is the luxury of not keeping financial score, as it were. Obviously you still keep your fingers on the pulse of basic fairness, in the sense that you speak up if it starts feeling like you always end up stopping for groceries or your partner always gets to pick the Friday-night movie. But I felt very strongly, going into our relationship, that I wanted our household to be ours not "hers" and "hers" in a nit-picky material way.

We share books, clothes, food, bath and body products, we co-care for Geraldine. Psychologically and emotionally, I didn't want to get into a situation where I started resenting that Hanna's physical therapy bills were a significant monthly expense, or to start stressing about whether her decision to prioritize buying a new season of Supernatural was less justified than my decision to pre-order the latest Diana Gabaldon in hardcover.

Do I catch myself doing it sometimes? Sure. I'm as fallible as the next person. But I want to work toward a place where mutual confidence and trust is so normal that it's unremarkable -- dare I say nigh invisible?

guest post @ the last name project

I have a guest post up at from two to one today as part of The Last Name Project (co-hosted by Danielle of from two to one and Shannon of The Feminist Mystique). The Last Name Project profiles "an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities." For my contribution, I wrote about the decision Hanna and I made to combine our middle names when we register our marriage:

This solution felt right to us because it doesn’t privilege either person’s family name. It adds to, rather than erasing any aspect of, our (linguistic) identities. As a feminist and queer woman, I think extensively about mainstream notions of marriage, family, and identity, and I knew that I wanted a way to honor my individual self and family history alongside incorporating my partner into who I am and will become. Weaving Hanna’s middle name together with mine feels like a positive way to entwine our individual selves together without losing those other strands of who we are and have been.

Check out the whole piece over at from two to one.

minimalist wedding plans [installment the first]

While I loved to dress up and play princess or flower fairy in my babysitters' hand-me-down prom dresses as a child, I don't remember having much of a thing for weddings. Even my princess games tended toward the "orphan princesses run away to the magic forest to set up housekeeping together in the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse" feel to them (who me, pre-adolescent passionate friendships? what?). So I can completely and entirely, without any regret, say that I'm thankful beyond belief that Hanna isn't interested in a bells-and-whistles wedding.

About a month after we decided we were getting hitched on, like, a particular date, the major decisions have been made and the pressing details ironed out. Everything else is just icing-on-the-cake details. (Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago what kind of cake we were going to have and I was like, "Oh, that's right! An excuse for cake!")

For folks interested in the process of minimalist wedding planning, here's what we've got sketched out so far.

1. Ceremony. It's going to be a civil ceremony (neither of us are active in a church/religion), performed either out-of-doors or at the office of the Justice of the Peace we've hired for the occasion. The state of Massachusetts requires paperwork to be filed three days in advance of the license being issued, so we'll be heading down to City Hall to do that together at some point the week before the wedding. As I mentioned already, Massachusetts is one of those easy-peasy states where the fact we're both women is neither here nor there as far as the bureaucracy is concerned. (Thanks to GLAD for the legal overview; PDF)

The vows are still a work-in-progress, though we're shooting for impersonal-formal without saying shit we don't actually believe in. This is harder than you might think.

2. Witnesses. We aren't required to have witnesses, here in the state of Massachusetts, but we're talking about who we want in attendance. One problem is that the short list is scattered across at least four states and multiple time zones. So the question of who will be with us on the day, if anyone, is still under discussion and advisement. We do have a work-around in mind we're pretty happy with; more on that soon.

3. Rings & Things. We've decided to have rings, a matching set from an artist in Spain who sells through Etsy. She's engraving the rings with our new middle names (see below). We fussed a bit about the font for the text before deciding to supply her with the names written in our own hands.

"Sunday best" will probably be in order, just to spruce ourselves up a bit, though neither of us are inclined to spend the time or money necessary for the wedding clothes we might -- in our ideal fantasy headspace -- enjoy dressing up in (hint: there has, in the past, been talk of knee-high boots, corsets, and waistcoats).

4. Names. We've been going back and forth about this for about as long as we've been talking about getting married, and finally decided that since children aren't in the picture and there's no elegant way of combining Cook and Clutterbuck, we'd go with combining our middle names instead. Hence our new, legal, middle names: Elisabeth Jane.

5. Tattoos. Wedding tattoos, I know. But we've both got ink already and since my ability to wear jewelry consistently is a bit dodgy we decided ink was a more permanent way of marking the transition to being wives. Drawing on Hanna's Buddhist practice and our English-Scottish roots we decided we wanted a knotwork design, and chose the eternal or endless knot. We're going to have my dad work up some different options incorporating colors we're both drawn to, including browns, purples, blues, greens, and grays.

