40.

I am almost finished writing my book proposal for my memoir, Somewhere in the Middle, a story about how my life changed after the death of my father. I’ve really dug into the project this year and welcomed the thrust inward. Reliving the complicated conversations, the arduous decisions, and the awkward realities that have filled the past decade in order to write this book is no small task. I don’t write to present that I’ve got it all figured out. I’m not writing a script for others to follow, but what drives me to write is that someone, somewhere might benefit from knowing that even though major aspects of life can and will change, authentic love doesn’t have to be one of them. I know now that my life can look however I want it to look - how liberating to truly embody this sentiment, and how complicated. It’s what we do as humans: we take what we know and we live it until something or someone tells us not to. 

As a writer, I make meaning. I have the privilege of selectively shaping meaning with what I do and don’t say. I accept that there will be inaccuracies, but I will not allow for deceptions. I have the right to my boundary - of what I say and what I left unsaid. Others with whom my life intersects will remember the story differently. My only obligation is to stay faithful to my point of view. I don’t write the truth; I write my truth. 

After a book proposal is complete, it is usually sent out to an agent of choice. So, as I’ve been researching agents, I like to imagine myself working with the person behind the bio, going to coffee or for a glass of wine maybe. I like to imagine this person believing in my story. When I read about an agent looking for LGBTQ stories, my attention peaks. When I read that she’s looking for queer stories that go beyond coming out, I wonder where my own story falls. Is it a coming out story? Or does it span further into the realm of queerness? Or somewhere else entirely?

My story doesn’t begin with coming out. It begins with a death that throws me deep into the bellows of grief. It begins there, in some versions, but it also begins long before my father’s passing, in others. Most of the time, the beginning is untraceable. Where do our stories begin? 

Ten years ago today, on the morning I turned 30, my father called me to tell me his cancer had spread. It wasn’t my father’s death that caused me to question aspects of my life - it wasn’t that kind of direct cause and effect relationship. But his death opened a portal of deeper knowing that we each get one life. One life in this body, in this time, with these people, in this place. The only constant of this life is that everything changes, and when it does, when someone or something enters from the wings catching us completely off guard, what happens then? And how does fear bind us to the “shoulds,” the prescribed, the rigid ideals that define us?

In my writing, I seek to interrogate my fear, and I do so from all angles. There is fear with any kind of change, any kind of shift, not to mention one that breaks so many societal norms. I shine light into dark corners of what it means to be a complex and multi-faceted human - to be real. 

When I reflect on this decade, on the changes both of my inner landscape and outer world, I can’t help but remember a moment with my father, just a few months before his diagnosis. He was in Colorado for Thanksgiving. Calvin was two-months-old. We took a walk around the soccer fields near my house. I felt the warmth of my infant against my chest in the baby carrier. His tiny head bobbed with each step, and he curled in toward me like a comma. (The child to this day knows how to incite pause.) As we crested the hill overlooking the fields, we saw hundreds of geese mowing the dry grass on the fields. And in the next moment, a cluster of them above in the sky, all flying together in formation. My father stopped, hands on hips, to watch the soft-winged, round-bellied creatures move effortlessly across the sky, circling once, twice, three times before soaring out of sight.

“That’s something,” Dad said, releasing a long exhale. “They all seem to know just where to go.” 

I have leaned on other authors during my process of writing. I’ve sought validation from their stories; I’ve found mirrors. I have a community of voices - most of whom I’ve never met personally - who are my inspiration. 

I remember, early on in my journey, I found a new therapist by Googling therapists who specialized in women’s sexuality. Deb’s office was not in a basement like my former therapist’s, but on the third floor of a building surrounded by trees. I could hear children playing at a nearby daycare, but I couldn’t see them because they were fenced in, protected. I showed up to my new therapist’s office for the first time carrying a book with me, the only book I had found that reflected back to me the specificity of my struggle. It was a paperback with purple tones, depicting a woman wandering through a field of wildflowers. It was called Living Two Lives: Married to a Man but in Love with a Woman. I highlighted, underlined and scrawled notes in the margins of the book. The author, Joanne Fleisher, takes readers through her own story, when back in 1979, married to a man, she finds herself falling in love with a female friend. I read the book at night before bed, my black pen in hand. I read the book in coffee shops when I was supposed to be writing, but I hid the cover from anyone’s view. As I skimmed the titles on Deb’s shelf, I wondered where they’d been or why my searches were not revealing titles such as these: Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel, Sexual Fluidity by Lisa Diamond, Slow Sex by Nicole Daedone and even one called Vagina by Naomi Wolf. 

