I have always been a rule follower and a people pleaser. When I was about five years old I nicked a lolly from LD Nathan at the local shopping centre. I hid under my bed to eat it and was consumed by the guilt about what I had done.
It was a perfectly natural part of growing up. Push against the rules society has in place, and your conscience will guide you as to what is right. I knew I had done the wrong thing, and I felt so icky about it, I didn't do it again.
In my life to date, I generally have followed the rules - there was the odd wayward moment as a teenager, but given the standards I had set for myself, I didn't do too badly. I was an earnest Christian, so at the time being felt up by a boyfriend felt like a mortal sin, so never mind doing the stuff many teenagers were up to (experimenting with alcohol, drugs, sex...)
But a couple of problems started presenting themselves. The rules around me started changing, so the world in which I had signed up to a particular life wasn't the same world I was living in now.
That was partly me - as I met new people, my world expanded. I met people of different faiths, of no faith, who were sole parents, gay parents. All super, super smart. All very kind. And good.
Wait a minute...
In the past I'd tsk tsked at the gays, the single parents, the people who had sex with people they weren't married to (or going to marry) people who weren't married..... you get the picture.
And so I started questioning everything I had signed up to to date. Marriage. Babies. Being a stay at home parent for so long. When my mother took a controversial route out of this world, it started me on a long journey of wondering where I had been, where I was heading, and what rules applied any more.
Then I fell for her.... and I was in a right mess.
I had made a promise to someone else when I was 18 but at 37 I didn't want to keep the promise any more. What kind of person did that make me?
But was anyone a particular 'kind of person?' Or were we all just in a changing world in which we needed to adapt?
If I'd seen more lesbians as a teenager, would things have been different? If every single family I had contact with hadn't been a heteronormative, nuclear family, would things have been different? If I'd seen same sex couples, single parents, working Mums in the world around me, would things have been different? If my mother hadn't spat "You aren't queer, are you?" at me in an accusatory fashion, would things have been different?
I can take responsibility for my choices, but the broader issue is that choices are determined by social norms, social standing, circumstances. 2013 was a very different world to 1994, but I was still expected to keep a promise I made when I was little more than a child.
Everything could have been handled more sensitively. I am not sure turning the rules upside down immediately makes me a liar or a cheat. It makes me a human who found herself in a difficult situation where hurt was inevitable.
I think the answer to not making a promise you can't keep is to be realistic and careful about what you promise in the first place. Should we be placing ourselves in a position of absolutes, or is life more about ongoing negotiation and re-evaluation?
What are all the rules about? Who benefits from them? Are they kind? Are they fair? Do they really matter?
I had been in a cultural vacuum for so much of my life. That cultural vacuum was very definite about rights and wrongs. And you know what - definitive rights and wrongs have a high comfort factor. Everyone knows where they stand. If you don't fit in, you're in trouble. But you know what's what.
I have been wrong, but I am only human. Being wrong makes me more sympathetic to the people I used to judge.
Living outside the black and white box requires more energy. More negotiation. More weighing up. But I also think it has more capacity for kindness. Black and white rights and wrong often produce confused individuals who cannot see past not fitting in the box. Black and white rights and wrong produce punitive consequences that don't make anyone's life better. Black and white rights and wrongs stop dialogue and honest conversation and stifle growth. Black and white rights and wrongs reduce the capacity to see things beyond your own scope and beyond your own concept of righteousness. It stops you seeing the people behind the monochrome.
The world devoid of absolute black and white is far more scary, but it is anything but grey. It is bright in vivid colours, with love, with laughter, with tears, with challenge, with kindness.
It is a world full of life.
