Stardust Diaries 2007

by Swan, Tarn

  We did the usual tour, walking in tense silence. He paused for a while by the duck pond. It was bitter cold. The water had begun to glaze at the edges. Only the recently restored Edwardian fountain bubbling at the centre of the pond is likely to stop it from freezing over completely tonight, unless it gets exceptionally cold. He was shivering and I wanted to put my arm around his shoulders and draw him against my side, but I knew he'd step away from me, so I kept my arms wrapped tight around my own body.

  There we were, the two of us, hurting like hell for a variety of reasons and unable to find comfort in each other. We were like the damn pond, beginning to freeze at the edges. If we weren't careful the ice would close in.

  He broke the silence first. Without looking at me he said he thought I ought to take the job in Bristol. It was what I wanted, promotion and a step up the ambition ladder with a bigger salary. Before I could react to this sudden turnaround in his attitude he dropped a bombshell.

  He said he'd decided to follow Lulu and Natalie's example and go for a change of scene. As such he had applied to the same cruise ship company a few days ago. He'd been invited down to Southampton for an interview and audition next week. Apparently he was just the sort of person they were looking for to join their entertainment team.

  I was utterly shocked. I stood there feeling the ice close over me as the man I'd spent almost a decade of my life with effectively told me the parting of the ways had come. He was leaving me. I couldn't speak my throat was so tight.

  “So,” he said, glancing at me, “are you not going to bother saying anything then?”

  “What’s to say, Jonathan?” I ran a shaky hand through my hair. “You secretly accept an interview for a job that will take you sailing around the world for a year. I think that says it all, don’t you? What the fuck is left for me to say except bon voyage!”

  I left him standing by the rapidly freezing pond and walked home at a rapid pace, my heart thumping painfully in my chest.

  He wasn't long in following. He did exactly the same as I'd done when I got in and slammed the front door behind him. We haven't spoken since. He went straight to bed and I sit here writing. The ice lying between us is thick enough to walk a horse and carriage over.

  How the hell did we come to this state of affairs, this cold war? It feels like it’s come out of the blue, but when I think about it I realise it isn’t so. The seeds were sown when I allowed him to persuade me that what we needed to complete us was a child. The adoption attempt took its toll. On the surface we carried on with things as normal, but it was always there, white noise, as we went through the slow agonising process. It built up stress in the background of our lives. The hope of success acted as a bulwark keeping the stress and strain at bay. Failure brought it all rushing to the fore. It looks like it’s going to sweep us apart.

  14th February ~ Complex Valentine

  The journey from York station to Southampton Central takes over five hours. It's difficult to describe my emotions as I watched the train that would make the trip draw up to the platform this morning at eight twenty-five. I stood by the drinks stand, inhaling the alluring androgynous fragrance of coffee grounds watching the three of them standing together, arms linked, waiting for the train to halt and open its doors to new boarders. Twinkles, Lulu and Natalie, aka Jonathan, Freddy and Kevin. Each of them meant something to me. They had occupied space in my life. My Adam's apple bobbed painfully, one of them had more than occupied a space in my life. He was my life.

  I'd already said my goodbyes, so I kept my distance. I watched people ebb and flow along the platform: the morning commuters, early day-trippers and the half way travellers stopping at York to change trains, straining to make sense of the muffled voice coming from the tannoy system.

  A departure was announced and the train heading for Southampton pulled slowly away, picking up speed, travelling on into the distance leaving a resonating emptiness. Tears fell.

  The City of York has recently acquired a giant Ferris wheel similar to the London Eye. It’s situated close to the Victorian railway station. It stands sixty metres high offering at its zenith on a clear day a twenty-mile view of York and the surrounding countryside. I've always wanted to ride it and so this morning I paid my money and took my seat. As the wheel slowly turned and my carriage inched skyward I allowed my mind to take calm stock and review recent turbulent events.

  I never envisaged children as being a fundamental part of my life. I accepted childlessness as being an aspect of my sexual orientation and moreover an aspect I was comfortable with. I didn't need a child to make me feel complete or fulfilled. I had no urge to prove my genes. I was genuinely delighted when Karen asked Twinkles and I to be godparents, but not because it offered me the opportunity to fulfil some deep, previously denied need. It was simply an honour to be asked by valued friends to play a part in the life of their valued child.

  I love Dominic very much. I love seeing him grow. I love time spent with him and at the end of the day I love seeing him go home to his parents so I can resume my own lifestyle again. I also love my baby sister and Gabby. I love the way they move through my life and touch my days with their presence, but I'm glad I am not responsible for them 24/7.

  My relationship with Twinkles fulfilled all major needs for me: the need to give love and be loved, sexual needs, the need for companionship and the need to nurture, which is part of my personality structure. A discipline relationship has parental aspects to it as a natural component, but not in any kind of incestuous way. Parenting and its associated skills are not just to do with child rearing. Parenting is about caring, protecting and guiding and those portions of my personality found reward in the relationship Twinks and I forged between us. He was enough for me.

