Selah...It's complicated

Picket-fence polyamory and the fragmenting of my family

There’s something very powerful about choosing your own name. When I converted to Judaism, I had the opportunity to name and claim who I am as both a Jew and as a person.

Ultimately, I chose Selah (סלה) as my Hebrew name because it’s got a messy, complicated, uncertain etymology and meaning, and that felt very relevant to my self-understanding.

This is no less true today than it was in 2019, and to be honest, sometimes it does feel as though I managed to accidentally manifest the baffling complexity of my life. It’s also quite fitting for the primary topic I seem to have stumbled into writing: a chronicle of the process of dismantling my family.¹

Some definitions of ‘selah’:

to lift up

to tread upon, underfoot

to weigh in balance, judge, compare

to hang (as for weighing)

a musical notation to pause and consider what has just been sung / to breathe / a change in tempo

“Amen” / “Hallelujah”

to pile up or pile on

a literary indicator of a crossroads / a junction between two kinds of experiences or ways of being

Picket Fence Poly at a Crossroads

For over a decade, I’ve been engaged in what I call “picket-fence polyamory.” My simple definition of this phrase (which I’m pretty sure I coined) is a fairly standard white suburban American life.

While my family didn’t move to the suburbs until a few years in, we had all the other markers of a “boring” life from the start, despite the fact of three live-in parents sharing the load of keeping house and raising kids: community and school engagement, religious participation, even a minivan(!). Add in two dogs and a backyard garden and you can see why we could almost fit in at the PTA.

Photo by Ralph Florent on Unsplash

As for so many “normal” American families, 2020 was for us the beginning of a slow slide into marital distress, and the crises of the past 6 months have culminated in a shattering from which we are unlikely to recover. I am at an alarming crossroads, trying to remember to breathe, and to see the beauty in the world amidst everything.

Lifting Up New Stories

When all of this marital strife began to look critical, I did what I almost always do in times of distress: I searched for a book to help me make sense of things. I was hungry for stories which resembled mine, to help me feel less alone and give me some ideas about what to do or at least how to cope.

As you may imagine, finding such stories was quite a challenge. Near as I can tell, the number of queer three-parent families dealing with relationship crisis while raising several neurodivergent and gender-expansive young adults is, well, nonexistent.

People sharing their experience of navigating separation when you were never allowed to be legally married but have nonetheless interwoven your families, finances, and lives, are few and far between.

I have begun to find a few relationship self-help books that address the kind of trauma feedback loops we experienced (thanks, Universe, you’re a little late).

This is all to say, I hope that lifting up my stories and experiences while working through this mess—processing my grief, working through the fragmentation, destruction, and restructuring my family, discovering new ways of being, and trying to make sense of it all—might offer new reasons to pause and consider, and maybe even an opportunity for someone to find a piece of their own atypical experiences reflected in a semi-public space.

I hope that lifting up my stories might offer an opportunity for someone else to find a piece of their own atypical experiences reflected in a semi-public space.

Amen, or, May It Be So

My life’s purpose as I currently understand it is to make some kind of positive impact on the lives of others. This has led me through experiences of carrying babies for gay men as a gestational surrogate, pursuing a Master of Divinity degree from a queer-heavy liberal seminary, and becoming a spiritual companion to guide people who, like me, have felt excluded and pained by traditional religious institutions. This purpose also informs my writing life, poetry and prose alike.

I hope that reading my words, however many or few of them you choose, will help you feel a little less alone, a little more seen, a bit less afraid, and a bit more loved. At the very least, I hope you come away with something new to consider.

So what do you think? Am I the only person on Substack navigating “marital” failure in a queer context? Are you going through any devastating life changes, or do you have any good resources for me?

Thank you for being here, Dear One. Selah.

My first two posts, which accidentally kicked off this current theme:

Un-knitting a life

Pressing Mute on Pain

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1. To keep my work semi-private, most other posts on this topic will have a paywall. This is the only way I can keep part of the post public while locking the rest for subscribers. Until June 5, annual subscriptions are 100% off, or you can do it the regular way and provide some financial support for my journey.