Restoration in progress

When I got married, I did so with the understanding that I would change my last name. What I didn't do was thoroughly weigh how I felt about changing my last name, and I didn't know how to add more weight to what I wanted vs. what others wanted me to do. I got married in the El Paso courthouse, and my wedding ceremony followed a year later. This year served as my buffer between getting married and changing my name. As the prospect of doing that got closer to reality, I realized I had an internal conflict.

My husband and I discussed it, and his offering was to hyphenate. I never liked this solutrion because it's usually just the woman hyphenating, and where is the compromise or "partnership" in that? So I have to carry a clunky last name just to ensure mine isn't erased? That doesn't seem fair. My solution was to bump my original last name to my middle name (not "maiden" -- please let's dispense of this archaic bullshit term), so my initials transformed from "GMR" to "GRC." This was the best I could do to accommodate myself.

I didn't anticipate my mixed feelings, or how it would feel conflicting to look at things with my original name on them while carrying this new name, which wasn't "mine." Yes, you marry your spouse's family, but it still isn't your family. These people bring their own history, culture, and brand of dysfunction, and while you might carry their name, it's a bit like becoming a citizen in a new country. You live there now, but it's not truly "home."

What I'll never forget is the way he sulked when I hinted that maybe I wouldn't take his name, I'd just keep my own. I'll also never forget my mother-in-law spotting a checkbook of mine and commenting, "Giselle, you didn't change your name?" This was during the "buffer" period and instead of asking why she cared (because women are expected to not be the problem in that relationship with their husband's mother), I explained that I hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Changing your name legally is a series of tasks that occurs in sequence, starting with a trip to the social security office. I visited the one in El Paso with marriage license in hand, followed by the DMV, and last of all, I updated my passport. When I got divorced, I knew I would have to go through the same steps all over again. There wasn't an "off" switch, or a toggle that would revert my married name back to my original one. My divorce decree specifies my name change, and even if you spend the money for your divorce, you have to send a six dollar check to the county clerk to get a certified copy of your divorce decree. That was my first step; and I botched it. I sent the paper form, but missed the part where I had to include the check. They returned my request form noting that payment needed to be included. I tried again, sending in the same form, this time with the check. They sent documents back to me, and I scheduled my social security appointment online.

The day before I was set to go in, I reviewed the certified divorce decree and, to my horror, realized the first couple of pages were documents from someone else's divorce. The "certified" portion was an additional page in the back, with an official looking gold seal and the county clerk's signature. I flipped through the pages in disbelief, worried that I would be turned away for presenting someone else's paperwork. I noticed the certified page portion of the decree actually had the case number from my divorce. With a little magic called removing the staples from what the court sent me and attaching the printed out copy of the decree I received on the day of my divorce via email, I had a fix. I placed the correct documents into the manila envelope and put the envelope into the tote bag I use for work, which was where I was planning to go immediately after my appointment.

The following morning, I got there early. I couldn't remember if my appointment was for 9:20 or 9:40, so I showed up at 9, prepared to wait. There was already a crowd gathered outside of the social security office, which was situated in a small strip mall. There were two uniformed guards serving as the gatekeepers for the whole operation. They sorted people into two lines outside of the office: those with appointments lined up on the right, those without, lined up on the left. When the guard asked if I had an appointment, I said yes. The issue was, I could not remember the exact time, and I had failed to bring the post it note with the appointment confirmation number written on it. I did have my manila envelope with my cobbled together certified divorce decree and my driver's license, but I could tell it didn't matter. Before I went inside, the guard (a man), scolded me. "You can't take that in there," he said, referring to my purple 40 ounce knock off Stanley tumbler (courtesy of Aldi, IYKYK). "It's just water," I said. "It's too big! Put it in your car!" Was there a limit on what size container of water you could carry into the social security office? Were the rules from TSA airline security now bleeding into other federal facilities? I had parked around the corner in a Walgreens parking lot, there was no way I was going to go all the way back there just to stow my obnoxiously large vessel full of water in my car. In a moment of defiance, I placed the cup on the concrete beside the entrance, "I'll just put it here," I said. The guard surprised me by telling me to place it on the floor inside of the office space, next to the wall. I did, and then I went to sign in on the electronic kiosk for my appointment. When the machine produced the paper ticket with my number in line, the other guard, a woman, challenged me on my appointment. She had a list of names and appointment times, declared I didn't have an appointment, took my paper ticket from me, and dismissed me. It was such a disorienting experience, I questioned if I really did have an appointment or if I had imagined it.

This kind of treatment wasn't personal, either. Everyone waiting was treated like a suspect. The guards had Department of Homeland Security badges, and pistols holstered on their belts. What in the authoritarian regime was going on here? I left that non-appointment frazzled. I just wanted to change my name. Defeated and shaken, I collected my giant faux-Stanley tumbler and walked back to my car. This was nothing like the time consuming but unthreatening name change experience I had gone through twenty five years ago. There had been no armed guards deciding whether my appointment was legitimate or not. Back then going to the social security office was remiscent of visiting the DMV, not whatever this was.

Fortunately, I made not one but two appointments; the first had been a bust, but the second was scheduled to occur twelve days later, on a Monday morning. This time I had written down my appointment time, and I knew I had entered the key information from my divorce decree. On the Sunday before my second name change attempt, anxiety set in. What if I got turned away again? What if they noticed the divorce decree wasn't cleanly stapled with courthouse worthy staples, what if (insert unlikely but still possible scenario here)? If they turn me away, I'll just make another appointment, I told myself. Ultimately this wasn't important, it meant I would have to carry this last name that never quite felt like it was mine for just awhile longer. But it's the principalities.

The next morning, I busied myself with puttering around and cleaning up the house. This appointment wasn't until 11:10, which meant a lot of puttering, and a lot of time in my head. I remembered a time when my ex-husband shared how he and his friends had laughed over a female classmate of theirs married a man who took her name. He found it funny, and couldn't understand why a man would do this. When he shared with me, I understood he expected me to laugh right along with him. "I don't see what's so funny," I said. We talked about it, and to his credit, he checked his friends the next time one of them brought up this classmate and her husband, but only because I had called him out on it. When I thought more deeply about the implications behind finding it funny, I felt hurt. Dominance is baked into marriage and the individuals entering the marriage hold the responsibility to tailor the arrangement to suit their specific needs, regardless of what is written in the societal script. When the script heavily favors one member over the other, will they both be willing to meet in the middle? Here were these black men, who should have had a full understanding of the dehumanization that comes with taking on a "master's" name and erasing their own, yet they expected their wives to do exactly this. This reversed situation was an affront to their masculinity, and something to laugh about. Without saying it, the implication was, this man who had adopted his wife's last name as his own was a little bitch. And if this was how these guys thought, to the point of joking about this couple's decision as a group, what did they think of their own wives? Marriage is a property sale dressed up as a romantic endeavor, but there can be no true partnership unless both participants understand and agree that they are true equals. Expecting one person to delete their name and replace it with someone else's is not a compromise, but an expectation of self abandonment; we keep expecting this from women and then wondering why they lose their identities in their marriages. We marvel at the disproportionate percentage of women filing for divorce. The men in these situations will claim they were "blindsided," after all, the marriage was working just fine --for them.

A close friend texted me to check on me; she remembered my appointment was that morning. "Are you bringing your water?!!!" she asked. "I'll go thirsty," I replied. Another friend offered to call, and when he did, I admitted being angry at myself for changing my name when I didn't want to in the first place. He told me to give myself grace. "You made that decision based on the information you had at the time," he said, adding, "But things change."

I puttered around awhile longer, and then gathered my things for my appointment, which I hoped would be more boring DMVish and less Gestapo-y this time around. A creature of habit, I parked at Walgreens again, and hoofed the last block to the strip mall on foot. The crowd outside of the building was smaller than last time, and this time I had brought my notebook with my appointment time noted. I also wrote my name in the notebook for the guard to check against her list. My tumbler remained firmly planted in my car's cupholder.

When the guard checked me, she saw my name inside of my my notebook and agreed that I did have an appointment. I went inside to sign into the kiosk and get my ticket, and the guard ushered me back outside because there were no available seats in the waiting area. By the time there was a seat, the guard directed me back inside, and the first number I heard called out was two numbers after my ticket number. Oh no.

The friend who called me texted to check on my progress. "I have a ticket and I'm waiting," I wrote, cautious not to claim success. As the numbers being called kept going up, I talked to the guard again.

