It’s my anniversary month, and I thought I’d share a little bit about my sapphic life, even though it doesn’t involve any but the most ordinary magic.
The above screenshots come from a pretty typical texting conversation with my wife, who at the time the screenshots were taken was in Thailand while I had just gotten back to the United States with our son. (I have her permission to share ALL of this because she is just that awesome.) She texted that she was trying to buy me a wedding ring, which she tries to do on the regular when she is overseas and we miss each other, and as usual I had no idea what was going on because I don’t really wear rings and my little fingers have mysterious ring measurements that I do not know and will never understand apparently.
We are, in fact, already married! We’ve been gay-married lo these many years, and together longer than that. Why don’t we have rings?
To understand this, you have to get into how and why we got married when we did. Back in the old days in the United States, people of the same gender could not legally marry one another, and that meant a lot of cascading bad things for people who needed to get married to legally protect their relationships. In our case, there were issues with health insurance (of course) and being out at work (of course) that were intertwined with immigration issues. I am an American citizen, and my wife is an immigrant from the Philippines. Because immigration law is so arbitrary and strange, her immigration status depended upon keeping her job. And while straight people could marry their non-American spouses relatively easily, for us that was not an option; I couldn’t marry her or get her any kind of spousal visa if she lost that job. Without going into details on the immigration issues and what we had to go through while we were together — it was a lot.
In the summer of 2013, two things happened: we had the child that we had been longing for, and the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which is what had forbidden marriage as a legal option for us. Also my mother came to visit. Because the baby.
While my mother (the grandmother) was there, and I (the biological mother) was in a haze of hormones, and my wife (the patient and supportive mother) was in a haze of sleeplessness, my mom suggested we do something special to mark her visit with our baby, like maybe getting him baptized. But being very involved in church things, we thought that really, the baptism would be so much work, we’d need lots of lead time to organize the liturgy and mom was only visiting for a couple of weeks, and we’d need to get a lechon and reserve the church for hundreds of people. But you know what we could do while mom was visiting? We could get married! And we should do it fast in case the Supreme Court changed their minds!
So keep in mind I had had an emergency c-section about a week before this, so I am wandering around downtown trying to find the marriage license office and do all the paperwork while wearing a baby in somewhat of a dazed state, and my wife asked a pastor friend and mentor to host a little ceremony in her house, and we wore barong tagalog that my wife had specially brought from the Philippines for a special occasion (this seemed to be one) and I chose a Mary Oliver poem as one of the readings, and we had the wedding ceremony and then took my mom and a couple of other relatives out for Mexican dinner, and we were now legal, and my wife could re-start her immigration process from this new legal status, and a few months later we also did the baptism with over a hundred people and we did, indeed, have lechon.
And this is why we have no rings, because we had this little sweet ceremony with no preparation and no money, and no regrets. And maybe one of these days we’ll have a big party for our existing relationship and celebrate all the people that have been part of it, family and friends, and on that day, my wife will want me to have a ring, so…she’s ring shopping.
I’m constantly grateful for the fact that our relationship and our family now has legal protection. It’s made our lives together possible. We’re continuing to work for the protection of queer and trans people as well as immigrants of all status and their rights. It’s heavy political work and we’re in a heavy political season, so wherever you are and whatever you do to work for the good: thanks.
PS: My wife also wants you to know that she DID buy me two engagement rings but I’m just…not good with jewelry.