Poly Analogues - Reserving Nicknames

I discovered something today. I was making a newbie poly mistake with my monogamous bio-family.

Most of what I learned about polyamory, I actually learned from my monogamous family. For instance, I've written before about how being adopted was a poly analogue - that being adopted taught me the importance of intentional family. My adopted parents did a very good job of teaching me that love and acceptance into a family had nothing to do with who contributed what genes, and that a strong family was one that chose to be a family.

But today, I learned another lesson that applies in both the poly and monogamous worlds. It wasn't quite as profound - it was an etiquette question - but I am constantly reminding people who have questions about polyamory that, most of the time, it's not a poly problem ... it's a people problem. Here is yet one more example of just such a problem.

I was raised from birth by my adopted family, so to me, they're my family. When I say "my mom", I am referring to the woman who raised me. A handful of years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet the woman who gave birth to me, and all of my living biological family on her side. Because I have spent the better part of 30 years telling people "my adopted mom IS my mom", I was hesitant to call her "mom" when I met her. So, for the past several years, I have been calling my birth mother by her first name.

In the beginning, it was mostly because I attached a certain significance to the word "mom" and the role it went with, whereas this woman was a stranger to me and did not fit the role of "mom", even though she gave birth to me and seemed like a perfectly nice lady. Over time, however, as I got to know her, I continued the naming convention out of concern for my adopted mom.

From the very beginning of the search for my bio-mom, I have been concerned about how my adopted mom would feel about me connecting to my bio-mom. I wanted my adopted mom to know, I mean really know how much I loved her and appreciated her, and that my bio-mom would never, in any way, shape, or form, take her place. Sound familiar?

My adopted mom would always be my mom. She would always be the woman who tried for years, unsuccessfully, to have me; who waited and faced disappointment after disappointment until finally an adoption came through; who picked me up from school when I was sick; who helped me with my homework; who worked in a dead-end job for years because it had good pay and good benefits, to support her family; and who taught me inumerable lessons. No one else can ever take that history away and no one else could ever take her place. When I met my bio-mom, the first thing I said to her was "thank you" for making the decision to put me up for adoption and for choosing my parents. I told my adopted mom, when she asked me if I ever wanted to find my bio-mom, that the only reason I wanted to meet my bio-mom, was to tell her that. And I did.

So I reserved the title "mom" for my adopted mom as a symbol of her specialness in my life and, even when my relationship with my bio-mom turned into an actual friendship and not just some arbitrary "link" due to shared genes, I continued to hold that term in reserve for my adopted mom.

I think I noticed I was doing this somewhere in the back of my mind, but I mostly ignored it until today.

Today, I had a mini-crisis over what to call my bio-grandfather, and it brought out all this silliness to the forefront.

At first, I couldn't remember my bio-grandfather's first name, so I panicked a little about how to refer to him now that I'm about to go visit him again at the end of the year. Before I could embarrass myself by asking "uh, what's my grandfather's name again?", my bio-mom sent me an email in which she referred to him as "Papa".

So then I started to worry, if I call him by a familial title like "Papa", but I don't call her "mom", will she get her feelings hurt? Should I call him by his first name to make it less offensive that I still call her by her first name? OMG what am I going to call these people!

I sent a slightly hysterical SMS to one of my partners freaking out about what to do. Then I noticed the irony of Miss Poly Manners having an etiquette crisis. Then I noticed the parallel between this and polyamory.

This situation is the same thing as a pre-existing couple beginning to open their relationship, and one of the spouses getting a new partner, but saving certain nicknames only for the spouse. As in: "You must never call your girlfriend Bunnylips - that word is for me as your wife, and me alone."

I have long been of the opinion that reserving a symbol of your specialness that exists outside of yourself is a recipe for disaster because, if you are special due to something outside of you, then that something can always be taken away from you. In other words, if you wear a wedding ring, and that ring is special because it represents your special relationship, then that's fine. But if you refuse to allow your partner to give a ring to anyone else because it is the ring that makes you special, then your specialness can always be taken away from you. If being called "honey" makes you feel loved, terrific. But if the word "honey" is only special because you are the only one to be called "honey", then any other use of the term makes you less special.

Since I know I am special just for being me, it is absolutely impossible for any of my specialness to be taken away from me just because my partner does or says something with someone other than me that he also happens to do or say with me. Calling me "mi amo" is a sign that I am a special person in his life, but it is because I am me that I have that special place, not because he calls me that term. So that he calls his wife "mi amo" also doesn't detract from either of us being special to him. Do you see what I'm saying here? The symbol is representative of our specialness, the symbol does not GIVE us a specialness. We are not special because we have that symbol, that symbol is special because it represents us, and that cannot be reproduced or duplicated, even if someone else gets the same symbol.

