Category: Choices

The Life I Want

~ Laura Lowder ~ 1 Comment

Years of being told who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to settle for . . . none of it honest, none of it good, not knowing how to fight back to claim my own identity and to defy the people I love .. . They mean well, but they don’t know me, so they have no authority to dictate my life to me.  Still, from childhood I’d been taught I was supposed to yield to their judgments in all matters.

In the fall, I made the decision:  I would move.  I would cut the safety rope linking me to a life I mostly hated, but which was quite secure, and go in pursuit of something more. Once I reached this decision, I must say, I have not had a moment of fear or uncertainty. I have paused frequently to ask myself whether I really was willing to take this risk, and each time the answer was a joyful Yes!

The Hand of God in this has been unmistakable.  I am in awe of how He has guided my steps along the way, even feeling Him laughing at me and saying, “Sweetheart, what took you so long?”

I never had to place my property on the market. When I began doing my research, my neighbor offered to buy the place and offered me the high end of current market value for our area (I knew this because I’d already looked, before I talked with them of my intentions). We closed the sale on a Wednesday. That evening, I got in the car and headed to my chosen new locale for what I believed would be the first of several “recon” missions.

I arrived late Thursday evening.  Friday, I met with a dear Christian realtor I’d connected with online. She showed me one house. I fell in love with that house, beginning with the front porch. It abundantly met my needs and left me “room to grow” — physically and aesthetically,  The rental was well within my budget.  I filled out the application.

“Laura, you must contact the pastor over at such-and-such church. My good friend tells me they have just lost their organist of more than 50 years, and they need someone.” I thought, okay, maybe next week. . .   The pastor contacted me. On Monday I went and played for him and for the one Board member who was able to come over on very short notice.  I was provisionally offered the position, pending completion of a formal audition.

I cut my recon mission short, headed back to my home and began my move (I had a contractual provision to remain in my old home until the end of the school year). Friends offered to help — a massive savings over the professional movers I’d thought I’d have to hire.

There were decisions to make.  I felt that — not just because of spatial and economic moving considerations — I needed to take only those things I dearly love and actually need.  Only the items that would fit in the life I want. So far as furniture went, that meant my antique bed, two chairs, and my desk; everything else, I sold or donated to my church charity.  Of the smaller items, if it could not be immediately put to use to help me realize the life I want, it would not go.  A saddle I’d held on to for sentimental reasons, for more than 30 years (I have not had a horse since I was 18, nor ridden but a couple of times since I was 14) would not make the move with me. I gave away more than half my books in order to save on moving space. I gave an avid gardener friend all my yard tools.  The trailer itself — the neighbors did not want to deal with it — I was able to re-home with a couple who would move it and refurbish it for their own daughter, recently escaped from an abusive marriage.  They also helped me with the cleanup as I moved out.

Several friends came and helped me pack, easing the physical stress on my body.

In a scant 10 days, I was back on the road, this time to stay.

I admit I hurt some people with my decisions — not just to move, but more, to keep my own counsel regarding the move until the last possible moment.  I did this primarily to spare myself the stress of having to explain myself to the extended family.  And I feel justified in that decision, still, because they all have made major life decisions without reference to me, and I think informing would have been too much akin to permission-seeking.

I have moved in order to create for myself the life I want. It’s not about betraying my family (although I confess to a bit of the good ol’ British Workers’ Salute in the direction of a couple of people who had betrayed and abandoned me at a crucial hour.) There was no room for expansion, in my old home.  The area I lived in seemed to sap the joy and energy from me even as its sandy soil saps nutrients from the soil itself. A cousin had pointed out that everything is stunted in that region — even the deer are significantly smaller than just a county or so west, where the terrain takes on a different character.  I was stunted, I realized, and I want to grow.

 

Power Sheets: First Impressions

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

I promised to let you know what I think of Lara Casey’s Power Sheets. My box arrived yesterday, and my first impression is that it’s living up to all the hype and enthusiasm I’ve seen on YouTube.  I think I’m going to find this to be a most helpful tool in facing the New Year.

For one thing, the product itself is sturdy as well as beautiful. Heavy paper to write on — and she urges you to make a mess of it, not limit yourself to your best and most beautiful .  .   sturdy dividers. Lovely stickers — and I am not a sticker fan. (Confession: I’ve already used stickers. My favorite are the gold foil arrows that help draw attention to salient or memorable points in the explanatory/inspirational text leading into our personal reflections.)

