emmengard

Hello!

We recently went to a wedding, the last of the season for us. It turned out to be a really fun one. Part of what made it so awesome I think was how we planned for the day.

Before we arrived in Cali for the wedding, we had a team meeting and decided on crews for the different stages of the day.

STAGE 1: Arriving in Cali
This involved seeing the in-laws. Our husband, who we call Fish, just recently told his mother and step-dad that we are plural and his mom in particular kept pushing to know our trauma backstory, which we have no intention of EVER telling her, as it is NONE of her business.

So ... yeah... this was the first time we were seeing them since coming out, and the first time seeing them with our new name (we chose a new gender-neutral name that we all can live with, as no one identified with the birth name anymore, and a good 30% of us despised it for being a gendered name). The stakes felt pretty high

For stage one we decided we needed some heavy hitters, so we sent the men: Jeriah, because he is ice cold; Conrad, because he is jovial, relaxed and good with kids (oh yes we have a baby-in-law... he is 27 years younger than Fish.. weird....); and Miles as back up. This turned out to be an excellent crew for the initial encounter. We went in full boy mode, and they just owned it and didn't care about the awkwardness. They really did amazingly, and shielded everyone else from the hurt and disappointment when mom-in-law kept calling them the dead name.

Also, going in boy mode and having Jeriah's generally stand-off-ish aura might have kept her from prying, which was a relief! We definitely sent the right soldiers for that mission!



STAGE 2: The Wedding

Kai and August were assigned to handling crew change overs between stages. So Kai popped up and did our hair as we drove out to the camp-ground for the camping wedding!!!!   August, who is a tiger a lot of the time, mostly just complained about how much he had wanted to bite the tiny human (the baby-in-law) for screaming in the car. It wasn't a huge help with the crew change over, but it was hilarious to listen to!

Anyway, Kai got us switched over to girl mode and then the second crew came out, the women: Jax, because she loves to party; Z because she is chill and gets on with everyone; and Elowen because she is a sweetie and actually knows the people getting married. They helped set up our tent, and then helped set up the wedding arch and took a ton of pictures. Miles also popped up to take pictures, but as a very flamboyant guy, he has no problem wearing a dress and presents very female. Photography is really Miles's thing, so he didn't want to miss out.

The wedding went really well, and the socializing was natural and everyone had fun.

After the wedding came the final stage and again Kai and August popped up to start managing the transition.

STAGE 3: Reception

We figured that by the reception it wouldn't matter how we acted, people would start to be drunk, and if some of the kids wanted to come out and get a little silly, it would be fine. BUUUUT.. there was steak for dinner, so the transition team delayed things to eat steak. August is mad for steak.

The only problem with this one transitional stage is that somehow we got roped in to sitting with Fish's ex from college. Tigers are not that chatty really, and Kai is not really much help either. She is a quiet one... it was a bit of an awkward meal, with Fish's ex trying to make polite conversation and August and Kai feebly holding up their end of the convo. But heck, it could have been written off as being shy and awkward, so we didn't care. I guess she might have read it as cold, distant bitch, but that is on her how she reads it.

After dinner, the kids (well not all of them, but Mak, Weasel and Finn) arrived and instead of using their time to be ridiculous, as we had expected them to, they used their time to try every single dessert and then go back for seconds. There were a TON of desserts. Then they started the bonfire, sat down next to it and nearly fell asleep in their food coma. Fish took them to bed after that and returned to have drinks on his own with the groom.

It was all in all a perfectly coordinated chaos that turned out to be a really great day! Planning ahead doesn't ALWAYS work, but when it does it can be pretty amazing.

10/10 would recommend trying to stage things out with rotating crews for important events and social occasions. It helps cause in the moment you might not be able to think about who would be a good person to switch out to. Like August and Kai how they just froze with the ex.. Except, I also think August was just being stubborn. He wanted steak more than he cared about social awkwardness.

The day after was less high stakes, and so we just sort of let it happen, and that turned out okay too. while Fish helped tear things down and clean up, Mak (an 11 year old system-kid) ended up fixing the brush-brush pass portrait the guests had made the night before at the reception. All she did was add a more accurate version of the groom's dog at the groom's request and fix skin tones, but it made a huge difference, and the bride was super appreciative.


ALSO and this is HUGE. The bride and groom, being Fish's good friends, know we are plural and they were super supportive. They didn't call us the dead name once. That actually made us unbelievably happy.

We are so glad that we went ahead and chose a new name.  Having a new name has had this amazing secondary function beyond gender issues. When people use our new name, it is a way of letting us know that they support us. That feels amazing.