 The purple book was my guidebook at the time -  my beacon of hope. Someone else had survived this; someone else had made it through. If this seems dramatic, remember what was at stake, in my mind. My family. My children. My life as I knew it.

In that session, as I lamented about my feelings, I remember saying, “I see two women together, and I just want to move closer. I want to know more. I don’t understand what is happening to me.” 

Deb nodded, “So when you see them, you want to reach out toward them?”

“Yes.”

“So here’s what I want you to try,” she said. “Every time you find yourself wanting to reach toward someone else, I want you to try reaching for yourself.”

In many ways, this is where my story began - with choosing myself.

Rather than continue down the path of fear, a path that was generations old, I probed deeply into my experience and finally began to speak my truth and slowly and intentionally gave myself permission for authentic design and co-creation of a life. Reconfiguring our family, coming out, and entering into my first queer relationship allowed my truth to surface and breathe and gave me a sense of agency and purpose like I’d never experienced before.

My story has taken a decade to live, and almost just as long to write. It is the story of a creation of a nest, a home base, I can authentically call my own. The gratitude I have for my family is immense. My love overflows. I am grateful for Cheri for how she sees me, for how she loves us. Thank you for doing this life with me, for showing up every damn day to be a team. Your tenderness and presence are such generous gifts. I am grateful for Angus; he is the best father to our children, and it is his selfless love that inspires me everyday to be better. Thank you for your patience and understanding. I am grateful for our children. Thank you for being the most profound teachers. And to my father - whose story ended and made it possible for part of mine to begin. Whose life will forever be intertwined with mine. Thank you for teaching me about true joy.

I am responsible for the legacy I choose to leave behind. What will live in the memories of future generations is in part up to me. 

There is a freedom I feel, and all at once, an obligation.

Here’s to 40. To giving myself and others permission to live a full and authentic life of love and connection. To coming out. To evolving my work and activism for equity. To sharing my truth. To love.

When it comes to food, it's always 'I do.'

There had to be a wedding in Taiwan, and I was to have a red dress. Though I was already married in October on a blue-sky autumn day in Baltimore, it was important to ritualize our union with Angus’s family, all of whom aside from his parents and him, still lived in and around Taipei. For me, and Angus too, the trip was less about our wedding and more about embracing the opportunity to eat our way through Taiwan, from the coastline to the mountains, through the city and into the country. We started our culinary journey at the hotel, in the morning after a fitful night of jet-lag induced sleep, when we were told we could choose from the second floor’s American breakfast buffet and the third floor’s authentic Chinese breakfast buffet.  

How was that even a question? Third floor. Definitely.

I had never smelled such a combination of aromas as the elevator door opened to an expansive room overlooking the surrounding city. It smelled like dinnertime, not breakfast, and with my senses peaked and curious, I wandered up and down the length of the buffet. Colors I had never before experienced in the genre of food - pastel greens, vibrant reds, even something wiggly and translucent clear resembling jello. My favorite were the crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, savory scallion pancakes. I gobbled them at every breakfast that week, finishing off the savory with a sweet portion of sesame-coated mochi.

Angus’s grandmother - his dad’s mother and the matriarch of the family - lived in Taipei with her caretaker. Ama insisted on cooking for us, and with minimal help from her caretaker, put out at least a dozen dishes of food onto a waxy wooden table minutes after we walked through the door. Outside, scooters buzzed down the busy streets, weaving through cars at a standstill. It was warm, the air carrying the electricity of a bustling metropolis and at same time a humidity that suggested the city’s proximity to the ocean. 