But the really important point is that these evaluation and planning prompts aren’t trite. They invite one to go deep, to think long and hard, and honestly, about a particular question.  I’ll be revisiting the pages over the next few days and trying to go more deeply and broadly into each one.

This is a workbook that invites deep reflection and conscious planning. And, I must say, realistic goal-setting.  I appreciate this more than I can say. Lara even has review and evaluation re-visits on a monthly and quarterly basis; this is not a one-off, trivial News Years Resolutions exercise.  She also has a video series that she emails to you when you order, that goes through the book in very manageable segments.

There are also YouTube videos in abundance that show you particulars of what the product looks like and what the prompts are. My favorites (so far) are Elyssa Nalani’s and Ashyln Writes.  You can do a basic search for PowerSheets in the YouTube search bar and come up with loads more. They’ll also have links galore in the info box.  I won’t add more here.

But, yes, I recommend this product. It’s pricey – I would never have bought it had I not been deadly serious about making some changes. But since I am that serious, I’d say the money is well spent.

Life adjustments – Getting Well

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

I love Advent. It’s the beginning of the liturgical year, in the liturgical churches, a full month before the calendar changes over, but even more, Advent is a season of preparation. We need to reflect and prepare for the big events of our lives, and probably for our lives, themselves.  Yes, I’m quite certain of that.

For too many years I’ve drifted on the currents, had no particular plan or purpose. Vague generalized ones, but not particular. The reason for this is understandable: when I was growing up, and later in my marriage to TFP, plans were the prelude to disappointment. All those broken promises!  And again, and again, there was that open and subliminal message that I was too unimportant to have any legitimate purpose in the world, apart from being TFP’s “beard.”  That’s a message that cuts deep, long after we’ve realized the lie it is. I’ve just been drifting along, feeling pretty helpless to change things.

Also, I just have a temperament that does well under still and quiet, not trying to push or force events or answers.

But it does have its limitations. If we’re not happy with something — a job, a piece of furniture, a relationship — then we either make changes or we become the victims of our own inertia. Resentments can fester, precipitating a crisis that might have been avoided had we taken initiative early on in the dissatisfaction.

I have decided it is time for some substantial changes. There are things I want that I can’t achieve in my present circumstances.  I am 62 years old; I want the remainder of my life to be fruitful, joyful, productive, and spiritually and emotionally rich.

That’s Step One: Decide to make a change.

Step Two, for me, at this time, is to take time to very particularly evaluate just what it is I DO want. It’s not enough to say, “I’m ready for a change.” Changes can be for the worse, not just the better. I want to have a clearer understanding of what motivates me, what I truly care about, what  — well, since my Catholic faith is important to me, I couch it in these terms: what I perceive God wants from me, and for me.

I’ve ordered a couple of resources to help me work through those great existential questions. When they’ve arrived (later this week, I expect), I’ll do an evaluation here for your benefit. This particular one — Lara Casey’s Power Sheets — has gotten a lot of good mentions on the YouTube channels I have been watching. I’ll let you know if the product lives up to its reputation by my expectations.

Step Three — and these can be concurrent (they are for me, right now) — research your options. Want a new career? A new home? Research the options, and the costs, and the risks, and the values.  Knowledge is a form of empowerment, and one that I believe will allow us to step out in confidence in the new direction we’ve chosen for ourselves.

 

On Love, Part Three

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

In my last post, I pointed out that loving turns a spotlight on us.

My marriage to TFP was a desert, emotionally. Sometimes I would try to contort myself into odd configurations to try to get his attention and make him take me seriously.  Sometimes I just fought him. All the things I was told a Christian marriage was supposed to be simply were not there for us, and I was resentful of his scorn and derision of those ideals, as well as of me.

When I was dating my second husband, a bad alcoholic and probably an undiagnosed bipolar, there were a lot of good things going on. What TFP had criticized and ridiculed about me, H2 found cheerful and welcoming and enjoyable.  When I cooked a meal, H2 appreciated it and told me so (and he ate with a hearty appetite).  When I re-arranged the furniture, he said it looked nice — not, “Why did you do that?”  There was a neglected, wounded domestic side to my nature, and H2 seemed to enjoy the fruits of my efforts in that direction, which flattered my feminine ego. The rest of my personality. . .  I was convinced (by TFP, in part) that my complexity was at least partially to blame for my inability to be happy; I was ready to narrow my life down, I thought, in order not to be alone.