  Before Dominic came into our lives Twinkles had never expressed any interest in children, certainly not in us having any. He was hooked from the moment a beautiful two-week-old baby curled his tiny hand around his finger. From that moment he developed an overwhelming desire for us to have a baby and be a family. He said he needed a child. We had discussion after discussion and finally I agreed we would pursue parenthood.

  Thereafter discussions focussed on ways and means. We investigated surrogacy, but currently gay couples are not considered by most UK agencies. They only accept married couples and as things stand a civil ceremony is not considered a marriage though the policy is being reviewed. We certainly could not afford to go outside the UK to commercial agencies.

  It was initially suggested we apply to foster, but he wasn't interested in being an intermediate kind of parent. I also had reservations about him being able to cope with letting a child he'd grown fond of go, especially if he thought the place it was returning to wasn't as ideal as he thought it ought to be. It would be heartbreak every time for him. He isn't emotionally built for those kinds of scenarios. It isn’t his area of strength.

  I was also in doubt about his ability to cope with older or teenage foster children, especially those who were suffering life difficulties. He freely admitted that teenagers made him nervous. Seeing as he would be the one at home all day I didn't see this as being beneficial for either him or the children concerned.

  He wanted a baby. He wanted to bring a child up from birth, to bond with it and nurture it from its earliest days.

  Our lesbian friends Val and Sandra were also looking to have a family and it was Twinks who suggested we consider surrogacy and co-parenting with them.

  I vetoed the idea from the start. I didn’t care for the 'turkey-baster' element to it, but more importantly I thought it had more pitfalls than positives. A plethora of complications could arise from such an arrangement, legal ones not withstanding. I was intensely uncomfortable with the idea of us donating sperm to impregnate one of our closest friends. That aside, if it worked, I knew Twinkles would not be satisfied with partial custody. He would want to have the baby all the time and have the main say in all decisions. In short he would not share well.

  There was also the
risk and possibility that Val and Sandra would not, once the child was born, want us involved at all. It happened frequently. It happened even in ‘paid stranger’ surrogate arrangements when the carrier of the child didn't want to give it up at birth. There was a whole nightmare of possibilities involved in such an arrangement. I said a firm no.

  To my mind it was unfair and irresponsible to bring a child into a situation where it might be the potential cause of conflict, bitterness, legal wrangling and heartache between former friends.

  Adoption seemed to be the only way forward and so it began. The day we found out we had been rejected as adoptive parents I experienced a sense both of loss and relief. The loss took me by surprise. Maybe a small part of me had begun to adapt to the idea of being a father and raising a child and my sense of loss was centred there? I truthfully don't know. I think in the main it was empathetic for Twinkles.

  The relief I felt was straightforward. Had we been accepted I would have done it to the absolute best of my ability. I would have adapted to the huge changes in lifestyle and given the child my care, protection and love and probably been very happy. The relief was because I didn't have to do any of those things, and it also meant Twinkles was still all mine. I didn't have to share him. It was a selfish, but honest feeling. Paul once told me that when Karen said she was expecting his initial feeling had been a jealous fear he would lose some aspect of her, if not all of her, to the baby. I now understood what he meant.

  I'm still convinced one of the reasons our application failed was not because of our gayness as such, but because of the type of gay couple we were and the circles we moved in. Our social worker was pleasant, but I always got the impression she wasn't fully at ease with us. She accepted us on one level, but at a deeper level there existed a strong band of resistance. Twinkles' unique flamboyant style, even when he was toned down, unnerved her slightly. She met my mother, fine, she met my dad, again fine, and then she met Prissy and some of our friends and you could almost see her visibly battling against this band of deep ingrained societal resistance. We must have come over a bit like a GLBT Addams Family.

  There were numerous factors involved in the decision to turn us down, but Twinkles needed someone to act as specific guilty party. I was it. That's the way he is. It takes him time to sort things out in his head and until he does he needs a place to lay blame. I've always been willing to be that place until he goes through the process of shifting and sorting his emotions before taking responsibility.

  In his view I was to blame because I hadn't wanted a baby as much as he had wanted one. I hadn't tried hard enough to impress those dealing with our application. I hadn't tried hard enough to find ways and means around the difficulties we encountered.

  I was to blame because I'd had skin cancer and was still considered to be at risk from skin cancer. I was still having regular checkups at the hospital. At the last one I had another mole removed from between my toes on my consultant's advice. My suspect health must have gone against us.

  I was to blame because of uncertainty over my job and its location, which complicated matters with regard to having to switch authorities in the event of a move.

  I was to blame because we had some nutter who had plagued our lives for over two years. I'd done nothing to find out who it was and worse I'd opened my big mouth and told the social worker we had a frigging nutter plaguing us.

  I pointed out that social services conducted stringent investigations into the backgrounds of prospective adoptive parents and they would have found out from the police about the hate mailer and it was better to be totally honest.

  I was proven right about how thorough the checks were, because she brought up the incident when Twinks was arrested for smashing all the glass in the front door of his grandfather's house when his mother shut it on him.

  All in all, set out in plain print, I could see, and so could Twinks if he would but admit it, that realistically we didn't look to be a good bet for providing an appropriate emotionally stable environment in which to raise a child.