One day, Angus and I sat in the back of a family friend’s little red car and bounced along back roads, winding up and down mountains to arrive into a blanket of fog at the coastline. There was a little shack next to the water, and as waves pounded nearby rocks and sent salty mist up in plumes, we entered the ramshackle building that revealed a modest restaurant. Several tanks of freshly caught swimming fish lined the walls, and we were immediately instructed to pick out our fish. I swear I saw it move on the plate after it was steamed and brought to our table just twenty minutes later. Poured over was a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, garlic and cilantro, and the fumes of the acrid sauce made my mouth water as it met with the warmth of the fish.

Up in the mountains, in a rural village, we walked by women stirring large pots of soup at roadside stands. We ate fried taro at picnic tables, our fingers coated with oil. One of the most memorable places we went on that day trip was up a narrow road to a mountain top to a single lane street, slick with a recent downpour, lined with vendors. The most magical moment standing and watching a man shave cream ice and deftly wrap it into a burrito with crushed peanuts and cilantro.

I did not know how I was to fit into the red dress at the end of this week, and yet, I didn’t care much. At the wedding, after a minimal ceremony and an obsessively rehearsed all-Mandarin speech from Angus, we sat down to a 12-course meal. As is tradition, the bride and groom must visit each table and take a shot of some kind of clear liquor, and we made our rounds. After a few slams of the scorching liquid, I stopped taking the shots and simply went with the cheers.

The day before we left to fly back home, we went to night market, which goes down as one of the best experiences of my life. In Taiwan, the night market is like a carnival that happens - every night. Not a drop of alcohol in sight makes for this the epitome of good, clean, sober fun. And the options for food are endless. We saw a line for pork buns that wrapped around the block, so naturally, we waited. When it was time to experience what the fuss was all about, and I had the pork bun in my grip, I bit into the hot, doughy outside into a rich and garlicky pork middle. The grease and juices from the meat that was trapped inside the bun ran down my hand, wrist, arm.  It somehow made its way into my hair, even. I spent the rest of that evening smelling the remnants of heaven each time my hair wafted close to my nose. Also, it would be remiss not to mention that as soon as we ate the first bun, we got back in line for another.

When Angus and I married, his culture became my own. Though our current configuration is no longer a marriage, the practice of bending over a dish with sheer curiosity and intrigue, the folding of dumplings with our children, and sharing in traditions that hold a depth of meaning gives our family intention and purpose, even years beyond that red dress.

The Pearl

The fireworks that sounded the night before my father died felt threatening. Not like the fireworks of years previous, where my face, up-turned to the night sky ooo’d and aww’d at the bursts of light. My father would be turning 67 today, June 20, on the Summer Solstice, the brightest day of the year, but he won’t turn 67 because he left this life at the age of 58. He died on July 5th, just 15 days after turning 58. All of these numbers I know by heart. But I don’t know the dosage of morphine the hospice nurse administered that finally allowed my father’s resistance to death to dissolve with his breath. My father loved life. Were he a card in a deck of tarot, he’d surely be The Lover, the one who showed me just how to decorate life with all the glitter and shine. His belief in life juxtaposed with his premonition around his own death was a paradox within the confines of which he both lived and died. But at the end, there was an unrest, a surreal blanket of fog enveloping the six months from diagnosis to death, a feeling like it just shouldn’t have been him.

The nurse who finally told my father he was going to die, the one who answered him when he asked, “How long do I have?” She was a gentle soul with the spirit of the deer. She had soft brown hair, framing her face in feathers and doe eyes that conveyed a depth of compassion that made me want to be better, do better, love better. She was not the one who was ultimately there at the end, but she is the one I remember the most. She sat on the edge of my parents’ bed, next to my father, before the hospital bed arrived. She sat on the edge of that bed on the 20th of June, his final birthday, and delivered the news to my father that we were all too scared to speak. “A week...two at the most.”