"These numbers are random," she said, "Go sit down, you'll get called." The woman sitting beside me shared her ticket number, which was five before mine. The numbers kept getting called, in sequence. This didn't appear to be random. To add to the confusion, the speaker system was one of those portable back yard party karaoke deals but when used in an office setting with hard surfaces, there's lots of reverb. Added to that, some of the social security employees had to struggle to pronounce certain names. And on top of that, there was no visual display showing which ticket was called and which desk was serving the customer. This place could have taken a few cues from the DMV.

After 40 minutes of waiting for our numbers to be called, my seat neighbor talked to the guard again. The guard acquiesced, and talked to one of the social security employees. My seat neighbor got called, and I figured I wasn't far behind. The guard spoke to someone at another desk and miracle of miracles, my name got called over the janky little speaker system. I gathered my documents and hurried over to my assigned desk.

"I called you earlier," the woman behind the desk said. "The guard told me to sit outside," I replied. I detected the tiniest eyeroll and suspected this wasn't the first time this had happened. I pulled out my documents and watched the woman behind the desk squint at my divorce decree, which specified and spelled out changing my married name to my original name.

"What are you changing it to?" the woman asked.

In a brief moment of wisdom, I had also grabbed a copy of my birth certificate before leaving the house that morning. Even though it wasn't required, I figured it would be a helpful reference instead of making someone scan through divorce decree lawyerese. I pushed the birth certificate under the plexiglass that separated us. "It's going to look like the name here," I said.

In less than ten minutes, it was done. She handed me a receipt which sated that I would receive the new card within two weeks. There was other information on the receipt, too. You can request a card replacement three times within a year, and you can replace your card ten times in your entire life. Who came up with this stuff, I wondered. And, when did you need a social security card anyway? I had lost both of my previous ones ages ago.

This morning, less than a week later, I checked the mail and found my new social security card waiting for me, with my new old name on it.

Name change process, zero out of five stars, do not recommend.

When your relationship with your country is full of red flags

I recently discussed what it feels like to be a person of a certain demographic to a coworker. I said we are all given these vehicles (our physical bodies), and the way we present ourselves to the world is represented first by these "vehicles" we are driving. Sure, you can do some things to modify your vehicle, but overall appearance and first impression is of the color, make and model of this vehicle, one you had no choice in selecting. People may treat you differently based on the vehicle you're driving, and they may treat others better based on their personal vehicle preference. My main point to this coworker was, we can know these things are happening, but we can not definitively prove it's because of their bias. This is what microaggressions feel like. This is what not getting a job might feel like. This is what Diversity, Equity and Inclusion measures were intended to alleviate.

We are experiencing a presidential administration that might as well say, "We're going to play in your face and there's nothing you can do about it." This is a place where the base assumption is, if you're not a white, Christian (let's add the quiet part here: Nationalist), heterosexual male, you didn't earn your high ranking position. The default assumption is that you aren't qualified, and this is why so many of us harbor symptoms of impostor syndrome and feelings of not belonging. We are witnessing things occurring that, if Barack Obama had done any of this, he would have been impeached immediately, and removed from office. Why can't we prove it? Because we also know if Barack Obama had arrived as as a candidate the way 2016 Trump had arrived, he would not have been a candidate. We wouldn't even have known his name because he would never have reached any scenario for public consideration. Again, we can't prove this, but we know it.

We are witnessing that all of the hand wringing over caring about the Constitution, while showing that our rights don't matter. We heard cries for "merit-based" selections that were bullshit, a ruse to show us this argument was a mere distraction, a way to get people buy into the story that unqualified people were unfairly taking jobs and preventing submediocity true talent from succeeding, while we watch a slew of clearly unqualified people stepping into high level positions without any of the ever-important merit we've heard so much about. It's frustrating to watch, but whenever these things happen, as a black woman, it feels oddly validating. Everyone sees what we've suspected all along.

My 19 year old often feels despair about all of it. She sees a country that doesn't value its citizens, or care about equality, and in fact the lack of equality is the point, and serves as the foundation of so much of our country's prosperity. We have conversations about the need for a reckoning that we know will never happen. We can see it in the burning of a plantation and the memes that followed. On one Facebook friend's wall, she posted about it, explaining there was no need to rebuild, and that she didn't feel bad for the owners. It was her wall, and her opinion. Even with this, a (white male) friend commented, judging her for her lack of sympathy over the property damage. Despite paragraphs of explaining there would be no sympathy for people who knowingly bought a property with a history of the atrocities that accompany American slavery, and turned it into a wedding venue; that the human suffering represented by that structure far outweighed someone's loss of property. Why is this so hard to understand? Why do so many feel entitled to request empathy from us, when they have no capacity to be empathetic towards us regarding our country's history, regarding the way people are so eager to seek a reason to explain or justify when a black person is murdered by the police, or to insist when our president, who happens to be black, was not born here.

I know Trump was elected as backlash to having a black president. I sometimes ask myself if it was worth having eight years of an Obama presidency when it meant we've gone through three election cycles with Trump on the ticket, and two terms. I don't have an answer, and I don't know if I ever will. I remember the hope and excitement when Barack Obama was elected. I remember my mother's joy as she said, "I feel like he's my son." I remember how rosy and optimistic I felt. This past November, I felt despair, fear, and like I had been duped because I bought into the ideals we use as a selling point for our country. At nearly 50, I have to accept and believe the darker reality -- the same way we face the truth about relationships that aren't working for us. You can't fall in love with potential.

At my job (and many other people's jobs, I'm sure), we are urged not to talk politics. Again, this is part of the problem, isn't it? Not talking about it, going along to get along. The culture of this country encourages behavior intended to avoid resolving the root problem. That funny thing happens -- the thing you're familiar with if you've ever been in a relationship where an issue keeps rcurring without resolution, to the point that the issue becomes old and beyond the statute of limitations -- you become the problem for bringing up that "old shit." It's all old shit -- the racism, the class disparity, the need to subjugate women in a way that does not allow them to have bodily autonomy -- all things intended to get us back to giving lipservice that we value equality, while setting the stage to cultivate the opposite.

Have a Nice Day

Since high school, my best friend Heather and I have commented on the way people can ask how you're doing and not really care about the answer. It seems if you don't answer the prompt with the select few "acceptable" answers, you'll be upsetting the balance of the universe.

"How are you?" -- when we ask this, of strangers, coworkers and even friends, we expect the following:

"I'm doing well, how are you?"

"I'm doing great!"

"Living the dream!"

And so on. Anything indicating life is kicking your ass may garner a look, or questions, but in truth we aren't always doing great. The problem is, we aren't prepared to deal with less than great. I don't know if our custom of asking people how they're doing is solely for the appearance of caring or something else. I wonder if it's a shortcut, one of those phrases learned for anyone learning a new language, to invite those new speakers to respond in the approved way spelled out in a text book. I wonder if this ties into the explanation of why Americans smile so much, as a cultural nonverbal shorthand to bond and let others know everything is okay in a multicultural society. All I know is, I'm tired of it.

Add to this throwaway lines like, "Have a nice day!" and "TGIF," or one I received today, from a fellow veteran, telling me to "Enjoy your Memorial Day!" (with a string of emojis, of course). These sentiments are not ill intended, but they are thoughtless, and closed off in a way that leaves no room for the recipient to say, "But I'm actually not having a nice day."

This well meaning but disconnecting way of communicating extends to how we deal with grief. "Sending my condolences," "I'm sorry for your loss," and "Let me know if you need anything" are those well meaning phases we use when someone we know has experienced the death of someone close to them. We have this way of wanting to show we care but not wanting to get too close to the pain. We don't want to feel uncomfortable, and feelings that aren't coded as positive make us uncomfortable.

The problem with being well meaning but unwilling to be uncomfortable is the missed opportunity to connect. When we are locked into this way of relating but not really connecting, we isolate ourselves. We send the unspoken message that it isn't safe to confide in us because we don't actually want to hear about what's really going on, we just want to give the appearance that we want to hear about it. This cultural agreement we've made, compounded by the highlight reel effect of social media may explain the isolation and loneliness so many people experience.

If someone asks me how I'm doing, and I'm not doing well, but I don't feel safe sharing that, and in fact, I feel like something is wrong with me because I'm not doing well. How, in a world that tells you to be yourself, be true to yourself, be honest, but not like that, can we change how we interact with each other, and do so in a mindful way that requires us to stay still and prepare to receive the real answer, even when it's less than "great?"

