Out of the Closet at 40 — No Not That Closet, the Other One

If my DNA wants to reproduce, does that mean I want to?

CW: miscarriage

I started turning het when I was approaching forty. I went through a sort of reverse coming out of the closet.

It took me a couple of years to come to terms with it. For someone who was a long-time Lesbian, it was a big surprise and quite traumatic.

Could I still call myself a Lesbian?

Or did I have to call myself a bi-sexual? That really didn’t feel right.

“Big deal,” the young ’uns might think, “so what?”

For me, it was a big deal. I had suffered, I fought for being a Lesbian.

Being a Lesbian wasn’t only who I was attracted to, it was my culture, distinct from gay male and heterosexual culture.

I was a Lesbian with a capital ‘L’ to denote that it was my culture, as distinct from being lesbian, merely my sexual orientation. It was inextricable from my identity.

Being attracted only to women, my life was uncomplicated by the divided loyalties and the contradictions that heterosexual feminists face.

Then, at age thirty-nine, I started feeling attracted to a male friend of mine. He had a partner, so it was easy to deny my feelings. I buried them until I had a dream that forced me to admit them to myself. It wasn’t easy.

I hadn’t had a partner for years, had given up my car, and was pretty much the only out Lesbian remaining in the area. I was a culture of one in my day-to-day working and social life. I wondered if I had been assimilated by heterosexual culture because of my isolation.

I felt like I was betraying myself.

When I confessed to a lesbian friend that I was attracted to a man, she was completely unfazed and reckoned I was with the majority of lesbians over age thirty-eight!

Wow. This was not something I’d heard anyone talk about. Ever.

Another friend of mine confirmed this. “Biological clock,” she said, “it happened me when I was thirty-eight. It’s your DNA, shouting at you to reproduce!”

Okay. That made some kind of sense.

Did I want a baby? A child? “Do I?” I had to ask myself, feeling a bizarre disconnect between self and body.

Was I truly attracted to this man, or was my DNA taking over in a bid to reproduce?

If my body wanted children, did it know better? Should I pay attention and let my DNA have its way?

I like children, I understand children, and I have worked with children — other people’s children. Quite apart from there being no chance of ever getting pregnant, I knew, or thought I knew, that I shouldn’t have my own children.

I come from generations of hard women, two long lines of unloving or narcissistic mothers, and a criminally dysfunctional family, where decades of child sexual abuse by a much older brother was condoned by my parents.

I reckoned I was too selfish, unloved, and unloving to have children of my own.

I did not trust myself to end the cycle.

Don’t get me wrong. I am kind and care in a generous, general way, but I am not loving. I use the word but do not really believe in it. Compassion, yes; Love, no.

Happily, I like myself and my own company but am always quick to point out my flaws if someone is taking a romantic interest in me.

Probably, this means I don’t allow people to love me. Oh well, you can’t have everything. If they are loving their rose-coloured version of me, it’s not me they love, anyway!

I thought about all this, good and long.

When I was younger, seeing one of my straight sisters with her kids, my determination to never have my own was reinforced.

When she was pregnant the first time, she talked about her fears that it would be a boy who might grow up to be a rapist.

Her second pregnancy, she said she hoped with all her heart that it was a girl and that she would grow up to be a lesbian!

In front of her kids, she would warn me, “Never have kids. They are awful. I wish I’d never had them.”

It had idly occurred to me when my cat turned sixteen that I could have raised a daughter by now. I do realize raising a child is not the same as raising a cat. It was no more than a fleeting thought when I was thirty-six.

Now forty-one, I had more than a few dreams that I was pregnant or had a baby, and in one, I had six children! Well, let’s see, I thought. Maybe I would be a good mother.

With a male friend of mine, I started exploring hetero sex in a frank, non-committal way. It was fun. It was just sex.

Then I got pregnant for the first time when I was forty-two. I was awesomely, unconditionally delighted.

They called it a geriatric pregnancy, and I did everything by the book to ensure a healthy baby. Though I still had my own caravan, once I got pregnant, I was practically living with the father, who was fifty, and already a grandfather.

They were happy days, despite very swollen feet and worries of pre-eclampsia. I was blooming and euphoric.

The due date was my mother’s birthday, how fitting! When I told my mum, she told me that I myself was conceived on her birthday. I had never heard that story and was intrigued when she told me that I was conceived, on purpose, in a motel in Toowoomba. I spelled it in my head as To Womb Ba, and I loved the pun, and the coinciding dates.

Before twelve weeks, I miscarried.

It was horrendous.

I felt a sharp pain under my belly button. Then, I had spotting. A good friend of mine drove me to the doctor and then to the hospital. The whole experience was also triggering and extremely difficult for her, as she had suffered multiple miscarriages herself.

Suddenly I was in the hands of the professionals, in a Catholic country where abortion was still illegal and unmarried mothers were looked down on even more than lesbians.

Who knows if it was because I was unmarried that the purse-lipped nurse who drew my blood left my whole arm bruised dark black for weeks?

Before any test results were told to me, what I had thought was going to be a sonogram turned out to have been a D and C. There was nothing left in my womb after that.

I was devastated. The father was not, and we split up not long after.

Now, having lost my baby, I longed to have a child with all my being.

It wasn’t to be. Two years later, in 2004, my life changed even more radically when I got a ‘flu’ (maybe Sars 1) and then developed CFS/ME (think Long Covid.) I lost my successful career as a stage actress, could barely play music anymore, and my social life dwindled unbelievably fast.

My doctor told me I would get better, and so I waited to get my life back.

Another consequence of this auto-immune disease for me, and many other women, was early perimenopause.

I often hoped I was pregnant again, having missed a period, but the tests were always negative.

Life could have been worse. I still had good friends in my neighbours, including my oldest and dearest (platonic) friend.

Then he died of cancer in 2012. I miss him every single day.

I also had one partner, a lovely man, uncomplicated and kind. It just happened that way and continued for ten years.

I was, and still am, more or less bed-bound. Our relationship wasn’t secret, but it wasn’t public either, for it happened, of necessity, almost exclusively at my house.

Shay’s social life was completely separate from his private life, and that had always suited him. His friends knew of me but didn’t know me. And with my friends, it was the same of Shay.

He was found in his bed, three days dead, in 2015. Pneumonia, from a ‘flu he caught in China. He was forty-nine.

Life was now bleak as bleak could be.

What with the accumulative disabling effects of CFS/ME and then the ongoing COVID epidemic, I should be so lucky to meet anyone, male or female, to share a cup of tea with, let alone to share my bed.

In the face of all that, the current orientation of my sexuality is pretty much a moot point, methinks. Could Involuntarily Celibate be added to the LGBTQ+ label these days?

To myself, I am still a Lesbian, and my lesbian radar is alive and well.

Here on Medium, my lesbian stories are most appreciated, and with so many new Medium friends, I am happy to stir things up a little and get you thinking or identifying.

Or maybe I am just making sure ye don’t get too comfortable, putting me in some handy box!

Sorry now, but until the day I die, I don’t want one.

Thanks for reading my story