Okay, this is sort of a here and now post but, at the same time, I refer to stuff that has happened in my past. So, let’s call it a “that was then, here is now” moment. I was inspired to write this because, a few weeks back, I met someone I used to work with. I haven’t seen this person since before Thalia was born, and that would be more than twelve years ago. As is just so typical of lesbians, she asked me, “What do your kids call you?” I replied, “Ma.” She looked at me, “And what do they call Beth?” I looked at her and said, “Ma.” She got this confused look on her face, “What if you’re together and you both answer at the same time? What happens?” I though about it for a minute, and then told her that Thalia will usually point to one of us and say, “You” or “This one.” That seemed to disturb her.

What this person wanted was two distinct names. Like, maybe ma and mom. Or mom and mother. I mean, you cannot imagine how long she went on about this. It made seeing her again a real chore. I call that “processing,” and lesbians are notorious for processing. Not this lesbian, mind you, but most lesbians. Shit, get a room full of lesbians together and you can almost hear the whirring sound. Let me tell you where I come from on this one.

I live in a “No Processing Zone.” Seriously. I come from a home where both my mother and my grandmother were called, “Ma.” We used to congregate at my grandmother’s house after Sunday morning mass to eat meatballs and dip bread in her gravy (that’s spaghetti sauce to non-Italians). When I say “we,” I meant our family plus my aunts and uncles and their families. There were more people calling each other “Ma” than you could shake a stick at. We worked it out. There has been absolutely no lasting trauma from it.

Now, for the benefit of those who haven’t seen the evil mother-in-law, I’m going to include her photo here. Doesn’t she look like a lesbian? She processes too. Yes, she wants Thalia and Aaron to call her Mamé because that’s what “her boys” call her. Her boys, of course, are her other grandchildren. I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Miss Thalia would comply. When I told her, she looked at me and said, “I’m not calling her that.”

Now, there was a period in my life when I lost my fucking mind. I’m not prepared to write about that in much detail yet, but I’m getting there. Suffice it to say that I was involved with someone else, and this person was a processor par extraordinaire. To this day, I’m not sure WTF happened to me. This woman had every characteristic that I just about disliked in a person, and processing was just one of them. Needless to say it was over before it began.

I don’t say that I never think things through. I do, but I’m more likely to just “go with it.” I also don’t over-analyze a situation like my bride does. If someone does something that hurts her, she has to know why the person did it. I don’t want to know why. I just want the person to fucking stop. It’s simple for me. The less time I spend in the processing zone, the more productive my life is.