  After the event Twinks was depressed and why wouldn’t he be? He’d had a dream crushed. He wouldn't allow me to comfort him so I gave him the space and if you like the permission to be angry with me, because I thought it was what he needed at the time. And for a few days it was exactly what he needed. You cannot punish someone for being in emotional pain.

  The mistake I made was in giving him too much space for too long a time. Space then became distance and we both began to freefall. We'd gone through an intense experience and suddenly it was all over and not with the desired result, at least from his point of view.

  What he needed was for me to take tight control of the situation much sooner than happened. In my own defence I was feeling guilty and confused. The process had taken its toll of me as well as him. What we both needed was some gentle impartial mentoring until we found our feet again. Instead what we got was the well-intentioned, loving, over-compensatory sympathy of partial friends and family. They offered inappropriate advice and opinions that served to hype up Twinkles' personal drama and his sense of being rejected.

  The space between us widened further as other events escalated tensions. I was offered the job in Bristol. It couldn't have been more ill timed. It provoked more anxiety and anger, as the prospect of uprooting and moving away from friends and family loomed large. I experienced yet more guilt because I wanted the job. I’d worked bloody hard and I deserved the promotion.

  To make matters worse Lulu broke the news that he and Natalie had replied to an advertisement for leisure and entertainment staff aboard a cruise liner. The job was well paid and afforded the opportunity to do what they loved doing best, as well as taking them around the world. They were going for it.

  Twinks was gobsmacked because Lulu hadn’t mentioned applying for the job. He was devastated that his best friend and his best enemy were going away to pursue something glamorous and exciting, leaving him behind. It felt like his whole world was falling apart. He accused Lulu of going behind his back and betraying him. Lulu hit back and said he hadn’t told him because he knew how he’d react. Jealous, he was always jealous.

  The night Lu told him we ended up having an argument in which he bitterly accused me of holding him back and ruining all his dreams. He said he wished he'd never met me. They were words without real substance, heated words of the moment. They were meant to wound and they did wound. I'm only human after all. I feel things too. I am not perfect and I do not have a keyed in automatic response to every given situation. I'm flesh and blood, not a piece of programmed machinery.

  Unhappy people say mean things to each other, which even if they contain grains of truth are on the whole ugly distortions of reality. I'd had enough of being cast as the villain. I told him that on the contrary he had held me back professionally. I would have climbed the career ladder higher and faster if I hadn't always had to take into consideration his desire to stay in the area that suited his interests. I pointed out that I'd given up far more than him. I'd moved lock stock and barrel into his world and now when it wasn't going the way he wanted it to go I was solely to blame.

  It was true. I had not wanted a baby, but did he care about that? Not a jot, and as per usual I had taken his needs into consideration and put them before my own. I stormed that if I'd gone with my instincts and put my foot down and kept it down at the beginning we wouldn't be going through hell.

  The floodgates opened. I told him that everything always had to be about HIM and what he fucking wanted whether it was a new dress or a new baby, while I put my own needs on hiatus to serve them. Maybe my apparent ‘failure’ to find ways and means around the difficulties we encountered was symptomatic of my stifled feelings and maybe he ought to put his wants on hiatus to consider mine for a change.

  I also pointed out that his determination to have a baby rather than adopt an older child had contributed to our application failing. Babies did not remain babies, just as kittens and puppies didn’t remain cute li
ttle bundles of fluff. They grew and changed presenting set after set of challenges.

  I told him a baby wasn’t a doll or a possession or an accessory, or a pet. It was a human being. A baby was the beginning of a lifetime commitment and a lifetime of putting someone else's needs before your own. To my mind he hadn’t thought through the full implications of being a parent. Why he wanted a baby and only a baby was something he needed to give some serious thought to.

  That was the point at which he took off his wedding band and threw it at me saying maybe he needed to give our whole relationship some thought. He had no idea I held so many grudges against him. My thought at that moment was to sit down on the bed, pull him over my knees and give him a damn good spanking only the sound of Frank and Katie hammering on the front door interrupted it.

  At first I thought our rowing must have disturbed them because by then it was well after midnight. Not so.

  Gabby’s bedroom is at the front of their house and she had woken her parents to say there was a fire outside on the road. The crackling flames had woken her up. It was a car. My car. Twinks and I were so busy quarrelling we hadn't heard a thing. By the time the fire brigade got on scene my car was blazing. The heat from it was incredible. It melted the road surface on which it stood. The petrol tank could easily have blown up. I told Frank to get his family and take them and Twinks to the back of their house, because if the car did explode the shrapnel would take out all the front windows.

  The fire brigade finally brought the blaze under control and dismissed all notions of some kind of electrical fault. It was clearly arson. The door had been forced and the interior set alight using some kind of propellant.

  It was too much, the final straw. Twinks became distraught, sobbing that social services had been right to refuse our application. We weren't fit to have charge of a dog, not with things like this going on. He then had a screaming fit, hurling abuse at the police for not doing enough to apprehend our tormentor. He then went for me, grabbing for my hair. Sensitive to his obvious emotional pain and torment the police threatened him with a caution if he didn't control himself.