Hey, everybody. This is my very first post here, so before I get started I'd like to say hello and introduce myself a bit... I'm a 37 year old married mother of two from South Africa. And, I'm bisexual. Suspend disbelief for one moment whilst you take in the fact that I only discovered this bisexuality last year. Yeah, I know, it's weird. I didn't think that could happen to anyone either - but maybe, just maybe, there is someone out there going through something similar. Hearing that I've gone through it may make you feel better about it!
So the truth, I suppose, if I'm really honest with myself, is that the realisation didn't come as such a big surprise to me. My first crush was on a girl. We were in seventh grade and I had it quite bad for her. Through high school I crushed out on boys and married one when we were both very young. I've had a couple of other major crushes on girls - and it seems impossible now to think back and realise that I did not understand that I was attracted to them. I am fortunate in many ways. I love my husband, and he returns the love with interest. Even so, I was very nervous to approach him last year with the news of my different orientation. I did pluck up the courage to do it though and found him awesomely supportive! In addition, because I am faithful to him, I will not be experiencing the love of a woman.
It hasn't been plain sailing though - I've told a select handful of people and not all of them have taken it as kindly as he did. I very soon came to the realisation that it has nothing to do with anyone else. And it got me to thinking about labels in general. For a time, I was actually imposing this bisexual label on myself. Being bisexual has brought me to an understanding of some of my own behaviours. I had stopped doing many of the things that I enjoyed, because I thought that society didn't expect a woman like me to be doing them. I found that labelling myself in that way felt a bit like tying myself up in a tight rubber band. The stopping and the labelling were miserable. So I took a step back and asked myself if I really wanted that. Look, I'm not sure that we can ever entirely escape labels. White woman, black man, ADHD child.. society seems to like defining itself with one or another term, when underneath it all we are all just humans made up of flesh and blood. But we do have a choice about how we describe ourselves - to ourselves and to others. The decision I came to was to just BE - just do the things I wanted to do - and who cares if Joe Blog next door doesn't agree. We are not boxes to be packed up, labelled and put in a container. As my teenagers keep telling me, "it's my life".
So... my orientation - or my true perception of it - changed. But nothing else did. I'm me, and a happier me now that I've got to the bottom of who I really am, and that is that.
Now that I've introduced myself to you, I can get on with writing about topics that are close to my heart, and the next posting will feature acceptance or rejection of a child in their formative years - positive and negative ways to react to children.
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