But human nature won’t be narrowed down. H2 and I weren’t “equally yoked.”  H2 was straight, he thought I was bright and funny, he told me I was beautiful and he made me laugh and we had a lot of fun together — fishing, camping, and so on.  But I was better educated than he was, and after we were married, the flattery changed to complaining about the “junk” that marked some of the things I like best about myself:  my books, music, art.  He had bragged on how smart I was, before we were married, but afterward he found that threatening — he resented the clutter of my library and writing, in a temper would talk about backing a truck up to the back door and hauling off “all that junk.”  He decided he disliked my friends, even my blue-collar friends like himself, friends I’d had since high school; he only wanted to socialize with his family and friends. He was very demanding in that regard, and I lost touch with people whose company I had enjoyed, before. We had different religious and political values — again, revealed only after we were married.

So — you see, although I had a sort of love for H2, it wasn’t a mature or healthy sort of love for marriage. It was more along the lines of what C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, refers to as storge — an affection given to one’s family, or to a dependent or inferior.  It is, he said, the sort of affection a dog might have for the cat doing figure-8s around its legs, “although no self-respecting dog would ever confess to it.”  — or something along those lines; I don’t have the book in front of me.  It’s not at all the sort of respect-based love a woman ought to have for her husband.

Which brings me back to loving, and to what loving DF has taught me about the nature of love — and about myself. Love devoid of respect and esteem might do in some passing and mediocre, inessential relationships, but not in our most intimate, our deepest friendships. Let the romantic element of love be unrequited or unfelt in life’s various challenges; the respect and esteem can still stand strong and vigorous and healthy in the face of all things.

This is important. After the demoralizing experience of having been married to a man who couldn’t appreciate our femininity, who scorned us for being women — after trying to adapt to the impossible in hopes of becoming lovable in his sight — we need the experience of loving, and even more than of being loved, in order to be healed.  Loving wakes us up. It makes us whole. It reveals to us what is real and important about ourselves.  It shows us our dignity, our strength, our beauty, and our worth. It affirms our authenticity while leaving us free to discover just who we are.

After the destructiveness of past self-denial, loving gives us back to ourselves.

 

How do we find ourselves again?

~ Laura Lowder

I can only tell you how it happened to me:
First, I was in college when DH and I separated and divorced. It was the first time I’d realized I am intelligent; it was my first major success.  He tried to sabotage it, but I knew that leaving school to follow him, when he announced his intention to leave, would have catastrophic effects on me. Deciding to stay where I was and to let him move out alone was one of the best decisions I ever made.  Brutally difficult (remember, I didn’t know at that point that he was gay), but worth it.

A few years later, during the course of my job, I came across a wonderful pamphlet, “Do You Love Me?” a reproduction of a talk by John Barger, founder of Sophia Institute Press. As Barger detailed the story of the death and rebirth of his own marriage, and the death of his much-loved wife, I found that the ideals I’d always held of marriage, of intimacy, were not, as DH had insisted, “unrealistic, naive, and irrational,” but were legitimate. And, in fact, were the teachings on the nature of marriage by the Catholic Church. This one event was huge.  It validated my deepest instincts and intuitive understanding, which DH had repeatedly ridiculed.

In the fall of 2005 I took the advice of some friends and auditioned for, and was accepted into, a large regional chorus. This activity placed me in the company of some very fine men and women, some of whom shared my ideals, values, and faith; all of whom were intelligent and accomplished people.  The camaraderie I experienced there gave me an increased sense of fitting in among good people, something I’d not pursued since I’d graduated from college, after the divorce.

A group of us would go out for a late supper after rehearsals, and the conversations around the restaurant table moved me to shake off the residue of the attitudes I’d put on in order to try to “get along” with a man who simply would not, could not, be gotten along with.  I found myself beginning to turn again to values and ideals I’d thought I’d “outgrown,” but in reality had only stepped away from in order to accommodate a difficult person and situation.  As I returned to them, I found more clearly who I am, in my own integrity.

I learned through reading, studying, and simply observing what matters to me, what I find strong and enduring, and what is fleeting, artificial, and unsubstantial. I jettisoned the latter bit by bit, and reinforced my understanding and love of the former.

One lovely thing that happened was not of my choosing, but the happy “accident” of biology, I think. One morning, in my late 40s, heading into menopause, I woke up one morning thinking, I have spent my entire life being told I have to be careful not to upset or worry or offend other people.  Well, it’s time for those other people to start worrying about not upsetting me!