So, back to my family. As a kid, all us cousins and friends and neighborhood kids used to call the parents of our friends "mom & dad". We called most adults by their first names, but our especially-close friends' parents were also given the honorifics of "mom & dad". None of the parents ever seemed to feel slighted when their kids called some other kid's parents "mom & dad" because those parents were being called "mom & dad" by those other kids too.

Then, in all the families I knew growing up, anyone who married into a family called everyone in the in-law family by whatever title their spouse called them. In other words, my mom always called my dad's parents "mom & dad" and vice versa. So there was a whole lot of throwing around of the terms "mom & dad" and other familial nicknames.

Which means that, if you combine my whole rant on specialness with the historical precedent, I was being exceedingly silly in worrying about what names to call my bio-mom and bio-grandfather. My adopted mom is still my mom, even if I call my bio-mom "mom", or my hypothetical mother-in-law "mom", or my best friend's mother "mom". And my bio-grandfather isn't taking anything away from my godfather by being addressed by the same name of "Papa", nor is he taking my dad's place just because my nephews call my dad "Papa".

My parents are special because of who they are, and they are given those special names because those names symbolize how special they are as people. They are not special *because* they have those names - those *names* are special because of who holds them. My mom is not special because I call her mom. The word "mom" is special because it refers to people who fill a special role. My mom has a lot of names. She is "mom", she is "mother" when I'm being a snotty teen, she is her first name, she is Mrs., she is Nani. She is not special because she has those names. All those names are special because they represent her as a unique person, and that unique person is unchanged, no matter what you call her and no matter who else gets called by the same name.

So, rather than continuing to draw arbitrary lines around certain terms, rather than boxing off nicknames as being the connoters of the specialness instead of representative of the recipients' inherent specialness, and rather than stressing myself out about this whole matter, I'm letting go of the habit of reserving generic nicknames. I'm going to call people by their actual titles or nicknames because that's who they are, and expend my energy reminding them of their specialness in ways that actually matter. But I'll still use unique identifiers like real names to third parties, so there isn't any confusion about which "mom" I'm talking about.

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Some links to building personal security:

• http://blog.franklinveaux.com/2008/05/some-thoughts-on-noticing-differences/ - Some Thoughts On Noticing Differences (but what if he compares me to someone else?)
• http://blog.franklinveaux.com/2005/06/some-thoughts-on-being-special/ - Some Thoughts On Being Special
• http://www.morethantwo.com/becomingsecure.html - How To Become A Secure Person
• http://blog.franklinveaux.com/2005/08/some-musings-about-security-in-relationship/ - Some Musings About Security In Relationship

Poly Analogues - Placing Limitations To Protect Insecurities

Along the same lines as the last post but totally independent of each other, I had a conversation with my mom (my adopted mom) the other day. See, my adopted sister is *also* adopted. Like me, she was adopted at birth, so other than the lack of shared genes, we are every bit the definition of "sisters". In fact, I even got to name my little sister (well, her middle name, but it's the name we called her for years, and the name I still call her, even though she goes by her first name to everyone outside the family). The reason I located my bio-mom in the first place is because my sister made it her life's quest to locate her own bio-parents, and when her bio-mom was found, the social worker offered to locate mine. I agreed on a whim.

My sister's story did not have the happy ending that mine did, although I believe it had the *better* ending for her. My sister's bio-mom is a mess. The day my sister first saw her bio-mom in person was at her bio-mom's parole hearing. My sister tried to begin a relationship of some sort with her bio-mom, but discovered that she was most important to her bio-mom as someone with a steady job who could bring her the groceries that she couldn't buy for herself due to her drug problem. So after doing so a couple of times, my sister just dropped out of touch with her bio-mom entirely, knowing that she couldn't help her but would break herself trying, and she consoles herself by praying for her bio-mom.

The reason I believe this is the better ending for my sister is because my sister and I have very different views on our adoptions. I knew from the beginning that my bio-parents were teenagers and that's why I was given up for adoption. I knew from the beginning that being put up for adoption was the smarter choice. I knew from the beginning that I was very, very fortunate to have been raised with a stable, middle-class couple who desperately wanted children and who loved me every bit as much as any parent could love their children. I knew from the beginning that being given up for adoption was not a rejection, but the ultimate sacrifice of true love to give one's children a better life than one could provide oneself. I had nothing more than idle curiosity about my bio-parents - who did I look like, who did I take after, who gave me the genes for loving sci-fi books and pets?