Flight of the Blue Falcon

When new cadets arrive at West Point they get their own version of basic training, CBT, or "Cadet Basic Training" -- better known as "Beast" -- where not only are there new cadets, but cadre who are slightly older cadets. I know having kids two or three years older than you yelling at you doesn't compare to the fear a seasoned drill sergeant can inflict, but it was harrowing enough to understand sometimes the best way to get through more challenging times in life is to maintain a low profile.

I quickly understood I was never going to maintain a low profile. We all wore the same uniforms, but being short, female and brown meant I was still going to stand out. On top of that, the Beast companies were organized into four platoons. For every formation, the entire Beast Regiment stood on the Apron, which spanned the parade field ("The Plain"). Because there were so few women, we were usually placed in the front, and beacuse of our height, we generally wound up at the end of the squad. My first squad leader, Cadet Coll was a junior (AKA, "cow"), and petite, fit, and loud. She wasn't exactly scary, but she also made sure our squad didn't slack off.

Being a cadet required you to understand military basics. We went to the range to fire M-16s, we spent a week sleeping outdoors, we collectively learned the basics of land navigation and how to maintain our uniforms. West Point adds the twist of wearing traditional gray wool uniforms, eating in a mess hall designed to hold 4,000 people at once, and living in the barracks with strict rules about accountability. You were an adult, but you couldn't keep a car on post until you were a senior. The running joke was that you gave up your rights and slowly earned them back as "privileges." And, there were plenty of quirks that came along with this life.

Instead of going through an assembly line style food line with lunch trays, we sat in the Mess Hall with waiters who served us. The tables sat ten, with the squad leader at the head, as the "table commandant." Contrary to the widely accepted protocol that leaders ate last, the table commandants served themselves first. West Point embodies a situation where "this is tradition and how we've always done it" sometimes collided with principles of competent leadership, leaving us with a place that was part Army, part boarding school with a large helping of its very specific brand of quirk.

The three new cadets at the far end of the table also had roles, there was a hot beverage corporal, a cold beverage corporal, and directly opposite of the table commandant was the most stressful postion of all, the gunner. We rotated positions at every meal so everyone got their turn. The biggest task was presenting dessert to the table commandant, and often dessert arrived in the form of a cake that needed to be cut.

I had a practice run at this after being accepted to West Point but before I arrived. The parents club in Northern California held a luncheon for all of the cadet candidates who were planning to attend. Part of it included an uncut cake as dessert. I was assigned to cut the cake, and in this case, there would be seven slices. I did the best I could and everyone at the table heartily agreed that I had done a pretty good job at eyeballing and cutting seven nearly even slices. The trick was, once you arrived at West Point, even if you did do a good job cutting the cake, you were going to hear about every error, every sloppy crumb that lay bare on the icing, every way you had butchered this cake in such a way that it was the equivalent of killing your whole platoon.

When my turn came around to be gunner, there was no cake for dessert, but in an odd twist of fate, there was cornbread in a round tin. So close! I picked up the tin and held it at my left shoulder and recited my line. "Ma'am, the side for this meal is cornbread. Would anyone not care for cornbread, ma'am!" We announced it this way so anyone wishing to be exempt could raise a hand, or this being Beast, a "paw" to spare themselves from having a slide while also letting the gunner know how many pieces to cut. No one raised their hand. I quickly got to slicing.

I felt confident. This was an even number. If I could manage seven slices, sure I could do this. I raised the tin again. "Ma'am! The cornbread has been cut, the cornbread to Cadet Coll for inspection, please!" "Come on down, Richards," she called from the end of the table. I placed my napkin on the table, scotted my chair back, stood at attention, picked up the tin from the table and quickly walked it down to my squad leader for inspection. When her eyes bugged out I realized something was very wrong.

"Richards, I need you to count the number of slices you cut."

I counted once, and then twice. There were ten people at the table, and everyone wanted cornread. In my haste and overconfidence I had cut eight slices.

"How many slices, Richards?"

"Ma'am, there are eight slices."

"And how many people are in our squad?"

"Ma'am, there are ten people in our squad."

"Do you know what you just did, Richards? You dicked all over your classmates. You're a buddy dick."

I didn't know any of these terms, but I now understand this was the sanitized version of calling someone a "buddy fucker," or if you wanted to get fancy, a "blue falcon." It wasn't true, but this was not the time to plead my case.

Cadet Coll continued. "I need you to choose two squadmates who will not get cornbread, and you can't choose yourself."

I chose two squadmates who would not get cornbread, and I felt horrible for the remainder of the meal. It's an incident that's stayed with me, not because anyone in my squad bought into the accusation, but because the accusation didn't fit. I cut the wrong number of slices because I was in a rush, not because I was trying to screw anyone out of their fair share of cornbread. Plenty of us have experienced the consequence of dealing with a blue falcon. It happened to me last week at work.

On Monday I arrived at work with my access card, which serves as the magic key to opening the automated gates to my work site, to being able to access my computer, and getting into my email account. I could do the first two things, but quickly discovered my email was disabled. This meant I couldn't see meetings or any recent communication.

I quickly made it known, "Hey, I'm not blowing anyone off, I just can't get into my email." Everything else seemed to be working but apparently my access card was flagged because the expiration date was over a year away, while the contract I support expires at the end of September. This sent me on path to re-apply, get a new card and see if that fixed the issue. In the meantime, no email or calendar access -- not the worst thing in the world.

On Wednesday I went into the conference room to refill my 40 ounce Stanley knock off (thanks, Aldi), and the guy responsible for updating my access card paperwork, was sitting at the head of the table. I considered asking if this was a meeting I needed to attend but decided to get my water and return to my office. Well, when you get that kind of inkling, you're better off just asking the question. Remember, I couldn't check my calendar. As luck would have it, yes, there was a meeting, and the guy and I were on the project together -- a team effort -- yet, he had said nothing. I know his nature. I know he'll leave your slide out of a briefing if you failed to update it for the weekly staff meeting. We are adults and we do this weekly, so if you miss, it really is on you, but everyone has an off day on occasion. There is no reason to take advantage of every opportunity to exhibit blue falcon behavior.

When my nearly 50 year old brain jogged its memory later, I recalled that yes, there was a kickoff meeting Wednesday, and I'd missed it. In an effort to be proactive, I stopped by his office and said, "I forgot there was a project meeting. I don't have access to my calendar."

He looked up, "Oh! I forgot about that."

Of course he did. Given the nature of our jobs, I didn't have the levereage to make a bigger stink; there would be no comeuppance from this slight. Work environments often tout the importance of teamwork, sharing information, and setting up each other for success, yet we all know there's that one person, that bad agent. On Friday I had to take a one hour detour to lovely and scenic Pennsylvania to get a new access card. Why not get one close to my work site? Because that location does not allow walk ins, and appointments were booked for over a month. The lady updating my card realized my card still had a lot of time left on it, and I had to explain my predicament. "Oh," she said, "well, whoever had to submit this form put the wrong expiration date on it."

And who could that be? If you guessed a certain aforementioned blue falcon, you'd be right.

I don't understand people who operate this way. It would have been a minor inconvenience to give me a heads up. If I had been sitting there and he was about to miss the meeting, I would have said something. And there's that hard lesson we all learn at some point in life: You can't expect you from other people.

Imitation of Love (Volume 3 - The Grown Up Years)

crush /krəSH/

noun

informal

a brief but intense infatuation for someone, especially someone unattainable or inappropriate.

This is going to be the last post on this subject, and it's a long one, so strap in. Writing has been painful but insightful of the way I have grown up seeing romantic love, and by extension, the guys I've liked over the years. Each week I slip my self imposed deadline because it gets harder to look at myself as I write about years that edge closer and closer to my current age. I mentioned my ex-husband in the last post. I am careful not to call him a college sweetheart; I didn't have romantic relationships at West Point that resembled “sweet” anything. It would be convenient to rebrand us as "college sweethearts;” it's a nice shorthand to skip explaining the actual gritty details of your relationship. We only went on three dates while we were both at West Point, two of which were movies -- not the optimal venue to connect when both parties are introverts. He also met me on summer break between my cow (junior) and firstie (senior) year; he was a year ahead and had already graduated and been commissioned. This was my 21st birthday, and I am pretty sure we descended on T.G.I Friday's for dinner and my first legal drink. I was staying with my sister and her family in in Dover, Delaware, where she was stationed, and he had made the two hour drive east from his parents' house in Maryland. He surprised me by excusing himself from the table and moments later, a singing, clapping crew of servers appeared at our table with a dessert, complete with a lit candle. Before we left, I had at least one of those ridiculously sweet cocktails (ah, the days of not worrying that diabetes is going to show up on your latest lab test). We finished the evening walking around my sister's neighborhood after he dropped me off. Just as we returned to the house, he leaned in for a kiss, which was also unexpected, and awkward. But he had driven all that way, and was consistently clear about liking me.