I distanced myself from people who revealed that their acceptance of me was conditional upon my altering myself to satisfy them.  I’m not talking about holding a moral line — goodness knows, those are easy enough to cross. And too often, people who are critical of some things are astonishingly tolerant of immorality (so long as it doesn’t inconvenience them) — I mean, rather, that if I didn’t alter my personality, or my temperament, or my Faith, or my interests/tastes, etc. then those things were subject to criticism.  Sometimes we can’t physically distance ourselves — it’s a relief when we can – but we can mentally and emotionally draw some lines in the sand and withdraw from that point.  And we can do so with dignity, calm, and clarity.  It may take some practice, but it can be done.

Everything we encounter becomes an invitation to affirm our true nature:  we either bend with the prevailing wind at that moment in order to try to get along, or we stand in the growing certainty of what is right. This might be a subjective right — discovering one’s proper work, for instance; I have worked as a shipping clerk and as a secretary, responsible positions that my practical family and friends greatly approved of, and I did my work well enough, but I was very unhappy with the bad fit of what I was doing and the disuse of my real gifts and abilities.  Or it might be an objective moral right — the defense of marriage, of the vulnerable and defenseless among us, and so on.

There is great strength in solitude. A younger woman with children to care for might find this very difficult. A bit of quiet each day is barely enough to keep the inner batteries charged for facing the day’s challenges, much less to find solid grounding and healing. We use what we have and must trust God to provide the rest.  I didn’t have money for a vacation when DH and I divorced, nor for many years after. When it came, it was like the old-fashioned “rest cure.”

The trick, however, is to embrace the solitude and its temporary discomforts, and not to try to hide from it/them with noise and activity.

 

 

 

 

Forgiveness Is the Key

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

We’ve heard clever explanations of hanging on to a grudge, such as letting someone live rent-free in your head. That’s okay, so far as it goes –

But let’s take it further:  do you spend a lot of time thinking and/or talking about the bad hand you’ve been dealt by the Fates? the wrongs you’ve suffered? how unappreciated you are?  how you suffer?

We all know people who do. I know several on social media who rarely post anything other than the attention-seeking whining and complaining.  It’s boring.  And you know, I just don’t see how they can be happy people.

You want to be happy?  You want to be at peace?
1.  Give your whole life to God, and walk with Him.  That’s worthy of a series of posts, right there, because it’s important to understand Who God Is and what He requires of us as we live for Him and reflect His Divine Nature to the rest of the world. But nothin’, and I mean NOTHIN’! is better than that!

2.  Forgive the people who have hurt you.  Yeah it’l come round to taunt you from time to time.  Some times it’s a torment and it might not even be easy to recognize what’s going on.  It took me weeks, this winter, to figure out I was still living under the shadow of my parents’ choices.  But keep trying!

Forgiveness isn’t forgetting the past or pretending it doesn’t matter (things that hurt you at the core of your being matter a lot).  I think of it as letting go of the very human desire to be avenged.  To get even. To persuade the person who hurt you to see the hurt and regret it and to make amends. Tha’s out of your hands and you’ll drive yourself batty, obsessing about it. God will rightly judge and hand out penalties in the Judgment (yes, I believe in Purgatory, and it’s a good, healthy place); our job is to release our need to be made right to and to go on living. Yes, 70×7 for the same offenses.

Learn, if you’re still stuck, to get out of being the victim or someone’s emotional punching bag. Or rescuer or one to hide behind. Forgiveness is NOT about letting other people willfully and viciously use and hurt us!  Become strong!  Learn to value yourself (get counselling if you find this difficult — not for the rest of your life, but for a few weeks/months while you find yourself)

3. Choose to be happy.  Count your blessings.  Can’t find any?  Start a notebook.  You got a roof over your head? Clothes on your back? Food in your belly? Start there.  Recognize daily beauty — the song of a mockingbird or the flash of blue of a bluebird, or the serene ambling across your yard of a doe and fawn — and make a note of it.  Note the brilliant colors you encounter in Nature.  Find beauty all around you.  Put a pot of flowers on the table (heading into spring, I splurged when I really couldn’t afford it on bunches of tulips from our local grocery store.  My spirit needed them more than my body needed the food, and I can’t begin to say how much they lifted my spirits, what pleasure they gave me for a week at a time).

Study other people.  Who do you admire and respect? Why? Reach for those qualities in yourself.
Who makes you feel happier for being around them? Why? Emulate them!

Do you have friends? Be grateful for them. Look for ways to be a blessing to them.