But my sister never saw her adoption as the wiser choice. She always saw her adoption as being "given up" by her bio-mom. She always felt rejected and unwanted, no matter how much love and attention our parents showered on us. She sought her bio-parents with desperation from the time she discovered the internet as a teenager. For my sister, life was always a "grass is greener on the other side" sort of situation.

So when she found her bio-mom and discovered the kind of life she could have had, especially when she learned of the fates of her half-sisters who were not fortunate enough to have been adopted out, it gave my sister a newfound respect and admiration for our adopted parents. My sister is much more content now, much more aware of her privileges, and of the love our parents have for her. I think she is finally done seeking some unattainable thing and she is finally making her life really her own life now. That's why I say it was the better ending for her - I think it taught her a lesson she really needed to learn and her life is better because of it.

So all of that is to put into context the following poly analogue story.

My adopted mom and my bio-mom have never met, have never spoken, have never exchanged words except for one letter that my bio-mom wrote as a teenager, basically thanking my adopted mom for taking me. Both have expressed interest in meeting the other, but both have done so in a very passive way, to avoid intruding on the other. On my adopted mom's side, her hesitation was always out of concern for my sister.

My sister's story played out from beginning to end all before I located my bio-mom. So my adopted mom was always afraid that reaching out to my bio-mom would sort of rub it in my sister's face that her story didn't end as happily. Not that any of us *intended* to do so, but that it might unintentionally hurt my sister to be reminded that she was the one who wanted so bad to find her bio-mom, and I didn't much care one way or the other, yet it was I who had the feel-good reunion story of the year and not her.

My adopted mom was so concerned about making my sister feel left out or somehow "less" that my adopted mom did not open herself up to exploring a relationship with my bio-mom. My adopted mom was afraid that my sister's insecurities about who she was and how loved she was would be triggered if my adopted mom developed a relationship with her other daughter's bio-mom, since my bio-mom was so much "better" than my sister's bio-mom. My adopted mom was afraid that contact with my bio-mom would be a constant reminder to my sister of how much her own bio-mom sucked, and that would reflect on my sister as a person. Keep in mind that my sister never once asked my adopted mom to refrain from contacting my bio-mom. My adopted mom is self-refraining out of concern for my sister's feelings.

I realize this is convoluted, but it's a classic poly/mono story. One partner is insecure, so the other partner places limits on himself about the types of relationships he can explore out of concern for the insecure partner. As I continually explain when people ask about the whole jealousy thing - monogamy never solved the jealousy issue as far as I could tell. The only thing that solves jealousy is communication and a desire to rid oneself of the jealousy that puts one in uncomfortable, but personal-growth situations.

I'm not sure how it came up, but very recently, my adopted mom and my sister talked about this very problem. My sister has had some years to heal and to look at her situation from other perspectives now. My sister believes that she will not have any issues if my adopted mom and my bio-mom contact each other. And I think my adopted mom would very much like to do so, but I think she has been burying that desire as deeply as she can. I believe my adopted mom has felt a drive to thank my bio-mom in much the same way that I did when I met her.

So even in my ultra-monogamous, slightly religious, insecure-and-often-prefers-to-remain-that-way family, we had to learn to deal with jealousy, with placing limits on behaviour to protect someone else's insecurities, and to go through emotionally difficult situations in order to come out the other side with a better understanding of ourselves and the security in ourselves and our relationships to allow our loved ones the freedom to pursue other relationships.

It's not a poly problem, it's a people problem. Shying away from these situations, insisting on holding onto the rules and the insecurities under the blanket of "there is no One Right Way, so stop critiquing my methods", not only does not help your poly relationships, but it hinders your other relationships as well. As is often repeated in poly circles, the skills learned in polyamory are not unique to polyamory, but all relationships everywhere can benefit from them.

My sister is much healthier now; my sister's relationship with my adopted mom is healthier now; my adopted mom is now free to reach out to someone whom she has always wanted to reach out to; our entire family dynamic is in a much better place, with more security and more freedom. Funny how freedom and security often go together. When freedom is curtailed under the banner of "security", it usually doesn't make people any more secure, it just takes away their freedom. This is not a poly problem, it's a people problem.