five years ago, I made the craziest choice of my life

the true story of how my queer modern family began

I’m just realizing that, in almost a year and a half of writing this newsletter, I’ve somehow never written about the pivotal moment that has come to define the shape of my current life: my decision to invite my ex, my boyfriend, his wife, and their kid to move into my house with me for pandemic lockdown. On the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, it feels like the right time to share that story. Buckle in, because it’s quite a ride.

To set the stage, I want to clarify that my ex and I weren’t always in a place where we could tease each other about Sapphic pickup lines. For a while after she moved out in summer 2019, things were pretty much the way you’d generally imagine the vibes to be post-separation: tense smiles and the occasional passive-aggressive barb traded at custody handoff, copious sobbing and ranting about her various failings to my best friends and therapist.

In my experience every divorce has a few extra-special fun added ingredients that crank up the temperature to make the atmosphere even more combustible than it already is. Ours were my ex’s transition, the fact that our son was less than a year old, and my somewhat questionable decision to tell her the literal day before we signed our divorce papers that I was seeing someone new and it appeared to be getting serious.

In my defense, I hadn’t meant for it to happen. It was supposed to be a fun rebound fling with an old college flame I’d stayed friends with throughout the years. It had seemed so perfect: I liked and trusted him, and we definitely had chemistry, but he was also a married polyamorous vegan who lived in Berlin and only visited the Bay Area for work a few times a year. It was the perfect recipe for a casual situationship to dip my toes back into the dating waters. Except for how stupid into each other we immediately were.

In no time at all, we were flying all over the place to see each other during the brief windows when my ex had custody. And then, after just a few months, he and his wife decided they were interested in bringing their one-year-old kid (!) to the Bay Area for a few months in early 2020 to contemplate a more permanent move. Almost before I knew it, they were in an apartment in the city, and I was arranging brunch dates with his wife, who I’d vaguely known back in college.

It was exciting, but I was also hugely ambivalent about the whole thing. Being with him felt amazing, but it was so much so fast. I already had to manage the feelings of a transitioning ex and neurodivergent six-year-old (thankfully, the one-year-old was chill as hell). I had zero interest in or bandwidth for the feelings of some man, no matter how good we were together. I was also adjusting to living alone for the first time in my entire damn life, because at the age of 20 I’d moved directly out of my college apartment and into the graduate school apartment I shared with my future spouse and even further future ex. I had a lot to learn about being a grown-up outside of a serious partnership, and I was determined not to let anything happening with my new old guy stop me from becoming the person I wanted to be post-divorce.

Everything was so new and strange and disorienting. My primary coping skill was an almost pathological amount of compartmentalization. All my bad feelings about my ex and our divorce I kept tightly locked in a box, only to be opened with close friends and in therapy, because I knew it was better for the kids to keep a good relationship with her. I dealt with my guilt about missing so much of my kids’ lives by focusing on work when I didn’t have custody and throwing myself into parenting when I did. And I kept my new relationship resolutely separate from everything else, shoving any discomfort I had with how to operate in the brave new world of ethical nonmonogamy into a metaphorical garage in my brain to deal with later when I was better resourced or something. A very plausible scenario.

And then the pandemic came, and I immediately decided to throw out my tidy compartments altogether.

I don’t remember exactly how I came to the idea of having us all live together. My first priority was my kids, and I knew right away that joint custody wasn’t going to work for us without any childcare help. My ex simply couldn’t manage her job, Zoom school for a kid with ADHD, and a rambunctious toddler all on her own. That’s not shade: literally nobody could do that. So our options were basically for me to take sole custody or for us to move back in together. But I was pretty worried that if we moved back in together, I would murder her. Meanwhile, I wanted to be with my partner, because I felt stronger and safer when were together. But obviously he needed to be where his wife and child were.

In retrospect, I think the reasoning sort of went like this: maybe my two problems could cancel each other out, and the boyfriend and his wife would sort of serve as buffers to keep me and my ex from killing each other. And I hoped that inviting both my ex and my boyfriend’s wife would sort of split the vote for which part of this plan was the craziest when my friends and family inevitably voiced their very reasonable concerns.