I completed my last year and he went on his way until I learned that I was assigned as an Air Defense Artillery officer, which meant I would attend the officer basic course at Fort Bliss, where he was stationed. The gears turned and clicked inside of my head: maybe it was meant to be. Very simplistic thinking, I know, keep in mind I was 21. As my early August report date approached, he reached out more and more. He was the first familiar face I saw after crossing the El Paso city limits and stopping at a hotel. We went on a few more dates, I started my basic course and weeks later, he started a five month deployment to Saudi Arabia. I see now how these types of events create a manufactured urgency. It was a variation of what cadets went through when they were seriously dating and had to decide if they wanted to get engaged to ensure a better chance at being stationed together. In the land before cell phones and social media, people had ways of disappearing completely when you parted ways and there was little chance of winding up in the same place at the same time ever again. I was not in a rush to get married, my motivation was more about not wanting to put myself through the trial and error and inevitable repeated heartbreak that comes with dating. If I could "lock in" (as the youth say) with a person who lived enough of a similar life to understand my experiences, and treated me well (and at the time I had no evidence showing me otherwise), maybe I could bypass some of the messy, painful lessons.

The interesting part about trying to take shortcuts: at some point you may find yourself rerouted to the territory you tried to avoid.

I got married thinking that would shut the door on my pattern of crushes and unrequited love. Marriage declares to the world that you have a person, and you are that someone's person. What could be more comforting than certainty in a perpetually uncertain world? Marriage offered the promise of individuals joining in a bond that was greater than the sum of its parts. I got married without examining what I expected out of that union, or even asking myself if it was truly what I wanted. When you convince yourself it is another block to tick on a checklist that covered adulthood, checking the block became a task that brought you closer to life goals. This guy was as good as I was going to get, my young mind told me. My thinking was reinforced by my sister; when I was a cadet, I showed her a posed photo of him in his football uniform. His arms and face were rich chocolate, and practically glowing. His eyes had that steely look and his solid jaw gave him a movie star presence. On the back, he’d written a short message to me, signed with “Love ya.” He likes you? She said. I said yes, and she was impressed. Her verdict that this one was a catch was additional information to file away. I respected her opinion and survived my time as a cadet partly because of her guidance and support. I saw no reason to look further. It's embarrassing to admit this because it says more about me than him. This type of logic is not uncommon when you become accustomed to dismissing the value of your own wants, or even worse, when you didn’t even bother to figure out what you wanted in the first place. This was the era of, “Choose the guy who treats you well,” not, “But do you like him?” It was a deliberate calculation: “He must love you more than you love him for this to work in your favor."

My first workplace crush happened four years into my marriage at a job I took after moving from Texas to the DC area. I found the job on Monster.com, the commute was horrendous, but after a year and a half of looking, this job was looking like the best I was going to get (notice a pattern, here?). I have a much earlier post about an incident at this job. This entry is one of my favorites, but the job was rife with disrespect and "teachable moments." It was here where I met M, who worked for my company but in a separate daily setting, under different customers. I don't know how he initially engaged me in conversation, but he would swing by my desk to talk, and over time, our discussions expanded. He was light skinned, slim, with a moustache, soul patch, a beautiful head of hair just shy of being an afro, and a light Caribbean accent. He had retired from the Army at the top enlisted rank but carried none of the rough-around-the-edges demeanor that seemed to be common in senior Army NCOs. He dressed in button down shirts and suits, drove nice cars, and was about fifteen years older than me.

Our conversations eventually came around to salary. M observed that I was in a desk originally configured for an admin assistant (as a “perk," people came in to install higher walls in my cubicle so I wouldn’t be subjected to the half walls and customer-facing vibe that the admin assistants had). I had a nebulous concept of my job and a coworker who had been there for years who was supposed to teach me some of his functions but instead seemed to relegate the easy but time wasting tasks that he didn’t want to handle (I refer to him as“Important Job” in the post I linked). “You’re a West Pointer,” M said, “You don’t belong here.” It felt validating to hear that, not because I believed I was better, but because I knew I was capable of doing more. When you go from being in charge of 30 soldiers and 88 million dollars of equipment, shredding papers and printing slide briefings for the daily stand up meeting can feel like experiencing an extended death. We discussed salary, and he said our company was lowballing us, that I needed to look for something else and his recommendation was to seek a job at the Pentagon, where he had once worked.

I was new to this game and when you first leave the military, you’re accustomed to having a career where, if you’re fortunate, you can stay there. You trust that someone will take you under their wing and their loyalty to you will yield a feeling of loyalty to your organization. I was lucky to run into M early in my career because he was the first person to tell me that in this game, your loyalty was to yourself. These companies, even the ones with employees who were veterans, were not loyal to us. “How much do you want to make?” He asked. I had never considered this. I arrived to my early job interviews thinking I would be lucky if they took me, and had a mental calculation of the minimum salary I would need to live comfortably. In fact, in my first post-Army job in Texas, the company that hired me gave me five thousand a year more than I requested because my number in the interview was so low. When I went home and shared my thoughts about looking for a new job at a higher salary, my husband said, “Are you sure you should leave? You haven’t even been there a year.” I contrasted this with the phone conversation I heard him having with his brother, who was leaving the Army with a Top secret clearance, but as a junior enlisted soldier without a degree. “You should ask for sixty-thousand,” my husband told him. That was fifteen thousand dollars more than what I made. His lack of encouragement was because this was the first job I landed after a year and a half of being unemployed and dependent on him. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if he thought it made sense for his brother to earn more since he was single, and would have to foot the bills alone, buying into the thinking that in a marriage, the wife’s income is supplementary, and less important.

My talks with M extended into going out for lunch, or sometimes taking a break in the middle of the day to cruise in his Range Rover or convertible Jaguar. Eventually we chose a lunch venue where another group from our office was gathered for a farewell to a departing employee. “They’re going to talk about us,” M said. “Let them talk,” I said. Technically nothing was going on, but whenever you tell yourself that, something is going on. When he gave me birthday gifts, a plain set of pearl earrings and a small flask of Tresor perfume, I freaked out and we had a talk. “I share more with you than I do with my husband,” I said. He understood and we took a break from each other.

When I got sent to Fort Bragg for work, I logged into the computer and initiated my job search. Not long after that I landed a position at the Pentagon with a 25% raise and a shorter commute. My husband was happy for me, but credit went to M. In my time between jobs, we met on one of my days off, and went into D.C. to tour a museum. "I was thinking of buying you a single rose," M admitted when we linked up, "you could sniff it and just throw it away." It seemed like a sweet sentiment until I shared it with Heather. "Oh, whatever," she said, "he just wanted credit for having the thought without actually buying a rose." Another time, much later, we met for lunch. By then I had already left the job at the Pentagon for one that paid even more. I was quickly learning how to take advice, be loyal to myself, make connections and keep an eye out for opportunities that fit my background. At lunch I voiced a desire for a higher salary that he thought was asking too much. With that opinion, M lost his luster and my heart was free.

I didn’t have a crushes everywhere I went — some workplaces were crush-deserts; there just wasn't anyone in the inventory that caused my heart to skip a beat. Eventually I realized these feelings cropped up because it was important for me to know that someone saw me — meaning they observed something in me that might not be obvious to others. At a more recent job, about ten years into my marriage, this someone was R. He was older (please spare me from the “Daddy issues” diagnosis, it’s so cliche), divorced and a retired Army officer. He was serious about his work; only once in four years did I see something not work related displayed on his monitor. He revealed himself after I returned from maternity leave. This welcome yielded a hug, and an admission that he had missed me. We sat at cubicles directly across an aisle from each other and rarely talked. I generally assume people don’t like me unless they show me otherwise, so my thought was, he missed me? Really?