6. Announcements. We're asking our friend Diana to design us letterpress announcements to mail out to family and friends. Photographs of any kind are still under negotiation, but a wedding portrait of some kind may or may not be included.

7. Honeymoon. This part actually came first! Our original plan was to spend a week's vacation on Cape Cod this fall (our first honest-to-goodness vacation that doesn't involve travel for professional development or family visits) and it was in planning that vacation that we decided the time was ripe to get married. So we're renting a tiny studio cottage on the ocean for a week and planning to spend lots of hours wandering around the national shoreline, hanging in coffee shops, reading, watching Supernatural and Stargate: Atlantis, cooking, wading in tidepools, and all the other things one does on a vacation-honeymoon with one's wife.

8. Family. With my family scattered across the U.S. from Michigan to Texas to Oregon, we're still working out the details of how to mark the occasion with family members. There's talk of celebration dinner with the parents of the brides, or a "grand tour" to visit the siblings ... basically, we're not sure yet. Time and money being what they are, a unified family-and-friends gathering probably just isn't in the cards.

9. Larger Meanings. Getting married. Being a wife. Having a wife. As an historian with an interest in sexuality and gender, and as a queer feminist, I'm obviously acutely aware of the historical specificity of what we're doing here. It's living in this time, in this place, that's making it possible for Hanna and I to conceive of ourselves as being in a relationship that falls within the purview of marital relations -- and then makes it possible for us to act on that self-understanding. Without fear of losing our jobs or being shunned by friends. Quite the opposite, in fact: our friends and family have celebrated with and for us, and when I told my colleagues about the nuptials I got a hug from my boss.

There have been other times when, there continue to be other places where, and other couples for whom, this manner of openness, legality, and celebration is not an option.

I'm also aware, and in political sympathy with, many of the people who decry the way the institution of marriage, however equal, has become the gateway to a whole host of civil rights, responsibilities, and benefits -- from parental leave to retirement benefits and everything in-between. The navigation of private meaning and personal choices as they interact with and help to shape public dialogue and structural inequalities, for better or worse, is something none of us can escape. Writing about what we're doing, and why, is part of my commitment to thinking about how the personal and political interact in myriad ways.

10. Cake! When I was a child, my default celebration cake was chocolate chip pound cake; these days I'm a fan of red velvet (is there a better mode of cream cheese frosting delivery? seriously). Clearly important decisions must be made.

I'll keep you posted!

a wee bit of news we'd like to share

"Never will I take for granted in this world your generosity of exploration, how you have listened to my body and found what you could do."
~Joan Nestle, "Our Gift of Touch," in A Fragile Union (144).

It's my parents' thirty-sixth wedding anniversary today, so it seems somehow appropriate to take this moment to make this particular announcement.

Hanna and I have decided to get married. It was one of those gradual processes that doesn't really have an event of engagement attached to it -- we talked about it, and then talked about it some more, until at some point it felt true. That at some point we would be married. Eventually.

And then, back in early April, I came home late from work one night to find Hanna reading in bed.

"Hey," I said, "I've brought you a present." It was a mint chocolate chapstick I'd seen that morning at Whole Foods that had made me think of her.

"I think we should get married when we go on vacation this fall," she answered.

I admit, this wasn't quite the response to the mint chocolate chapstick I was anticipating, but hey! I was willing to go with it.

At which point sleepy, comfortable, familiar, probably Not Safe For Work, kissing commenced.

these two mugs are getting married!

Happily, we're in Massachusetts where legal marriage is a boringly normal option for us. Believe me, there's a real thrill to be had from anticipating the moment when I can say phrases including the words "my wife" and experience precisely zero negative ramifications as a result.

Or, at least, if anyone does push back we have the backing of the law to tell them where to shove it. (Yes, I get a certain satisfaction from knowing this. No, it doesn't make me a particularly charitable person.)

We're getting married on September 14th. Our "to do" list for the wedding currently has a decidedly underwelming nine items, including three that are more properly related to vacation planning than the wedding itself. And half of them are already taken care of! There's a lot to be said for going the minimalist route.

What strange things we humans do. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as the season approaches.

Meanwhile, I am so very, very thankful, every day, that Hanna has chosen to build a life with me. There's no one I'd rather have here, at my center-space. No one outside my family of origin who so immediately and irrevocably meant home and safe as Hanna did. I know she doesn't fully understand why I feel this way, or always believe it to be true. Yet she's willing to take the risk anyway -- and that makes her one of the bravest people I know.

Wherever we travel from here, I'm glad we're a team. I think we make a pretty damn good one.