That’s all in hindsight, of course. At the time, I was very focused on convincing people that this choice was extremely sane and rational and normal. The four of us all knew each other from the University of Chicago, so it wasn’t like I’d randomly plucked a polycule out of mid-air! Didn’t a ratio of four adults to three kids sound preferable to weathering lockdown alone? Wouldn’t it be good for my one-year-old to have another same-aged kid around for socialization? Did they have a better solution, or were they just going to criticize my very logical reasoning?

Five years later, I’m willing to admit that they were right, and it was an absolutely ridiculous decision. Most ridiculous of all is how well it worked. That doesn’t mean that all of my rationalizations were correct — that’s the outcome fallacy — but the four of us all do really look back on those lockdown months with fond nostalgia. We spent so much time being terrified, of course, and obsessively reading the news, and there was a lot of freaked-out crying. But we also cooked so much, wiped down so many groceries with Clorox, went for so many walks in the neighborhood with a double stroller, played so much Fibbage. We called ourselves Quarantine Brady Bunch.

It was a bit of a honeymoon for me and my partner, but it was also a very healing time for me and my ex. I’d asked for a divorce in part because I was exhausted from feeling like the two of us had decided that I was going to be the one to solve all of her shit for her, and I was done. But during those months of gleefully freedom from having to snowplow the road for her, I pushed away the squirming realization that we both needed each other’s support. Our divorce had torn out some mushrooms, but we’d left all the mycelium in the substrate.¹ It was during that time that we started to build on that interconnected network to create the relationship we have now, which is informed by our deep knowledge of each other but lightly held. That framework leaves a lot of room for both hard conversations and jokes about Sappho.

After about six months, my house started feeling a little bit cramped with seven people and a large dog and we moved on to the next chapter in our queer modern family. My partner and his now-ex separated, and she and my ex moved in together to a house a few miles from mine. We share joint custody of all three kids, who go from one house to the other on the same schedule, and the four of us make parenting decisions together and share a nanny.

A lot of people have expressed surprise to me that my ex and my partner’s ex have lived together for so long. But I’ve come to believe that an arrangement like ours, with a bunch of single moms having each other’s backs — my ex once referred to it as a “mommune”, a name I both want to roll my eyes at and also adore — might just be the most stable and supportive setup that exists for raising kids. Certainly it’s more stable than the heterosexual monogamous nuclear family.

The mommune (we’re counting my partner, a non-normative cis man who our son sometimes calls “Mama Baba”, as one of the moms) gives each mother the chance to be herself and to both get and give support. I feel more confident than I ever have in expressing my boundaries, needs, and preferences. It rules. Everyone should be part of a mommune.

I wonder what it would look like for me to feel less uncomfortable with being crazy. Five years ago, I took great pains to explain to myself and everyone else in my life that all of us living together was an entirely sane and rational and reasonable choice. I still feel the urge to justify it in those terms, to be honest. But I’m curious what it would be like to let go of my death grip on the appearance of rationality.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, if you pick the Wild Magic sorcerer subclass, then when you try and cast a spell your sorcerer might accidentally start flying or turn everyone on the battlefield into a cat or something. Some of these effects are helpful, some suck. A lot depends on what you make of it. Life can be kind of like that, too.

Sometimes it feels like all of us moving in together was less a smart, rational choice we made as adults with agency and more of an accidental magical effect that we found ourselves in the midst of and decided to work with. One minute I was making very structured plans for how to gradually introduce my partner to my kid, the next minute my kitchen island was absolutely covered with bags of groceries.

When I was at the Romantasy convention a few weeks back, I went to a panel on magical worldbuilding. One of the themes that came up with all the authors was the idea that magic has to have a price. It exacts a cost. It obeys rules, but it doesn’t have to make sense, at least not in the way the logical part of my brain wants to categorize rationality. It doesn’t come for free, it doesn’t make the hard parts of life suck any less, and it definitely isn’t easy to explain to concerned relatives who think you’ve gone insane. It just is, and it works. Maybe that’s enough.

1. I apologize for this metaphor but my partner and I are working on a GameJam game about magical fungi and I’ve been watching a lot of mushroom videos and mycology Youtube is wild, y’all