R’s quiet nature and work focus caused me to think I was on neutral ground, but he did and said little things that indicated otherwise. Once, it was a comment about what he would do as my partner, if I weren’t taken, which is a completely inappropriate sentiment in a professional environment. When you are deep into a marriage where you often felt like a nuisance, or “too much,” it felt life-giving to hear another person voice how they saw you in a positive light. Another time, he commented about the work I probably did at home, with two young kids — acknowledging that I was probably constantly sorting and donating their outgrown clothes and taking care of things. It was so specific a description, because yes, that was something I did regularly, one of the many invisible tasks to manage storage and keep a household running. R had southern charm and humor; when tasked with something next to impossible, he’d claim our boss had him “spread thinner than Piggly Wiggly peanut butter.” As the years went on, more personal details emerged, including that he had initiated his divorce due to his ex-wife’s unrestrained spending habits. I admired him for that — statistically we keep hearing that men don’t leave their marriages, even when they’re unhappy. I kept my feelings to myself but answered honestly when another female coworker who was also a friend asked who caught my eye. To my dismay, she told him. Nothing changed, but knowing that he knew was particularly mortifying and went against my personal rule of keeping that crush under wraps. After all, I was married, and I knew how foolish it was to think about someone else that way.

When my husband accepted a job that allowed us to commute together, pick up time sometimes ran late. I would wind up being one of the last people at my desk, watching R pack up as he prepared to leave. “Is he coming?” he’d ask. “He is,” I’d say, making a joke that my husband’s minutes were longer because they were “football minutes” — a play on how a one hour game expands to three and a half thanks to time outs, halftime and commercial breaks. We would laugh. Sometimes he’d ask if I wanted a ride somewhere. Looking back, this might have been a soft pick up line, but I’ve never been one to catch hints.

I left the job four years after I started. Contract and leadership changes resulted in lower pay and more restrictive rules for employees. In my usual fashion, it was better to leave on my own terms than wait for the ship to sink. R hugged me goodbye and just like that, I was out of the door and off to the next adventure.

Every time I left a job crush, I missed the person. At the job I’d develop a pattern of seeing if their car was in the parking lot to decide if it was going to be a good day, or entering the office with an eye peeled for their presence. After enough time passed, the feelings would fade and I could transition into remembering them fondly. Instead of waiting for that transition, I addressed my feelings about R by writing terrible poetry and saving it as a draft in my email account. It was never going anywhere; this was my way of dealing with feelings I felt ashamed for having, and believed I should not have had in the first place. Of course my husband found it.

He was deeply hurt, and rightfully so. I did not deny his feelings and tried reassuring him that I had never intended to send the message; there was no email address in the “To” line. I knew this didn’t matter, the damage was done. When we shared this incident with our couples therapist years later, she looked at me and stated, “That was a betrayal.” Yes, it was. I would have been just as hurt if I had stumbled on a message written by my husband to another woman going on about his feelings and how he loved her. “No one will love you the way I love you,” my husband said during one of our talks, “you know that, right?”

I couldn’t figure out why this seemed like a loving statement but didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t until years later that I understood this line was straight out of Emotional Abuse 101. When I read an internet stranger’s post on Reddit describing a very similar statement from their partner, I gasped. Was there a hidden script they followed that the rest of us didn’t know about?

I took on another new job and on the first day I had to check in at the corporate office before someone escorted me to the government site, where I was working. There wasn’t much for me to do but sit at the desk and read documents; I wasn’t going to have computer access until I was vetted by the security office and granted access. I was going to be part of a three person team, and the other two, T and K — both men — who had worked with each other before I entered the picture. By the end of the day someone had to drive me back to the corporate office so I could get back to my car for the drive home —this was T. We exited the building and I smiled when I realized his car was the same make as mine. As we pulled into the company parking lot, he gestured towards a boatlike sedan. “Is that you?” I couldn’t tell if he was joking and I said no. Finally we pulled up to my little hatchback and I looked over to see if he was surprised. We said our goodbyes and I drove home. The following day one of the first things he asked was, “What’s your car’s name?”

How did he know my car had a name? Why did he think to ask— not if it had a name, but what was the name? His intuition was spot on, my car did have a name, “James,” due to my issued license plate having the numbers “007” at the end, and the British history behind the brand. It struck me as odd, because T was a military retiree, and I didn’t associate quirk or a question like this to someone who spent most of their adult years in the military. In fact, I suspected T was gay until he mentioned his wife. I appreciated the question, and the thinking behind it. My husband would roll his eyes at car naming as if to say it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t cute, it was dumb. That was how I often felt when he didn’t understand why I liked certain things.

At work I remained guarded, declining lunch with T and K and instead remaining at my desk to eat what I’d packed. I was still coming out of the shame of that discovered email, and I didn’t want to leave myself open to continuing the pattern. I lasted roughly four months. The feeling hit me after I’d snuck a photo of T sitting in his cubicle with his back to me, oblivious to the spy in his midst. He sat at his desk chair in his button down shirt and black sweater vest. His bald head was turned slightly, providing a glimpse of his beard and glasses. I couldn't place why that photo shifted something in me. Around the same time, I was keeping a dream journal on my night table. When I had a dream about laying beside T, trying to hold his hand and also trying to maneuver my ear to his chest so I could hear his heartbeat, I knew I had failed to stop my own pattern. I did not write about that dream in the journal.

Looking back so many years later, these things strike me as obvious alarm bells that I needed to assess my life and figure out what I needed. I was so used to feeling odd and ashamed of the way I’d go down this path repeatedly and keep falling into the trap of finding a high in another human being. I didn’t have any idea where to start.

This went on for two years. Our little team grew closer and closer because our work problems felt unique to us. T insisted on training me on an online tasking tool, so we would sit side by side and click through the different functions. He teased out personal information, and shared some of his own. Eventually I caved and joined T and K for lunch in the cafeteria on the top floor of the building where we worked or at a local restaurant when we needed a midday break. We moved desks several times, but always remained clustered together. When you work that closely, it becomes near impossible to avoid sharing your personal life.

I knew how I felt but I walked right on the line. I took in T’s comments about enjoying the book The Hobbit and paired it with a complaint that he could not find his letter opener and I presented him with a letter opener designed to resemble a Hobbit’s sword. I liked the way he seemed so touched that someone had listened and put thought into a gift even when it was something small and inexpensive.

One year we both planned to attend a conference for work, but T was away for a meeting as asked me to make his reservation and pay for his registration fee. I mistakenly used his personal credit card for the registration when it was funded by our organization. Even worse, the website explicitly stated they would not provide refunds for credit card purchases. I had a complete meltdown when I realized my mistake, and immediately called T, who remained calm about the $450 charge that would show up on his bill. I was so frazzled I didn’t make it to lunch time so I packed up my things and went home. When I shared what happened with my husband, including using the credit card number, my husband said, “He trusts you like that?”

I met T’s wife on one of our team lunch outings. The following day T declared to me that she “was a fan,” which was funny because I didn’t like how she had treated him during the meal, or how cold she was when he hugged her. I know my assessment was unfair partly because of my own feelings, and also because no one knows the truth about what happens in a marriage except the two people in it. T and K met my husband, who reluctantly agreed to join us for lunch at the same spot on a different day. I wanted him to meet the two guys I worked with all day, the same way I had gotten to know the cast of characters from so many of his previous jobs. What I didn’t seem to understand was, you can’t make your partner take interest. I wanted him to meet them, yes, but more than that, I wanted him to want to meet them.

The conference trip happened right around my two year anniversary at the job. T and I, and a bunch of others from our office would be there. K stayed behind. This was my first time at this annual conference, and I found it overwhelming. Not only was the day packed with information sessions and networking opportunities, we also had built in meals, which meant perusing the buffet line and finding a seat at one of the huge round tables set up in the enormous ballroom. If you didn’t have a buddy with you, this meant sitting among a bunch of strangers and making yourself open to potential questions and small talk. In other words, an introvert’s nightmare. Given the prospect of repeating this schedule for four days straight and you might understand why I was ready to leave by the middle of the second day.

On the afternoon of the second day, T called my room to ask if I wanted to venture out. He figured out there was a bus, and he’d gotten tickets. I felt exhilarated. I picked out something to wear and walked to the lobby to meet him. What followed was the most enjoyable date in my entire life. Looking back, I could figure out why. We were two years in with a solid friendship with occasional flirting. I knew this person, and without the pressure of feeling like I had to make him like me, I could relax and talk openly, because we had already built that rapport. We started with dinner by the water, and T wasted no time.

“Do you love me?”