Is there someone you know who needs help? Help her. Take the neighbor to the doctor and the grocery store when she’s not able to drive.  Pick up an extra bunch of tulips to cheer her up, too — or, this time of year, it’s little pots of miniature roses that are so beautiful.

Cultivate the habit of smiling at people.

Discipline yourself to stop bellyaching over every little thing. Everyone knows your sufferings by now; no need to belabor the point.  Now let them see your more cheerful and good-natured side.

Find one thing nice to say to everyone.

Get out of yourself.  Yes, take some time to rest and to be quiet and alone. But — bit by bit — “This week I will do this one thing” — get out of the rut.  It really won’t take long before you really have found some unexpected peace and joy and have become, very truly, your better self.

I wonder . . .

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

Did our upbringing and/or our family dynamics contribute in any way to our being attracted to an SSA (Same-Sex Attracted) man?

I’ve seen indication that women on oral contraceptives tend to shun more traditionally masculine men in favor of more feminized men; I was on OCPs for a couple of years, in my teens, as a “treatment” for what turned out to be endometriosis.

Is there something that shapes us to be attracted to men who can’t really love us?

I’d sure like to hear other women’s stories. Do we follow some sort of pattern?

Reviving the Blessings Journal

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

Low. Not sure what has triggered it, maybe the big anniversary or the realization I’m single for the duration or something I haven’t put my finger on . . . or maybe it’s the cumulative effect of several things at once. Anyway, it is what it is.

Several years ago, I came up with the idea of recording the unusual, the beautiful, the blessed things that I encountered during the course of ordinary days, to counter the sense of drowning in grief. I quit after several weeks, when I was back on top of things, again.  I think it’s time to revive the discipline

You see, I believe that every beautiful thing that comes by us, even the “ordinary” ones, is a way God is telling us “I love you.”  And every reminder that God loves us is a step out of the dark hole, or a pushing away of the Black Dog —

So here goes:

BLESSINGS AND BEAUTY, Week of February 25, 2018
Signs of Spring:  Daffodils and jonquils are up and in full bloom. Ornamental cherries. Bradford pears are a cloud of bridal white. Saw some forsythia yellow on my way to Mass, Friday.
A good bit of sunshine, last week, with temps in the 70s, giving us a break from the clouds, rain, and general early spring chill that we’ve returned to, today (Monday, 2/26).
A squirrel came within a yard of me, yesterday. I don’t know whether he was distracted by his food or just used to people moving around him but he didn’t seem to mind me at all. I like squirrels.
A turtle was by the sidewalk as I came out of Mass, yesterday.  A good-sized turtle.  I stopped and got some photos. He/She hissed and turned his/her back to me, but I still took pictures.
There’s a fragrance in the air, here at my country home, that reminds me of my grandmother’s grape hyacinths’ fragrance. I’ve no idea what it is or where it comes from – there are no hyacinths anywhere around me! and this fragrance is strong. But it’s a wonderful scent, and I wish I could capture it into a perfume to wear all year round.
My cousins’ dog came to visit both Saturday and Sunday. There’s something very sweet about a dumb animal choosing one as a personal favorite. Several students’ cats and dogs also seem to have chosen me as a favorite; their humans tell me they don’t behave the same open and friendly way toward other people who come to their houses.
My cat seems to be very sensitive to my state of mind, and he has stayed very close to me, these past couple of weeks, all cuddly and  — well, demanding and sometimes annoying. But it’s still sweet.
A young friend honored me this week by sharing a moment of profound vulnerability with me.
Another friend shared with me one of her personal sorrows.
I received a most generous gift from another friend, a gift that has covered my recent car repairs and given me a little to put aside for the next crisis.
Another friend, an artist, contacted me, “Can I help you with your writing and speaking business promotion?” She designed a business card for me, and coordinating notecards. I have to pay the printer, but she gave me her talent.
“I love the hymns we sang today,” someone told me, after Mass. I choose the hymns each week.

Some of these blessings also bring pain and sorrow — the love of my young friends and their parents is such a contrast to the estrangements I live with in my own family, and the affirmations of others’ gifts brings me the pangs of remembering the struggles to be known and taken seriously by my parents and by DH — but this is also part of the healing. One pushes through the resistance to find peace.

And I will push through.  The fact that a fragrance can stop me dead in my tracks while I delight in it, and the cloud of pink from a particular ornamental makes me say “ooooh!” before I’ve known I’m going to say it — these are signs of great hope.  I may feel low, but I am not too low.

Choices.

