I have spent countless hours trying to name what it is I am feeling right now. I am unsettled. I am perplexed.
I try to stay in the present, not get swept away in the “what ifs.” I try to focus on what is here and real. My marriage is real. It’s legal. My children, although young adults now, are legally my children, the adoption that binds us to each other is real. It’s legal.
When I was younger than my own kids are now, I went through the arduous medical and legal process to be fully recognized as the man I am. My gender identity is real. My maleness is legal. These are the things that matter to me. These are at the core of who I am. This is what is real and what is at risk.
If you’re like me, if you are a person who loves someone of the same gender, if you are someone whose children’s DNA doesn’t reflect your own, or if you are someone whose gender identity does not match the sex you were assigned at birth, you are probably experiencing mounting tension. But what are you actually feeling?
I am in a deeply emotion-centered profession. I am a pastor. I talk to people all the time about what they are feeling. While there are many things in life for which I have no skill, such as singing or remembering the name of the person I met five seconds ago, there is something I am pretty good at: talking about feelings.
Years ago, I worked as a palliative care chaplain, I have sat with hundreds of people in their final moments, I have explored the ever-shifting array of feelings that people experience as the end approaches. I know feelings, better than I know anything else.
Why, then, have I been vexed by the inability to name what exactly I am feeling? I’m watching our nation slip further from where I believe we should be. But what is this feeling? It’s not exactly fear. It’s not exactly anger. It’s not righteous indignation, which technically isn’t a feeling, but is another thing for which I have a fair amount of aptitude.
I didn’t know the value of legal recognition until I had it. When I was younger and a radical queer person, living in Berkeley, California, I didn’t care about marriage. I was there when marriage equality became the law in that state, I said it was fine for other people. I watched friends get married. I supported them, but I also rolled my eyes a bit, when they weren’t looking.
Then I witnessed the devastation of Proposition 8, which overturned marriage equality in California. I tried to believe that marriage equality shouldn’t be something to want. In retrospect, I now understand that this wasn’t a declaration of my radical queerness, it was self-preservation. I never wanted to go through the heartbreak that I had witnessed so many of my friends endure.
Then I met my beloved Allan, who changed my life. He taught me that I am worth joy, and love, and that I can hope for all the things that felt too scary, too impossible. Eventually marriage equality became legally recognized nationwide. Suddenly, I felt desire more powerful than I could imagine. More than anything, I wanted to be Allan’s husband and our kids’ dad.
I like to joke that I don’t know where babies come from, because I got mine in a courtroom. But the truth is, as a non-biological parent, I have had to fight to be seen as real. I know where love comes from. While our kids are now grown, our legal bond matters, for myriad reasons that straight folks and biological parents take for granted.
I now know the word for how I feel. It hit me, not with a subtle tap, but with the power of a bus. It’s grief. I have held the hands of the dying, I have journeyed with people in their most sacred and heart-wrenching moments, and yet when my own existence feels so precarious, how did I not know that this feeling is grief? There’s a term for when we grieve the things that have not yet happened, anticipatory grief.
I am anticipating that everything that makes me who I am could be stripped away. It hasn’t happened yet, but the anticipation of it is exhausting. I look around our community, I see that so many of us are in this same place of dreadful anticipation. It comes out in many ways, often through horizontal violence, where we turn on one another instead of fighting against those who oppress us.
We can’t grieve in advance, and we can’t prevent our grief by crushing others. All we have is each other. Your struggle might not look like my struggle; your grief might be different than mine.
We live in a cultural context where we are taught to look down the line to the person we can treat as less than us. This is not the reality we have to accept. This is not who we have to be.
How do we handle the anticipation of the terrible situations that are likely to come? We must care as much about others’ struggles as we do about our own. I will fight for you. I hope you will fight for me too.
In our grief, may we find our way to true community. May we finally learn that there is no liberation for any of us, until we are all free.
Rev. Jakob Hero-Shaw is the senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Tampa, MCCTampa.com. He is a proud husband and father in a family that was legalized through marriage equality and adoption.
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