Before I could question why he was asking, I nodded slightly, and bowed my head. The secret was out. This had never happened to me, and I knew no amount of denial would allow me to come back from it. Despite knocking out that question early into the evening, things did not feel awkward. We walked and talked, and five hours later, finished up with drinks at a pub that came complete with a server that had a soft Irish accent. We rode the bus back the hotel. Instead of sharing a seat like we had when we arrived, T sat on the other side of the aisle. He walked me to my room, and we hugged goodnight. I tossed and turned. I texted Heather, alarmed at how I was feeling. I had never wanted someone so much in my entire life.

This time was different because I had finally encountered a person who challenged me, and also seemed to appreciate the way my brain worked. We had moved beyond the usual office banter, the stolen glances, the inside jokes. Every time we crossed a line, we drew a new one, only to cross that one later. “What’s missing,” T would ask, referencing our lives and our respective marriages. It was a valid question that I should have used as a stepping stone to examine myself. We could enjoy each other without the contempt bred from familiarity. This relationship felt special, and like the only thing I had just for me, while every other aspect of my life required consideration of my kids, my husband, and my mother, who also lived with us. And, to be honest, part of this was a fuck you to my husband. No one will love me the way he loves me? Challenge accepted.

My relationship with T lasted two years. Being with him was fun and light at first but devolved into something unsustainable and heavy. The relationship progressed like an addiction, life-giving and exhilarating in the beginning, draining and restrictive by the end. Eventually when we met up, I was glad to see him but despondent when we said our goodbyes. I felt seen by T, but the nature of our relationship meant the world would never see who I was to him, which wound up being more important to me than I initially believed. These things don't end well, my sister once said, and I knew she was right. A cell phone billing error resulted in my husband discovering me, resulting in the single most destructive event in my life (so far!). Living a life where fear dictated my actions, paired with focusing on being "good" instead of being true to myself had led me there. Instead of figuring out what I actually wanted out of life I had followed the checklist only to realize the checklist had stifled me. Often people will blame an affair for the end of a marriage when the affair is a side effect resulting from the state of the marriage. I regretted hurting my husband, but I could not bring myself to say I regretted that relationship with T. When my husband tried to diminish my actions, claiming I had "made a mistake," I corrected him. He had a way of controlling the narrative, and reducing my experiences to his interpretation of events. "I did not make a mistake," I said, "I made a series of deliberate decisions."

My husband demanded I find a couples therapist and I did. When he got angry, I listened. When he called me names or wished ill on me, I took it. He had every right to be angry, devastated, sad and hurt. “Not after what you did” became a familiar refrain when I would bring up a paper cut that looked minor when compared to the fatal stabbing I had inflicted upon him. My voice became muted, and all of my husband's offenses throughout the years were dwarfed when compared to my actions. What I eventually understood was, those feelings didn’t give him the right to be abusive, and I did not want to spend the rest of my life with a husband who weaponized his forgiveness. To paraphrase the words of Cheryl Strayed, I had to be brave enough to break my own heart. No one gets married imagining they will eventually file for divorce.

I read books and blogs about limerence, a term that seemed to perfectly describe the way I felt affection for certain people, to the point that I obsessed over them and idealized them beyond human measure. Every crush did not become an obsession, but many of them did, to the point that thinking about the person was akin to having an app open that I wasn’t using running in the back of my mind. I felt shame for being a weirdo who could fall in love in an instant and get consumed by daydreaming, despite being married with two kids and an already full life. What I failed to realized was a “full” life is not the same as a “fulfilled" life. To quote T, "What's missing?"

That was what I needed to figure out, what was I seeking in these other people, and why? What did I need to change about myself to stop, because this was not how I wanted to keep living my life. What did I want?

I listened to the "Hidden Brain" podcast episode featuring Dr. Kristen Neff. She described having an affair with a married professor. That relationship had ended her marriage, and like me, she had also married young, to a guy she had met in college. In order to make progress she had to distance herself from feeling shame by cultivating self compassion. Developing self compassion isn’t easy when you are accustomed to an inner voice who works overtime as your personal bully. The best way I could practice was by talking to myself the way I would advise a dear friend approaching me with an issue. Kindness. I had to face the lessons I had missed after decades of avoidance. Self compassion helped me understand that what I wanted mattered, and I should not have been expected to abandon myself in romantic relationships. Self compassion helped me understand there were patterns that I developed in childhood that carried over into adulthood. Those patterns helped me survive childhood and became detrimental once I became an adult. I was in my 40's and didn't need to operate in the same way anymore. Self compassion isn’t a pass for shitty behavior; it is grace extended for being human.

I've stopped looking for a car in the parking lot or a favorite person sitting at a desk as a way to determine if my day will be bright or disappointing. I know more about myself, and know a secret relationship and double life is not something I will put myself or anyone else through again. I can appreciate qualities in some of my male coworkers and without going off to the races in my head. On one hand, I miss the unbelievable high of a newfound crush, and on the other, I never want to feel mentally ill over anyone again.

Imitation of Love (Volume 2 - The College Years)

I went to a college that wasn't a college, it was a federal service academy. This meant wearing some form of uniform during every daylight hour, living in barracks, not dorms, and being put in situations that hindered healthy social development because nothing about that place resembled a "normal" experience. I was also dealing with being challenged academically. I had decent grades in high school, and was talented at taking standardized tests, but I had no study skills. When you're introduced to a learning method where you read about the subject ahead of the in class lesson and you skated through every exam and major assignment in high school, it's a humbling experience. I spent my first two years on academic probation as I attempted to level off mmy GPA.

When I went to West Point, I knew it would be a population that skewed very white and very male. Women made up less than 15% of the population, and less than 10% of the Corps of Cadets was black. I did not want to admit it out loud, but with those numbers, I expected the odds of having a romantic relationship were ever in my favor.

It didn't take long to figure out I was wrong -- female cadets were not treated like a hot commodity. Now that I'm older, I understand why: this place drew the most traditional men and least traditional women. With the ratio as it was, we wore the same uniforms, we went through the same challenges -- trying to impress us in their uniforms and by boasting about their daily life was a tall task. Knocking us down a peg or ten was a way to reject us before we could reject them. We even had a derogatory name based on the wool uniform pants we wore: gray trou.

My pattern of crushes continued, and I continued not to do any introspection on why I was this way. Having a crush felt like the intensity of taking drugs without the nuisance of paying someone to obtain them. It took decades to look at myself and see the patterns, but at this age I was a bit of a junkie.

That said, I didn't actually want a boyfriend -- I didn't have the capacity to manage the academic course load and the emotional load of a romantic relationship. On top of that, sex and possible pregnancy was not an option. Remember, I was like Mayo from "An Officer and a Gentleman," I had nowhere else to go. Imagining the shame of squandering a West Point education because I'd gotten pregnant was all the birth control I needed.

There were guys that pursued me; Some guys didn't want female cadets but not all. There was a guy a year behind me, another who was a classmate in Gospel choir, and a few others, to include my husband (and ex-husband) to be. Sometimes they were too nice, and by this I mean not amenable to the occasional gossip or snark. I don't talk bad about people by default, but if I need to commisserate, I need that other person to be there for it, not to scold me or say "Giselle, that's so mean." We're human, we're not always going to be our best version of ourselves at all times. Sometimes we need an accomplice to join us in our observations of fuckery in order to truly connect.

I went on dates, but it was usually a one and done deal because I was either too awkward, or I wasn't motivated to give it another go. There were also times when I had to fend off or give in to unwanted sexual encounters. Dating in a healthy way was a challenge as there wasn't much time in the schedule to get to know someone and go for outings off post. We could take pass on weekends, which involved hotel rooms, binge drinking, and rushing into sex. One of these weekends, I rented a car with my friend T and went to Penn Relays. We didn't get a hotel room, which landed me on top of a hotel bedspread (yes, ew) in a bed with a classmate who I liked, but not that way. Another guy was asleep in the room with us (also, ew) when he pressured me into a blow job. Saying no only resulted in being pushed to say yes. Sometimes you bend to another's will because you weren't prepared to fight. Where was I going to sleep, I thought, in the rented Nissan Altima in the parking lot? If I had to give my daughters advice in the same situation, I would have said yes, sleep in the car. Most recently I saw this person at my twenty year reunion, and he hugged me and acted cordial. I played along (more fawning, ew) but have him blocked on every social media platform.

Oddly enough, I was comfortable talking about this with my friends, who understood completely. "Ah, yes, the courtesy blow job" Heather said over the phone, and we laughed. The shame I felt wasn't over the act, but for not standing up for myself and leaving the room. For awhile I even tried to gin up a crush on the guy as a way to retroactively make that encounter more palatable (no pun intended, really). I knew I didn't want to put myself into that predicament again.