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

I don’t mind being an ex-wife defining my work. This is something I do, it’s part of how God redeems that experience and brings something out of it that, I hope, helps others.

But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit back and let being the ex-wife of a homosexual define my life.  Even after thirty years. The warping of the psychological and emotional abuse of that decade-plus may be too much to overcome, and I may not be able to find happiness in married love, but I will not go through my life as a victim.

A “wounded warrior,” maybe, but not a victim.

A friend I dearly love made a remark – I’m sure, now, it was innocently-intended – that set off a chain reaction of memories. . . miserable, bitter memories. And a knee-jerk reaction, “I hope you don’t mean to imply . . . ” that I’m cringing over, now — but that’s okay, he’s tough and he can take it. My life isn’t endangered because of an accidental trigger.

Memories. Weaknesses. We think we’re sailing along in calm waters, we think that, because it’s been a long time since we have been tormented by thoughts and memories and reactions that we’ve finally come clear of them, and WHAM! something slams into our gut and there they are again.

As far as I can see, there’s only one thing for it: grit my teeth, fight my way to the surface of the wave, and ride it out. If I have a hard time getting my thoughts back under control, I have a local counsellor I can talk it out with. I have friends who will support me. I have this writing as an outlet.

I’ve been through this before, I know it will pass.  And it takes less time, now, than in the early years.

 

Book Review: The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

I’m only on Ch. 19, but I have to get in this review now.

I’m blessed to call Moira Greyland one of my friends.  We met on Facebook through mutual friends; she is the daughter of gays, I am the ex-wife of one. We have exchanged numerous comments and messages; a number of months ago, she became my voice coach, and we have talked numerous times.  She is a joyous woman, enormously talented, expert in several fields, energetic, cheerful, and beautiful.

She is also a walking miracle.

And a very fine writer.

Moira’s parents were famous writers; I’d come across Marion Zimmer Bradley through her Mists of Avalon (which I bought but never could get into, and eventually threw away), but I wasn’t acquainted with the name of Walter Breen until I met Moira.  Both Marion and Walter were brilliant and famous in their respective fields; I was surprised to learn that she was one of the cofounders of the Society of Creative Anachronisms, and other Faires.

Walter, it turns out, was paranoid schizophrenic. Marion didn’t have a formal diagnosis, having never been institutionalized, but my hunch is that it would have been very bad, had there been one.  Nevertheless, both of them were brutal child molesters and abusers.  Moira was raped by both her parents, she watched her father bring into their home and seduce dozens of young boys, her mother go through bouts of insane and irrational rages.  How she has emerged from that hellhole to be the vibrant and powerful — if sometimes shell-shocked — woman that she is leaves me in utter awe.

There are moments in this book of wry humor (Walter would have sex with “anything with a pulse” — in my head, I can see and hear Moira speaking those words). There are recountings that are so carefully navigated to avoid the salacious but still leave one wanting to scream with fury, to reach through the pages and to rescue that little girl she was.  Moira had told me she has panic attacks in the shower, and now I fully understand why.

But the book is more than just her story; it is also the story of the fomentation of the gay rights and pederasty movement (I’m sorry, the two really are inescapably linked — and Breen wrote about “Greek love”) out of Berkeley in the 1960s and 70s. Walter’s schizophrenia thankfully left him incapable of playing the system by self-editing his thoughts and words, any more than his impulses, he was very vocal in his advocacy of sex with children, and wrote about it, and his words and attitudes have been recounted by more than just Moira, which allows us to see the train of thought of an active pederast. His testimony in the criminal trial that put him in prison for the rest of his life was appallingly candid; he actually seems to have believed he could persuade the judge that he was in the right in seducing young boys, that he was doing them an enormous favor. Moira weaves others’ writings, remembrances, and testimony through her own story to demonstrate that these events she recounts were not the creation of her own mind but a well-documented, publicly-known “secret” in the various communities where the family were connected.

There are hard paragraphs to read, yes, but overall The Last Closet is a story of survival and of triumph of love.  Moira shows us the brokenness that each of her parents brought into their marriage, and the tragic and twisted love they shared (they were so in tune with one another on many levels, that they would regularly buy one another the same gift). She shows us her carefully-forged escapes and survival techniques.

As I said in opening, I’m on Ch. 19.  But I know how the story will end, because I know Moira:  in triumph.

Right now, The Last Closet is only available in Kindle format. It will be available in hard copy soon.  And — I don’t know where she’s going to find the strength to do it all — in audiobook.  Yes, Moira’s going to record it herself.