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Every Time I Wanted to Give Up On Love

Kate Sloan

2004. A girl I sort of know is sprawled out on the grass next to me in a park on a sunny afternoon. We’re barely friends, but we’re whiling the day away by playing a game together anyway. The game is this: we pick someone in our sixth-grade class and rate their attractiveness out of 10. How do preteens pick up the concept of reducing people to numerical scores in the first place? Who knows; our culture sucks.

Eventually we run out of subjects and decide to turn our harsh spotlights on each other. I give her what I think is a charitable 8 out of 10, because frankly, rating someone lower than a 7 to their face is unspeakably rude. But then she tells me my rating, and it’s a 4, and I am floored.

Is this why none of the boys in my class have ever seemed interested in me, except for the shrimpy nerd who aces all his English tests (who I secretly would kiss if not for the social stigma)? Am I really that ugly? And am I therefore banished to a loveless life? Will my big nose, big forehead, and wide hips curse me and deprive me in perpetuity of what I want more than anything – love?

I laugh it off, like I’m taking it in stride. But the truth is I can’t take it at all.

2006. The man I think I love is 23 years older than me. And he’s gay. And he’s about to move to New York.

I have a well-developed tendency of obsessing over people I see in plays and musicals, but this is the worst it’s ever been. I paste photos of his face dutifully into a scrapbook; I set up a Google alert for his name; I comb YouTube and Vimeo for any sign of him. I crowd all my romantic hopes onto him without him even knowing. When we say hello at the stage door during the run of his last Toronto show, I blush hard and my guts feel like disco balls shattering. How can someone mean this much to me and not even know who I am?

He isn’t the first gay man who’s swept me up and bowled me over; he won’t be the last. Part of me believes this is how it’ll always be: I’ll fall over and over for people who don’t know me, don’t want me, don’t even want anyone of my gender. Maybe love, to me, will always be lopsided. I carefully resign myself to this until it feels a little less sad. After all, being in the presence of someone who lights you up is a pleasant experience, so long as you can divorce yourself from the hope of them ever noticing you, let alone loving you.

2008. The purple-haired gender-weirdo I call my ex-girlfriend is distracting, vexing. They send me a piece of confessional writing in which they converse with a fictional god, trying to convince the deity to “get me back” for them even though they ended our short relationship – but, they’re careful to add, they don’t actually want me back. We made a terrible couple, and we’d make a terrible couple again. I’d be inclined to agree if I wasn’t so goddamn hung up on them that my grades are actually starting to suffer.

It seems – as it always does when you’re in this situation – that there is no one as smart, as funny, as perfect as my ex in my entire world. Every face except theirs in the sea of students bores me; classes we don’t share are easily forgotten and classes we do share are spent staring at them to the detriment of my studies. Nothing feels as important as this love that could have been.

This, my first real crush on a non-dude, is world-opening in ways I’ve never felt before. It’s easy to suspect, in the wake of such glorious wreckage, that no one will ever be this wonderful and wantable again. And so I lean into my misdirected lust and limerence, and when other people try to get close, I only push them away. This non-love feels realer than anything else that could develop if I only let it.

2014. Predictably, I cry, ending my first serious relationship on a street corner. Three and a half years in, I’ve simply fallen out of love: poof, whoops. My once-beloved is holding me; it’s hard to imagine letting go of such a steady presence. But eventually I do, and I get into a car and never see him again.

Established love began to feel so itchy and insular; I ran out of energy to wrestle my doubts into submission. So I gave up, cut ties, let go. But now I wonder if this means love is out of reach for me in general. Do I alienate everyone who cares enough to get close to me? Does devotion raise my hackles, or worse, bore me? Am I an emotionally stunted oaf who deserves for fuckboys to never text her back until one day she dies alone with nary even a cat to keep her company?

I take some time to myself, solitary, single. I learn what it feels like to breathe in my own body again without someone else breathing down my neck. I think: I just want to be alone for a while. And then, one day, months later, I think: Okay. I think I’m ready to be not-alone again now.

2016. Drunk, I spill my guts to my fuckbuddy-turned-crush on my couch after everyone else has left the party. It, shall we say, doesn’t go well. He knows I like him. He probably knows I love him. I wish he didn’t know. I wish I didn’t love him. I wish a lot of things.