The entitlement some of the guys had stunned me. One classmate, a football player, came to my room uninvited, hinting about how much he would love a massage. I don't know why he thought I was the audience for this, we didn't really know each other, and this wasn't an effective way to win me over. Another time I was with T again. We were visiting a hotel where a bunch of our friends were hanging out following the 500th Night dance (sidenote: this is a celebration for cadets in their junior year when they have approximately 500 days before graduation). She and I split company and I was cornered in the hallway in separate instances by not one but two different classmates, expecting sex. What baffled me most was, I did nothing suggestive to these people, I was simply walking around. I didn't flirt with them, I didn't lead anyone on; my existence in the same place where they were, and that place being outside of West Point, was all it took, apparently to ask, "Are we ever gonna have sex?" This time around T and I did have a getaway car. My 500th night date, who happened to be my future husband at the time, had been able to join me for the dinner and speech but could not go off post with me because he was still serving punishment tours (see, this is one of the many aspects of "not getting to have a normal social life" at West Point). He did, however, have a car because he was a senior, and they could own and park their cars on post. Before we went to the hotel, I sweet talked him into lending it to us, and fortunately T knew how to drive a stick shift. As soon as I found her that night, we made our escape and I gave her the rundown on how my night had gone. My now ex-husband uses this story as evidence that I used him because I knew he liked me, but he doesn't seem to understand how grateful I was (and still am) for the favor.

While I was a cadet, we were organized into academic companies during the school year. These companies were units of approximately 110 cadets, and we lived in the same floor of the barracks, we ate mandatory meals together, paraded together and played intramural sports together. I spent my first and second year in the same company, and between sophomore and junior year I, along with every other classmate, "scrambled" to new companies. This occured with the reasoning that you could get a fresh start if you had a not so great reputation. It meant meeting new people, changing roommates and re-establishing yourself. Before everyone split off to their summer assignments, the incoming cadets got to visit their new academic companies. Whenever someone asked where I was scrambling, I would hear, "Oh, T.M. is in that company!" He was the president of the class ahead of me, and I didn't interact with him until I arrived at my new company the following semester.

Junior year in the new academic company includes a "Cow-Firstie" bash, an unofficial weekend get together between the incoming juniors ("cows") and the seniors ("firsties"). It's held at the house of a cadet who volunteers their home for the debauchery. From what I understood, the point was to drink, bullshit, crash and get back to West Point intact before the evening accountability formation. During one of our lunch formations, T.M. made an announcement that he had room to give someone a ride. He had the voice of an M.C., the humor of a stand up comedian, and the car -- a classic convertible Camaro -- of a celebrity. Nothing about this guy was small, and I, who was usually the shrinking violet, was interested. I talked to my roommate R about him, and apparently he had inquired about me. On the weekend of the party, I caught a ride with T.M., and we drove across the Hudson river in the famed Camaro with the top down, aimed in the direction of the party. At some point we stopped for gas, and he emerged from the little convenience store with a can of Dr. Pepper and a small carton of strawberry milk. "You have to try this," he said, and mixed the two. It was surprisingly good, and it felt like he had let me in on a junk food secret.

I also got him to leave the party early because I planned to finish the night at a CAS Jam, which was at Camp Buckner, an outpost where every cadet spent the summer between their plebe (freshman) and yearling year. Camp Buckner was deserted during the school year, but Barth Hall -- the recreational center there -- was open for business. When I talked to T.M., I said I didn't want to finish the evening getting drunk and sleeping over at someone's house, it wasn't my thing. He nodded and appeared to empathize, although I suspected he didn't agree. We reached Barth Hall, and there were plenty of CAS members milling around outside. When he pulled up (remember, he was known by pretty much everyone) and I stepped out of his car, we caused a bit of a scene. Not many people actually knew me, and on top of that, when you're quiet and shy, it's an invitation for people to develop their own stories about you. The resulting story was, "She likes white guys." There are variations on this, "She only likes white guys," or "She doesn't mess with black guys," or whatever else can be derived from being dropped off at a party with mostly black people in attendance by one of the most well known, highly visible white guys in the Corps of Cadets.

And who was my ride home from the CAS Jam? My future (and now ex) husband. If I had a crystal ball, I would have penned several seasons of a dramatic comedy based on my life back then, while everything was still fresh. We had danced to a couple of songs, and he offered to drive me back to the barracks. Our ride home was quiet; this was my first encounter with him alone, and he seemed intense. He parked, I thanked him for the ride home and quickly dashed off to my room.

T.M. and I hung out for a month before things shifted. Most of that time he was serving punishment tours, which meant he couldn't leave post. He still went to the Firstie Club, the bar intended for (you guessed it) firsties, and would wind up in my room for some drunk flirting before going to bed. In an odd twist to the story of me "only dating white guys," T.M. revealed his insecurity one night after one too many at the Firstie Club. I had told him the story of the classmate sniffing around for a back massage, and he said something to the effect of, "All the black guys want you." I had to reassure him that this didn't matter to me. Besides, wasn't it more important to be liked and wanted? I didn't believe any one of these guys offering themselves actually liked me. It felt like the opposite.

T.M. also had an on and off yearling girlfriend, who I pretended didn't exist. That was just the start of my pattern of ignoring red flags to indulge in the potential of another person. T.M. was also older -- he had served in the Army as a linguist before coming to West Point, which meant he was 24 to my 20. When you are still living in a place that had a boarding school vibe, including bed checks and a designated time for "lights out" you could argue that everyone there was at the same stage in life, regardless of biological age.

I spent a long weekend visiting my sister to meet my newborn niece, and before I left, I lent T.M. my body pillow. He was going to be stuck in the barracks, so he sent me off with a note and told me not to open it until later. When I unfolded the note, I read, "Tonight I'll be holding your pillow and wishing it was you."

That note sustained me. Finally, I thought, after decades of holding torches for people I liked who liked me but not in that way, I had found someone with mutual feelings. And, as that old saying goes, "Easy come, easy go."

My roommate R was a diver, and on occasion, I had the room to myself when she had a meet at another school. Soon after I returned from my weekend away, R had an away meet, and this was the chance for T.M. and I to spend some post-lights out time together. Yes, it was against the rules, but there was no way to catch every cadet who broke the rules. I was my usual awkward self, even though this was a wanted encounter, and as far as one could get from a courtesy BJ situation. T.M. slept in the room, both of us crammed in my twin bed until the sun came up. We woke up on a Sunday morning. As T.M. quietly slipped out of the door, he promised to talk to me later.

Apparently "later" meant "never." The man ghosted me two decades before that term got added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. This was a near-impossible task, considering we lived down the hallway from each other, and would see each other at breakfast and lunch formation, and every other mandatory company event. To make things worse, seating assignments at the tables in the Mess Hall shuffled on occasion, and this time around I shuffled to T.M.'s table. That was by design, of course; T.M. and I had planned it before I had become invisible to him.

I remember trying to talk to my mother about what happened. This was new territory for me, as childhood had taught me not to share anything personal with her. When I called her in need of a sympathetic ear, she delivered her response in a mocking tone: "Oh, did someone break your heart?" My mom was a competitor in the suffering Olympics, and since she was widowed, my little problems were laughable. This was both hurtful and oddly validating, as my original childhood instinct was correct. My sister became my confidant. "I don't know what to tell you, Giselle," she said as I pressed the hallway payphone receiver firmly against my ear, "It's a terrible situation."

I stayed at the table out of sheer stubbornness, seated to the immediate left of T.M., who sat at the head. I kept my body tilted away so he remained a blur in my peripheral vision. He was his usual loud self but I found him more obnoxious than endearing since I wasn't in on the joke anymore. Every day I dreaded breakfast and lunch. Eventually I enlisted a male classmate to swing by the table in the mornings, and in the afternoons, you guessed it, I asked future ex-husband to get me. When I tried explaining what was going on and why I had asked him to walk me away from that table, he held up a hand. "You don't have to share." I'm sure he was trying to spare me but I wanted him to know what happened. This was playing out to be another life lesson from one of those other old sayings: "Don't shit where you eat."

I spent the rest of that year slowly getting over someone who was in my face for another eight more months, until he graduated. During this time, I also went on a few dates with my future ex-husband. There were no sparks with him, but he treated me well, and that placed him solidly into the category of "someone I would marry." I know, I know, wrong again. If I had that crystal ball, I could have put more thought into the conclusions I was making, but this was the best my 20 year old brain could do at the time.

