The facts of life demand it, and it's our lot to bend to it

I sat across the table with my aunt, my mother's older sister. She had always been my mentor. I was back from college with my master's in journalism ready to take on the world and expose the evil around us. She wanted to talk to me. She told me now that I had graduated I needed to get married. Each phase must be respected. Married to a MAN.

You don't have to love him she told me. You do have to respect him. And you do have to be his wife, intimately, even if it draws bile in your mouth. You will ** his **, you will bend over, you will cook his breakfast, you will have his kids. It's the natural order of things. A MAN, and you will get married and you will be HIS wife. Is that understood?

That day I learned that my aunt was also a lesbian. When her time came, her parents helped find a man who would accept her, with her flaw. And she got married. And that's the way it was going to be with me. They had found the man.

He is older, always older so they can bend you to their will. He had two children but his wife died of ovarian cancer. He would take me to be a mother to his children, to run his house, to wash his sox. He agreed and part of the condition is that I would immediately have a child to lock me to him.

He allowed me a girl, to work for me. What I did with her was my affair. But in no way was that to interfere with my place as his wife. My aunt said 'RESPECT' him. No one was to know about the girl. When you have a girl, one that you show all your affection, you can't help but to fall in love. She was hired to fall in love with me.

I respected my husband, I raised the children, I had a son for him in the first year of my marriage. Several years later, in a moment of anger, I conceived another child for him. This time a daughter. They are grown up and have families of their own. I have a niece that is going off to college. I have to talk to her about the next phase in her life. She is not to come home with a woman. We will find a man for her, one that will accept her failing. She will be allowed a woman to be close to her, but she will respect her husband. It is better if she knows that now, before she goes to college.

She will learn to love her husband, as she loves her life partner. I did, and so did my aunt in her time. It is an extra burden that we carry, those of us who call ourselves lesbians.

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