“I feel like you have this crush monster inside you, and seeing me awakens it and makes you feel terrible about yourself,” he says, brow furrowed in a concern I can’t help but find touching. He’s embarrassingly right; seeing him always feels like an illicit high, and always ends in a catastrophic crash. “I think we should just be friends for a while,” he offers, and I nod as tears slide down my cheeks.

The question that has plagued and haunted me for months is: Why doesn’t he love me? I’ll never get an answer that feels satisfying, because the answer is as simple and as awful as it always is: He just doesn’t. I know neither he nor I can force him to love me. I know it’s time to stop trying. Maybe one day we’ll actually be friends.

2017. My oldest friend makes me a gin and tonic and I cry into it until it’s closer to a briny martini, because I’ve just been through the most traumatic breakup of my life. “It’s okay,” she says, “you’ll get over it,” but I can’t imagine how I will.

He was my first daddy dom, the first person I trusted enough to let into that sector of my sexuality. He told me he loved me, treasured me, wanted to be with me for years. He lied.

I lock away my heart in a metaphorical box and tuck it into a metaphorical attic; it’s of no use to me now. But I do that with my kinks too, pushing them away self-protectively. If I never want, need, and enjoy anything that deeply again, I can never be this devastated again when it’s taken from me. I take another swig of my salty G&T and tell my friend, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to trust anyone again.”

But 4 months later, I go on a first date with someone whose daddy-dom vibes are off the charts. My inner submissive little girl stirs and stretches, but I shush her. It’s not safe for you out here, little one. Go back to sleep. She won’t. She’s starry-eyed. She wants to play.

So little by little, I let myself fall in love. I let myself open up. I let myself feel hope and safety and comfort and all those dorky feelings I thought had been smashed out of my heart. Love grows back like a stubborn seedling. I water it, and wonder if this time it’ll finally take.

How They Fuck Me

Kate Sloan

Gender is a sex toy. That’s not all it is, but it can be that.

I remember the first person I dated telling me they’d always been gender-weird and sort of wished they’d been born a boy. I remember their backwards baseball caps and baggy cargo shorts and strong, angular fingers. I remember my heart swelling, like a classical music sting in an overwrought rom-com, every time their boyness pressed up against their girlness. They could be flirtatious and dapper and charming, and none of these things felt gendered to me, or if they did, they felt multi-gendered, a prismatic rainbow of light they cast all around them. We both referred to them then as my “girlfriend” but that word seemed inadequate and small next to the bursting gradient I felt them to be.

In the coming years, several friends and partners came out to me as trans or non-binary, and each time, it felt like a shimmering gift. The trust they placed in me was so powerful, so surprising. I took it seriously. I did research, and asked questions, and said thank you.

And sometimes one of the questions was “How would you like me to affirm your gender during sex?” and sometimes the answers were very, very hot.

I remember my high-school FWB’s admission that they thought they were genderqueer, or genderfluid, or trans. We spent hours on a baby names website together, scrolling through androgynous names, until we found one that fit. They tried it on like a suit jacket and I saw them glow when I used it. That made me glow too.

I took them shopping for smart vests and vintage ties. Thus kitted out, they looked – and looked like they felt – handsome and whole.

The way they fucked me changed. Their approach became more confident, their touch more sure. One day after school, they had me pinned against my front door, hands roaming all over me; I said, nervous about curfews, “Maybe you should get going soon,” and they deadpanned, “Or I could have sex with you.” I felt the shivers of gender euphoria-by-proxy; we felt more aligned with each other now that they were more aligned with themselves. I tugged on their tie and they smiled like a wolf.

There have been other flitting hints of gender variance throughout my love stories, sometimes overt, sometimes covert. There was the high school boyfriend who tried on my red lacy bra and panties on a dare at a party, and loved how he looked in them so much that I bought him a bra for Christmas (to the chagrin and mystification of my mom, who accompanied me to the mall). There was the college boyfriend who told me he’d feel just as at peace in his gender if he’d been born a girl. There was the beardy beau who scoffed at my admission that I’m attracted mostly to masculinity; “I’m not very masculine,” he said, and I saw him suddenly through new eyes. Almost everyone I’ve ever loved, or passionately liked, has stepped outside their appointed gender box in some way. It’s my privilege to have seen these people how they hopefully wanted to be seen. I’m always searching for ways to do that better.