There are more stories from those four years but this post is long already, and I've done enough scab picking for today. One misconception I had was believing the crushes and obsessions would ease up after I got married and could focus my love and attention on "my" person. How wrong I was.

Imitation of Love (Volume 1 - The Grade School Years)

As long as I've been in mixed gender environments, I've had crushes on boys. In some cases there is a quick moment of realization and a switch flips in my heart and that guy becomes THE guy. In kindergarten it was Sean, a friendly boy in my class who was funny, sweet and gave me his phone number. I remember my sister studying the little scrap of paper with his handwriting and saying, "But it only has six numbers." Well, we were five. He tried. There was a yearly outdoor party my family used to attend. We would drive through rolling hills to a sleepy estate that sprawled over acres of grass with big old shade bearing trees. It was a party where people gathered in small groups because the total number of people in attendance was too big to be contained in one spot. At this party you may never even see the hosts, and people came and went according to their schedules, because the point was to show up, bask in the surroundings and enjoy the serendipity of not knowing whose path you'll cross. This was the type of thing where, if you were a kid, it was imperative to find the other kids and figure out if anyone was playing games or getting into something interesting while the parents were socializing.

This party was where I found Sean from my kindergarten class. We quickly paired off and found a tall grassy hill, which promised fun times of rolling down on your side and running back up to do it all over again. We weren't consumed with the fear of ticks or any of the other dangers the modern world tells us are lurking in the grass. At the bottom of the hill was a parking area where a young woman walked towards us. "You should try rolling down the hill," Sean told her. I couldn't believe it. We didn't know this person, and here he was, boldly suggesting this grown up roll down the hill in her nice blouse and skirt. "Oh, I rolled down the hill earlier," she replied, a typical grown up lie. I thought that was the end of it. There's no way she'll do it, I thought, but with enough persuasion, Sean had this person going up the side of the hill and rolling down, nice clothes and all. That was the glimmer moment for Sean. I was duly impressed, this boy from my class who didn't even know his complete phone number, had successfully gotten a grown up to do his bidding. That's some serious rizz, as the kids say (are they still using that term?).

Other crushes followed. In first grade I liked two different boys, Brian P., a quiet dark-haired boy known for his drawing skills, and Michael F. who had a soft rounded face, loose curly hair, and a gentle demeanor (They both had Italian last names; first grade was my era of returning to the roots on my mother's side). Most years I set my sights on one boy, usually not a popular one that everyone liked, but a boy who seemed perfect to me. In fifth grade it was a short Jewish kid named Derek Y. who engaged with me in sort of a love-hate thing. Our desks were near each other and we spent the school day roasting each other, but also sharing what we liked -- those red, black and white Air Jordan high tops, and "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister. Despite our witty banter, I was sure he liked the girl everyone else--boys and girls-- seemed to like: Amber C., who had arrived at our school in third grade as a beacon of style with her Benetton sweatshirts, skinny Guess jeans, perfectly permed shaggy hair and glowing complexion. Imagine my surprise when a friend approached me to ask if I wanted to "go out" with Derek. What? He liked me? He liked me? I was too shocked to consider the consequences of saying yes so I rejected the offer immediately. In my world, unrequited love was supposed to stay that way.

Sixth grade was an anomaly -- I didn't really like anyone that year. Many of the kids in my neighborhood got shuffled into a different elementary school much closer to where we lived which meant there would be no sequel with Derek, no chance to right the wrongs. That year I spent a lot of time pining over him, regretful of my rejection. I hoped that seventh grade -- junior high school -- meant we would be reunited in the same school again. I imagined visiting my old elementary school and making amends, admitting that I actually had liked him, and that yes, I would like to go out with him. At this point I was self aware enough to understand my runaway imagination wasn't normal. This kind of daydreaming was strictly between me, myself and I. If I kept journals back then, all the possible scenarios would have been written down, the make believe scenes played out, and I'd click my pen, shut the book and hide it. This is why I'm amazed when my kids tell me about interactions, observations and thoughts about their latest crushes. For me, that was highly classified information, certainly not something to share with my mother or even my older sister lest they found a way to use my vulnerability against me.

Seventh grade brought Eric W. into my world. We had English class together and I hardly spoke directly to him. Over the year I learned he was adopted (if I remember correctly, his adoptive mother was one of the teachers at school). His last name said "Jewish" but his complexion and hair texture was more racially ambiguous. He was kind, but this became the year of getting tongue-tied around my crushes so we didn't talk much. I asked for advice from my friend Janet, who told me to call him, but to act a bit dumb, so he wouldn't feel bad. I knew this was terrible advice and thought, why should I dumb myself down? Who does that? I didn't say that to her, and I also didn't call. I will say both of these people are present day Facebook friends. Eric joined the Marines and is currently a commercial airline pilot (I sure can pick 'em). He also married a black woman, which tells me I had a chance. I say that because as I got older I understood there were guys that didn't look at me that way -- who would never look at me that way -- because I was not the love interest they envisioned for themselves. It's a hard realization, but no one said the truth was easy.

I started eighth grade a month after a cross-country move to California to a place much less diverse than the New York suburb where I'd spent the first thirteen years of my life. This meant people would try to be clever and tell me I'd "look good" with the one or two other black boys in our class. I held nothing personal against these guys, they seemed nice enough. It feels insulting when someone decides for you that you have less than a handful of prospects because they're using the same logic as someone sorting laundry and trying to make a "close enough" pair out of a pile of single, unmatched socks.

My attention ultimately landed on Greg L., a slender boy with a charming sense of humor layered over an angsty soul. This crush stood the test of time, lasting well into high school. To borrow a term from the movie Vanilla Sky, he was a proximity infatuation. Like me, he was also a new kid in eighth grade, and over the years we wound up in many of the same advanced classes. He also had a friend named Dan that my best friend Heather found alluring. As much as I preferred to savor my crushes from afar with as few words exchanged as possible, Heather preferred to take center stage and pursue her love interests for sport (the pursuit of Dan W. will be its own blog post, now that I think about it. Put a pin in that one, I'll come back to it in another post).

One summer, out of the blue, Greg called and asked if I wanted to go to the movies. Would I? I wasn't going to repeat my road not taken with Derek; I said yes. We were both old enough to drive by then and he picked me up in his dad's sporty BMW coupe. After being surprised by my sister's engagement, my dad made a point to be present to meet my date which felt overbearing but understandable. We then drove back over to Greg's house, where his dad greeted me and wished us well. There were no movie theaters in Half Moon Bay, which meant a drive "over the hill" to watch his selection: Beauty and the Beast. The entire time, I could not shake my awkwardness. We know sleep paralysis exists, but maybe "date paralysis" is also a thing. More than once I've ruined what should have been a fun time out trying too hard to think of what to say or how to be in the moment instead of freaking out inside of my head. That date was the first and last one on one outing with Greg. Other occasions followed, including a venture to see Frank Sinatra live, but that time Heather joined us. In some situations I needed a conversation doula to keep things moving along with minimal pain. During those years I pined for Greg, I watched him pine for pale-skinned, cheerleader-adjacent, elfin-looking girls. He was mixed also, but white and Filipino, and I sensed he felt guilt for not feeling the same way about me.

My last high school crush was Rob P. who took up headspace my junior and senior year. He was also my coworker at the library and in many of my classes. Rob had a too cool way about him with his unnaturally colored hair, pierced nose, perpetually baggy jeans and declaration that he had chose to become vegan. He was tall and lean, with a rectangular face and cool blue eyes, an appearance that aligned with his Scandinavian last name. One weekend Heather and I perused the aisles of KMart when she shared how she had spent hours on the phone talking to Rob and his assessment of me was that I was "super nice." She managed to pull out of him that he liked me liked me, and I wasn't exactly sure what to do with this information. We worked together and a library didn't exactly lend itself (see what I did there?) to chit chat. This hand-wringing went on for months, until I went with the absolute dumbest option: telling him in the parking lot right before we embarked on a three hour shift together. "I like you," I said. "Sorry," he replied. And scene.

I always had Heather as my soft place to land with her wise voice of reason. As we proceeded through the agony of our crushes she would remind me that we had so much ahead, with so many more people to meet. High school was going to be a short period in our lives and hopefully not the best part. She was right, of course, but what I didn't realize at the time was that these crushes would continue into adulthood, along with the painful awkardness and overthinking. Stay tuned.