As I shifted my eyes from the green of the comforter, I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap as I sat at the foot of the bed, and my skin looked red. I felt what could best be described as relief as my father’s head collapsed into his palms, as he shook his head and said, “I just can’t believe this.” Something happens in me when the sword cuts through any kind of denial I’ve been an accomplice in perpetuating. It’s like chains are broken, and I can finally breathe again. I am no longer responsible for holding a lie in the name of protecting someone else.

A week before his birthday, when my father was still choosing to go to dialysis in a wheelchair we had to lift him in and out due to the overwhelming weakness in his body, he asked me to pick out his clothes. My father loved to be stylish. His wardrobe was all glitter, not in the literal sense, but figuratively, you know - brand names, bright colors, intriguing patterns - simple but interesting. My fingers passed over the folded Under Armor shirts, finding the royal blue, the one that matched his eyes, those deep set eyes unders sandy brows. The muscles in his body atrophied, his legs like a chicken’s, his cheeks sunken, the gray stubble on his face and then the sharp Under Armor tee and three-striped Adidas warm-ups. I could just break with the memory of it.

My dad visits me from time to time in my dreams. Sometimes he’s sick, but sometimes he’s perfectly well. He might tell me that the doctors fixed the cancer and that he’s back to normal and ready to play. Once, in a waking dream, the kind that comes with a deep and intentional visualization, I met my dad on a beach. He was laughing and shining so bright, like the light of the sun could be no match for his wonder. I ran in and out of the crashing waves, my feet gliding atop the warm, wet sand. He approached me and opened out his hand to reveal the most beautiful pearl, gesturing in his expression that it was for me. Taking a moment to revel in the sight of him, so alive, standing across from me before I received his gift, I marveled at how just when it seems nothing makes any sense, it all suddenly does. Like the paradoxes ride on rockets into the sky and burst into a million sparks of light, and every time the boom of a firework blasts through the night, one more “should” or “shouldn’t” bursts along with it. Of course it shouldn’t have been him that died, but it was, and it will someday be all of us, and that is half of what it is to be alive. To say, I want one more day. One more day to live life in all of its glitter and shine. My father passed to me the pearl of the truest wisdom.

God, how my life does sparkle.

On turning 39

Today I take another turn around the sun into my 39th year in this life. When my friends and loved ones ask how I will celebrate my birthday, I tell them I want it to be a quiet one. It seems only natural that a birthday during a pandemic wouldn’t include much fanfare, and there’s also something about the number that keeps calling me inward.

As I watch others pack their schedules with social distance this or that or say screw the distance all together and emerge from quarantine with a speed that makes my head spin, I notice my own voice’s response splitting in two directions. One is the vibration of anxiety, the tittering voices that taunt me with threats that I will miss out on so much. The loudest one telling me that there will be loss if I don’t choose to follow the flow and make some plans already. The other voice is quieter, and it’s the one I need to listen closely if I’m even going to hear what it has to say. This voice reminds me that I already know what to do and to honor that knowing because it will never lead me astray.

So then when I think of a quiet birthday, why does it make my throat sting and my eyes well up with tears? Why isn’t it something I can simply own from that truest place within? It is true, after all. Inward feels like the call that I am answering at the moment. Eight weeks wasn’t enough time to know what was ready to transform; I don’t want to clutter my life with all the people, all the things and make myself busy again. I don’t want to fear loss but to believe in connection. I want to turn 39 quietly all the while reassuring myself that I am never alone.

On the morning of my 30th birthday, my father woke me up with a phone call. When I saw “Dad” on the front of my then flip phone, I thought he was calling to wish me a happy birthday. When I answered the phone, I could tell he was crying. He was calling me from his hospital room. He was alone.

“Ker,” he said choking back tears. “It’s spread. The cancer spread.”

I was shocked and yet wasn’t. My father had elected to have a Hail Mary surgery to remove his last remaining kidney due to a tumor that grew to the size of a golf ball in a matter of just a few months and had re-entered the hospital about a month following his surgery after complications with infection and C-diff bacteria in his gut that kept him from keeping any food down.

“Dad…” I didn’t know what to say other than this name I had called him for 30 years. Dad, will you play with me? Dad, will you coach my soccer team? Dad, can you come to my swim meet? Dad, can you pay for my college tuition? Dad, can you help me move to Baltimore? Dad, should I marry him?