When mb first told me they were questioning their gender, we were sitting in an ornate, empty bar in Montreal, cocktails in hand. “I’ve been having some… gender feelings lately,” they said, “like really enjoying it when you call me feminine words.” This hadn’t been purposeful on my part – I calls ’em like I see ’em, and what I always saw when I looked at my partner was a person who at once embodied handsomeness and prettiness, beauty that transcended gender lines. We’d played before with dressing them up in my clothes, adorning them with lipstick and eyeliner, for scenes that then portended only power exchange and not a shift in identity. This revelation wasn’t a surprise; it hit me in the gut with a thump of Oh. Okay. Of course.

“What resources do you think I should look at?” they asked next, and I recommended My New Gender Workbook, Kate Bornstein’s seminal text, which I’ve gifted to many a gender-curious friend. I can’t advise directly on these issues but the other Kate can, and I trust her to. She did.

It was a few weeks later that mb breathed into the phone late at night, “I think I’m non-binary.” A few weeks after that, we went shopping – first for eyeliner and lipstick, then for shirts and bags – and I very nearly cried each time they emerged from a fitting room in something sweetly feminine or starkly androgynous. I couldn’t, and can’t, fathom such bravery. Every coming-out is a feat and a blessing.

The next night, we got sloshed at a Toronto tiki bar, and they asked me, voice shaking, if I had any reservations about dating a gender-weird person long-term. If perhaps I had envisioned a more binaristic trajectory for my life story. I wiped tears from my eyes at the very thought that anyone would reject such a gorgeous, wonderful person for something as unobtrusive as their gender. I told them I love them and that’s what matters. When you love someone this deeply, the fleeting states of what they are never seem as important as who they are, that seed at the center of their heart that stays the same even as the outside changes. Gender variance never scared me away from someone whose hand I wanted to hold. They could still hold my hand, as we walked through life together.

Once again, I saw gender confidence translate into sexual confidence. When my beloved murmured at night, “Daddy’s gonna slide their cock so deep inside you,” or “Do you like it when daddy makes you come in their mouth?” nothing felt different, and yet it all felt even better. When they kissed me roughly until our lipsticks mingled together, or let me put their eyeliner on them before they put my collar on me, I felt assured again and again that nothing had been lost. My Sir, my daddy, my partner, is still all of those things. They simply embody those roles now with truer self-expression and more gender-fuckery – two things that have never scared me and have always pulled me closer to people, wanting to bask in their bold beauty.

Love and lust can take many forms and can flow in many directions. I feel lucky every day to be with someone I love this much – no matter what or who they are, what I call them, what they wear, or how they fuck me.

Protocol Diaries: Love Letters

Kate Sloan

mb

“Dear mb: It’s hard to know what to write to you in a love letter because we are already so forthcoming about our feelings. A letter of this genre should be juicy, revealing, exciting, and you already know the juiciest thing I could tell you, which is that I’m extremely, embarrassingly, unchill-ly in love with you and have been for a while.” -April 1st 2018

When mb came to visit me in Toronto for the first time, 3 months into our sparkly new long-distance relationship, he brought me a present: a little blue Moleskine notebook and matching pen. Tools for my favorite vocation, in my favorite color. I glowed from the romance of it.

Once we’d spent a lovely weekend together and he’d flown back to New York, I began pondering what to do with this adorable notebook. In discussing this via text, one of us mentioned something about love letters, and the other said, “I was thinking that too!” And so began one of our many romantic traditions.

“I love you, Kate Sloan. Come fly with me. Be my co-pilot as we chart new adventures together. The plane I’m in is about to land, but six months in, I still feel like our journey together is just beginning. Yours with love, mb.” -June 22nd 2018

We each hand off the notebook to the other every time we see each other in person. We jettison it back and forth between Toronto and New York (and, on unique occasions, Boston, Alexandria, and Montreal). Each time we say goodbye, the person who now possesses the notebook writes a love letter for the other. Then, when we’re together again, mb reads the new letter aloud to me, whether he wrote it or I did. Typically, there is cuddling and crying. And then we go out for dinner.