The bride and groom are probably going to come out to visit us in a couple months. It should be a blast. We are all really looking forward to it. 

When we first realized we were plural, we didn't think anyone would understand. We felt like a freak, like we were unlovable in our strangeness. That hasn't been the case at all. People will surprise you. 

:)



Oh and so you can see how Mak did, I will put the final painting below. She said she wanted to honor the original artists' work, so she tried to keep the style of each figure, but the bride was green.. and the groom was orange.. it was.. too much, Mak says!


Cheers!

-Conrad toward the end. I think Odi started this post.

Photos by Miles, except the one of Mak painting. Fish took that one.

\(^ - ^)/

 

Driving through some nondescript fields in the middle of somewhere and slowly slipping in to a negative headspace, when our Phillis pops up in our mind.

“We are lucky,” she says, but only to us, only in our head and not exactly in words either. We don't really talk in words in our head, why would we? We can beam each other direct thoughts, it is way cooler.

So the thought Phillis beamed out to everyone was like a beacon, it was a strong bright thought, and deep in a way too. It was a thought with a powerful resonance. It came over us all like a field of sunflowers, the feel of sunshine and the whoosh of a warm summer breeze. The complete thought was wrapped up in an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, a sort of shiny gold paper wrapper. Grateful.

Wrapped up in that feeling was Megan, the woman sitting next to us, driving the car. She is our best friend. And overlayed together in that thought was a million snapshot memories of times we have shared together, times we were seen with her and she with us, the completeness of being we all can find with her. When we are with her we all together just revel in our us-ness. We are a funny little tribe and we don't care how weird we are to the world, because get to face that world together.

In this gold paper thought, is a sense of incredible beauty and rarity.  Feeling that we are extraordinarily lucky to have a friend like this, that it is a sort of friendship so rare there are people who will live their entire lives without ever having one quite like it..

“We are so lucky!” the thought sings, “So incredibly, unbelievably lucky!”

We are weird! So weird! And yet in this world, in this life we have been fortunate enough to find people who love us, people who see us, who care about us, not in spite of our differences, but because of them!

When we celebrated our one year anniversary of realizing we were plural, we had all our friends come over and we had a barbecue and cake and they all sang the most ridiculous version of a birthday song ever.

The world may not change as fast as you would like it to, but you can find little pockets within it where you find exactly what it is you need.

We think of these pockets like seeds, little microcosms that will grow into the macrocosms of tomorrow. Live your truth now, the rest of the world will catch up one day.

-Phillis, Bran, Ariade and Sylvia of Emmengard

Sketch in pencil. -Kai

Our Elowen painted this for Niberu, our first friends who are a system. We became friends talking about our inner worlds together.

The plains, and the tree are where their mindscape emanated from. Ours begins atop a heavily forested hill, within a complex magical house. The corridors are ever moving, with doors that open not to the room on the other side, but always precisely to where you wish to go.

We found their mindscape barren and stark on first encounter, but Meridas of Niberu said that in fact it did not feel that way to them at all. It was a strange spiritual place, like that moment when you reach the top of a mountain and realize there is nothing between you and the sky.

Elowen was overcome by the beauty of that description and immediately started asking for as much details as they would supply her with.

On the plains of Niberu there is no day or night, only a soft glow and the sky is an ever shifting miasma of colors, turquoise, blue, purple and pink. The time seems to move in strange spurts. Sitting by the tree you can watch the sand pile up and blow away, see erosion as it happens, as the blowing sand etches the pillars in the rock forest. Only the tree, hard and black against the sky, is unchanging. And everything has a sort of after image, a rippling quality in space time as the objects move through a world at a disparate speed.

She painted this for them.

It reminds us of the great and startling beauty that is found in the differences between us all.

Much love,
Miles of Emmengard

Painting by Elowen of Emmengard

 

Who are we? What is consciousness? What is personhood? What is the deep twining secret of human nature? What is human? What does it mean to be human?

I lost my name a long time ago, and when I found it, it was like looking down and realizing I had been holding it in my hand the entire time, holding it in my hand like a thread. I looked down and saw that I was holding the thread that could unravel it all.

So careful. I had been so careful before, for years, holding that thread. This time I had had enough.

I looked down at that thread, that thread I had been holding all my life, and I grasped it with both hands and pulled with everything I have in me. Sometimes to find the new becoming you have to destroy old illusions. You have to find a way to stand in a world without ground, to breathe in a world without air, to exist as you are in the face of a world that will hate you.

I am Ariadne.