“Keri,” he said, “will you be here when it happens? I don’t want to be alone…” Breaking into sobs, I held my 58 year old father as he faced the reality of losing his one precious life. As he attempted to digest a kind of alone that has no ending. The ultimate transformation of body to spirit to stardust. “Promise me,” he said. “Promise me you will be here.”

I am a list-maker, a future-oriented planner, a gatherer of the people I love most, and a damn good host. I am also an introvert at heart, a homebody, an earthy wild woman who feels at home getting lost in the trees. When life hands me something big, I take it as a sign to retreat inward. The lists are still made, the plans maybe too, but I stop gathering, hosting, and doing to enter the sacred tent on the land of those who walked before me to simply begin to be... alone.

This is terrifying work for me. So when the tears come around a quiet 39, I let them flow. I’ve spent my thirties saying goodbye to my father, having two babies, nursing them, raising these two amazing humans, reconfiguring a family with Angus that finally feels authentically ours, coming out as queer, establishing a new relationship with Cheri, singing in musicals, getting a Master’s in education only to go back to working as a pediatric occupational therapist, coaching Little League baseball, teaching yoga, supporting trauma recovery, becoming an LGBTQ advocate, making some of the best friends of my life, losing some of the best friends of my life, and finally understanding that I get to say no instead of always saying yes because I am too scared of being alone. There aren’t many more shoulds left guiding my path, and when one comes through in the voices that are not truly my own, when one says, “You should really plan a happy hour with some friends,” I can calmly reply, “not right now” and go back into the tent to continue to be.

My father wasn’t technically alone when he passed. He was, as they say in the obituaries, surrounded by loved ones. But really, he was alone. He left this life alone; we witnessed his passing, but he had to go alone. We promised to offer comfort, and perhaps in some way we did, whether it was by way of supporting his denial or being a fixture in his celadon green bedroom for that month and a half he transitioned. But he transitioned alone and in a grave amount of fear.

There is a lot about my father’s death that is a mirror for me, especially now as I turn 39 during a global pandemic where I am being asked day after day to sit with being alone. The alone I’ve found during this time is sweet and also scary. It is all the things, but mostly, it is teaching me something that’s taken 9 years to incubate long enough to become. And while I want to have the perfect words for what is emerging in this moment in time, it is a shift I am feeling within and struggling to speak aloud.

My father’s way of giving to his children was to provide us with uninterrupted spurts of time where we were together at the beach. It was in these segments of my childhood that I felt his presence and connection, and experienced for the first time a true feeling of joy. My father loved the beach more than any other place on this planet. When I imagine him now, even 9 years after his passing, I often see him standing in the wet sand in his fluorescent orange swim trunks, with a hands-on-hips stance and his gaze set out toward the horizon, hazy as it meets the dark blue sea. His skin is tan and salty, the hair on his arms has long ago turned blond, and his strong legs anchor him amidst the changing tides of beyond. I like to believe that at some level, my father felt a solace in being alone, and it is this memory of him on the beach, his blue eyes sparkling like the water, that brings with it a depth of understanding that his journey was his own.

I am still afraid sometimes, but I am not as motivated by fear. And the fear of being alone is ever-evolving into a reverence for solitude. When my anxious thoughts keep me awake at night or I worry that I will miss out or lose connection or be left behind, there is always the gentle current that pulls me back to my own center, my own truth, my own deepest knowing. And by moving with my own pace, my own flow, I have, in the past 9 years, found my way toward being with myself at the water’s edge, with a fierce stance, wild hair, and a oh-so-tender heart.

I say three words at the end of every practice, every yoga class, every prayer. Om Namah Shivaya. They were taught to me by a dear teacher, and remind me that every ending is also a new beginning. Every journey is uniquely designed with a beginning, a middle and an ending, and the ending always creates the space for what is new to emerge.

I am ending a cycle that started with an invitation, Keri, what are you so afraid of? And as 39 calls me deeper within, it feels like a divine opportunity to begin yet again.