“Dear mb: You know this already, but let me reiterate how happy it makes me that you are coming out as my partner this week. It makes me feel so loved, I feel like my heart is going to overflow and explode. It makes me feel like I’m really a part of your life, and like you want me to be.” -October 19th 2018

I dutifully copy each of mb’s letters into my own notebook, so I’ll have them to review even when our tome of love letters is in a different country from me. They remind me, at difficult times, that I am loved and appreciated. I am a verbally-minded person who absorbs information best when it comes in the form of articulate words, and so these letters are one of my best tools for combating the “Does he really love me?” shadows that come creeping in. Of course he does. It’s right there in black and white. (Or blue and cream, as the case may be.)

“Don’t be afraid that you or your feelings are too much for me. Their muchness has helped me get in touch with my own in a more authentic way than I have in a while. Your transparency and empathy as a partner are striking and rare. I treasure you, your tears, and the sense of relief that comes when we’ve said our deepest truths to one another.” -November 9th 2018

The practice of writing love letters – a new one every other month or so – is an exercise in mindfulness and being present. I have to dig deep in my heart and ask myself honestly: What do I love about this person, and how can I express it to him well enough that he will deeply, truly understand?

It’s so easy, in long-term relationships, to stop complimenting each other on the qualities and behaviors you love, because you’ve loved them for so long that it seems unnecessary to point them out further. But, as mb once told me, some things bear repeating in relationships. “I love you” is one of those things. I want to say it as much as I can, in as many ways as possible.

“You’re serious about me, and I’m serious about you too. I want to be with you for more years, more laughs, more trips, more late-night phone calls, more milestones, more orgasms, more kisses, more everything I can experience with you. I want to work hard to make this last and to make it good. That’s what I mean when I say I’m serious about you, Sir.” -December 11th 2018

I also appreciate our little notebook as a record of our budding romance – the way it has bloomed, deepened, and aged. For all my past relationships, I only have my own journal entries to refer to if I want to remind myself how each romance felt. For this one, I have direct windows into the people we each were when we were newly in love. Our limerence leaps off the page, and re-reading our letters always reinvigorates me, like: Oh yeah. I can feel like that. That’s amazing.

“Even at times when you feel sick, anxious, depressed, or exhausted, I want you to know that I’m happy I’m with you. I love taking care of you, holding you, figuring out ways to help you smile, relax, and feel safe again. I’m here for you through all of that, little one, and I want to be. I’m not going anywhere.” -December 28th 2018

We’re about halfway through the notebook now, more than a year into this tradition. I hope we keep it up until the book is filled, and beyond. I hope we can remember, even on days when our connection may be strained or the distance may be hard, that the most basic and important thing you can do in a romantic relationship is to love your partner and to make sure they know that you do.

No matter how many different ways I say it, no matter how many letters I write, no matter how much time passes or how many miles we are apart, one thing remains true: I love mb and I want him to know it.

20 Local Crushes Who Make Me Blush

Kate Sloan


1. The charmingly bedraggled server at the vegan café. He forever looks like he just rolled out of bed, hung over, the morning after modeling in a Calvin Klein underwear shoot, threw some rumpled clothes on and walked to work. Once I saw him greet a customer, “Hello! Happy Monday!” and it was Wednesday. Maybe he was thrown off because she was cute. Maybe he’s just like that.

2. The hot soft-butch waitress at the diner, who’s clearly just doing this to support her true passion of stand-up comedy or improv or TV acting, because she’s loud and hilarious and talks with her hands. She dresses like a female character from The Sandlot if that movie had any girls, and she always gets my breakfast order perfect. One time I overheard her telling a coworker about the shitty misogynist jokes in an improv show I’d also seen the night before, and my heart swelled for this woke little ragamuffin.

3. The guy who does the lights and sound for my favorite Friday-night improv show. He’s the main reason I keep coming back, week after week, year after year. His cues are usually funnier than the entire rest of the show put together. He punctuates scenes with absurd music stings and unexpected-yet-perfect sound effects that dial up the funny without ever stepping on anyone’s toes. I blush every time he takes my ticket at the door, because brilliantly funny people are my kryptonite. I don’t use the word “genius” lightly, but…

4. The intense blonde hostess/server at the high-end steakhouse who held my gaze with her cool blue eyes while explaining the entire complicated menu from memory. How the fuck is she that pretty. How the fuck is she that smart. How the fuck can I get her to step on my face.

5. The beefy, bespectacled nerd at the Greek pastry place who always brings me my spanakopita right-side-up in its little to-go bag and always, always says “Thank you” when I put coins in the tip jar.

