Anonymous

I had grown to learn that fighting=love. I was dead wrong.

Over those five years, I volunteered on hot summer days and rainy mornings. I stood in snow, wearing warm layers and fleece mittens. I volunteered beside women and men, many of them young, like me, but some older and wiser and living out a lifetime of experience on those sidewalks.

All of the men I met were married, and wanted to stay married. They said they loved their wives, and most said they were happy; yet the sex at home had diminished and they were men after all and needed their desire fulfilled. Besides the eye-rolling common excuse for infidelity, I believed they were telling the truth about loving their wives.

In my checkered past, long before I was a member of the PTA, I sometimes worked behind the scenes in X-rated films

When I left the hospital the night that he was admitted, I sat in the parking lot gasping with big ugly sobs and looking for someone to blame — beginning with myself. I'm his mother, and I'm the only consistent parent he's ever had. As I finally made my way home, with tears streaming down my face and my mouth open in a silent scream of pain, all I could ask myself was "what have I done?" How could I have allowed my son to be hurt so deeply, and in so many ways?

There really isn't anything unusual about our union. For all intents and purposes it's actually a pretty typical marriage. Except we're in an open marriage.

I’ve shared my struggles in navigating when your kid is struggling with their sexuality, at the end of the day, this is my daughter’s story.

If you go, I’ll have to pick up all the dog poop. I will have to take out the trash. I will have to sleep alone.

I never imagined myself being anyone’s wife so I grieved for my single life when I got married. I began to secretly long for the life I’d left behind.

Sexuality is fluid. And mine has led me from girl-on-girl action to a man inside me.