6. The unbelievably tall improvisor I occasionally see in longform shows, but don’t specifically seek out much anymore because one time he made me laugh so hard that I accidentally spit beer into the hair of the lady sitting in front of me and now I am ashamed forever. Also because one time an improvisor friend of mine introduced us at a party and I, at a total loss for words, said, “You’re super funny!” He knows he is. He said, “Thanks!” At least he was polite.

7. The multi-instrumentalist who used to accompany my favorite quirky singer-songwriter in tiny, intimate shows at the queer piano bar. The sight of his tongue darting out to wet his clarinet reed was of particular interest to me. Once I saw him leaving a school playground with his small son in tow, and my heart melted into a sticky puddle.

8. The “senior executive barback” at the fancy cocktail bar with the “verbal menu.” He will take your order, no matter how vague or nonsensical, and spin it into something not only drinkable but downright divine. Once he complimented my arm tattoo and I was so disoriented I nearly fell off my barstool. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen look devastatingly handsome in a pineapple-print button-down. But of course, competence can do that to a person.

9. The musical theatre actor with the impossibly luminous face. His headshot in the playbill never quite captures it. Once he smiled and waved at me and my mom from across a busy street because he recognized us from the front row of the Sondheim musical we’d just seen him in (ugh, help). I would see him in anything, as evidenced by the time I considered taking a 4-hour bus ride each way to see him play the lead in a small-town staged reading of Angels in America. I eventually decided against it because my boyfriend was going to be in town, but… I almost wanted to drag him along.

10. The spiky-haired, big-grinned boy who’s always around to help me find the lube or condoms I need at the giant gayborhood sex shop. He still makes me giggle like an absolute weirdo, even though we’ve been fucking on-and-off for nearly two years.

11. The absurdly competent, pretty, blonde bartender at the cozy cocktail bar. She knows how to make my favorite drink even though it’s not on the menu and everyone else who works there seems mystified by it. The way she handles a cocktail shaker is a source of particular fascination.

12. The tiny brunette server at the Greek diner, who brings me my $6 breakfast with speed and precision, all the while seeming so cold and unaffected that I might as well be a piece of gum stuck to her shoe. Fuck me up, queen. And bring me some orange juice, too, if you could. If you think I’ve earned it.

13. The very tall, very aloof comedian who sometimes tends bar at the improv theatre. It’s not a fancy bar – once, we ordered bourbon on the rocks, and he looked alarmed and said, “Pardon me?!” – but it’s cozy and crowded and sometimes he even smiles.

14. The theatre actor I’ve seen in parts as diverse as George Bailey, Louis Ironson, and Ebenezer Scrooge. His diction is impeccable. He’s a flamboyant, articulate dream. I saw a play once where he paraded up and down the boards performing a half-hour-long monologue in the middle of act one, and I wanted to stand up and scream at the rest of the audience, “Do you even realize how amazing this is?!”

15. The soft-spoken sushi server who brings me tofu and edamame before my meal. I have ordered the same exact lunch from him dozens of times and he still pretends (?) he doesn’t know what I’m going to ask for. Reserved shyness exudes from his very pores.

16. The no-nonsense bartender at the queer bookstore, who pours me my double whiskey and then hands it to me while entangling her deep brown eyes with mine. One time I saw her on the subway and her biceps were bulging out of her tank top. I wondered if handling big bottles of booze all day makes you strong.

17. The chatty LCBO clerk who reminds me of Fred Armisen, only older and, you know, probably not an abuser. He always seems to love his job, and when I pop in to buy whiskey or wine, he makes a big show of checking my ID because of how young I supposedly look, in a way that seems just the slightest bit flirty.

18. In its entirety, the longform improv troupe that always makes me remember why longform improv is my favorite. The stories they weave are as complex and absurd as their brains, individually and collectively. Once, I matched with one of them on a dating site, and he promptly unmatched me when I gushed that I was a fan. I only slightly regret this.

19. The beautiful brunette barista who always calls me “sweetie” and upgrades my drink size for no reason. We barely know each other, but somehow her conviction that I always need more caffeine feels like a deep, searching knowledge of my soul.

20. The androgynous server at the Mexican restaurant, punctuating her uniform with a backwards baseball cap. She brought me and my boyfriend perfect margaritas, sat almost uncomfortably close to me on the arm of my chair, chatted with us about our plans for the rest of the night, and then asked, inexplicably, “Are you guys chefs?” After she left, we looked at each other in bewilderment for a beat, before my boyfriend asked: “Did she smell good?”

Who are your local crushes?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Do I Want Kids? Part 1: Mental Health

Kate Sloan

Am I too crazy to have kids?

This question haunts me. I’m embarrassed at how often it flits through my head. When I get sucked down into the whirlpool of depression or anxiety, those moods pose a question which only serves to perpetuate them: Are you too fucked-up to ever get the things you want? And of course, in the throes of sadness and fear, “yes” is the only answer I can fathom.

There are times when my mental health is so bad that I can barely take care of myself – food, sleep, hygiene – so it’s scary to imagine trying to take care of someone else at those times. How can you be responsible for another human being if you’re crying too hard to get up off the floor, or if the world beyond your bed feels too scary to contemplate?

I’ve heard many a horror story from people whose parents raised them in a maelstrom of mental illness. Children of the severely depressed can be neglected; children of the deeply anxious can absorb compulsive fears; children of people with personality disorders can grow up hurt and confused, unable to truly trust anyone. Of course, these stories aren’t universal, and I probably know just as many people whose parents struggled with mental illness and who nonetheless turned out fine, but it’s hard to tune out these narratives when you’re scared they could come true for you.

I’d like to think my co-parent would be a relatively sane, grounded person, to help balance me out. (As much as I admire folks who raise kids solo, that doesn’t seem emotionally or financially tenable for me.) But then you risk creating an off-kilter family dynamic where one person is over-relied upon to prop up everyone else, psychologically and logistically, and that’s not fair at all. Maybe this is an area where polyamory could be an advantage: a solid support network of de facto other parents could take some pressure off. They do say it takes a village to raise a child, after all. The results of a legal paternity test can tell you a lot, but they’re not the whole picture, and a parent or guardian obviously doesn’t have to be genetically or legally related to a kid to assist in raising that kid.

Even supposing that I could overcome my own craziness enough to take care of a child – and/or rely on the help of other, steadier humans – I would still worry about transmitting that craziness to my kid. Some varieties of DNA test can predict whether a person might develop certain mental illnesses, but even if I went the adoption route, I’d still be concerned my negative thought patterns and tendency to overreact to emotional stimuli would get passed on to my little one through sheer osmosis. I would have to be careful and deliberate in the ways I chose to behave around them, and the values and habits I let them pick up – though I suppose that’s true for any parent. You probably want to clean up your act around someone you’re raising, to some extent, whether by quitting smoking or cutting back on profane language or, yes, consciously dialling back your “crazy” behaviors if you can. Hell, doing this might even help me feel less crazy, too.

That said, I don’t think it’s all bad for a mentally ill person to raise a child. Hell, both my parents struggle with depression and anxiety, and if anything, it just made them more empathetic when I started to notice my own psychological symptoms. I’ve also learned about cognitive-behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy while getting treated for my mental illnesses, and these are useful frameworks for anyone seeking to moderate and process their feelings. I could teach these systems to my kid(s), and maybe then they would have an easier time with childhood’s classically outsized emotions, like sadness, rage, and restlessness. Increased emotional literacy is one of the major silver linings I’ve found in my struggles with depression and anxiety, so I may as well try to impart it on my spawn.

It’s also worth noting that depression and anxiety don’t necessarily preclude you from being loving and supportive; you may just show your love and support in different ways than a neurotypical person, depending on how your symptoms manifest. I can still be there for loved ones when I’m having a rough time. It definitely looks different than my emotional support does when I’m feeling better – there’s fewer words of wisdom and more sitting in silence and solidarity – but it’s still a form of love. As the brilliant Carly Boyce pointed out in a suicide intervention workshop of hers that I attended, sometimes a person in distress doesn’t need you to pull them out of that distress – they just need you to keep them company until the feeling passes. As someone well-versed in distress, I could certainly do that for my kid.

So, am I too crazy to have kids? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s off the table entirely. I think, in order to feel comfortable taking that step, I would first have to feel stable in my medication regimen, brush up on my CBT and DBT skills, and have a relatively settled, dependable social support structure. But once those things were in place, I might just become a hyper-empathetic – if chronically frazzled – mom.

 

This 3-part series on parenthood was generously sponsored by the folks at TestMeDNA.com. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.