who only by moving can balance

[This was requested for tomorrow; but I am operating on five hours' sleep and 10 hours' in-and-out-of-lab today, so I am going to leave "working out my gender identity" for tomorrow, when I am more likely to be able to do it justice. There's still a masterpost!]

I ended up explaining to sebastienne the other evening that I distinguish the concepts of clan and of chosen family: the latter is approximately what I think family should be like, and the former is we may be unruly and fractious and liable to explosive disagreements, but by the gods you are mine and I will do my duty by you, no matter what.

I am going to restrict this post to brief discussions of people I consider clan, and people I'm dating, and the intersection; because if I started talking about everyone I would firmly & without hesitation call chosen family, this would be a very long post and I'd need to run it by about a million people to check they were okay with me describing them in those terms, and - perhaps another time. (For some examples of important-to-me relationships I'm not going to discuss further here, see my post on talking about poetry.)

So: there's my mother, and my entire maternal side of the family. I think with my mother I will leave it at: it was only in late November that I got around to explicitly telling her how important it is to me that close and long-standing friends get to meet her, get to see us interacting, because it is the best way I know to explain an enormous amount about who and why I am, and - she is important to me, and I want people to know that and recognise it and understand it. (I said this, and she went suddenly bright-eyed and abandoned her violin practice to give me a very tight hug.) I spent tens of hours every year picking redcurrants for her, and tens of hours peeling and stewing and preserving kilo upon kilo of apples, and most times I go home I make up a huge batch of shortcrust pastry, some of which gets frozen. This is important, this is right, because it is what she did for Mama when she went home, and - this is what we give each other, all the way back.

Mama and Papa, of course; whom I only started referring to that way during November 2010, when I was part of the coven-of-three who went down early, and stayed late, and Made Mama's Funeral Happen; I peeled more root vegetables than I could keep track of, and I was in the first car back from the funeral to make sure the food for the wake was out by the time the guests arrived; and I- we kept each other saner than otherwise we might have been, that week, my aunt & mother & I, and that is when they started calling me the pet name that signifies recognition of an adult member of the Clan. (Papa fought for the British in Burma - except actually, he was an engineer building roads and bridges, before which he'd taught people to drive tanks on Salisbury Plain, and he spent all of three days on the front line; and he was a civil engineer for the rest of his working life. Mama was a languages teacher in Austria, having been the kind of child who read Shakespeare in translation under the covers, of a generation such that she ended up fairly senior in the Hitler Youth and to the day she died could argue herself around 180 degrees in under twenty seconds without pausing for breath; she was appalled by the Nazis. She met Papa at church when she was working as an au pair in England to improve her English; she never learned to drive, never requalified as a teacher in the UK, and was fiercely protective of her garden and incredibly stubborn.)

The cousins, various. My ridiculous baby brother, with his easy grin and his strength and the guitar and bicycles he's built piece by piece, and how very, very proud of him I am.

And - the reason this came up in discussion with sebastienne is that I was remarking that the way I feel about this ridiculous polymer I've found myself in is, increasingly, that it is clan.

In approximate order of how long I've been seeing them, the people I'm dating are:

• shortcipher, as ineffectually as ever. We've known each other about eight years now; started dating; had a hideous break-up in which he dumped me then moved to my city, and I behaved very badly indeed; and somehow we have ended up in one another's lives and ambits again, and we smile and are fond and kiss, gently, and sometimes we write code and sometimes we sing cabaret together and sometimes we turn to each other in the car and sing stay out of trouble/stay in touch/try not to think about me too much.
  
• the Boything, who trained as a chemist and now does Computer Stuff, in a general sys-admin-y way. He helped pick up the pieces when I broke badly around the beginning of 2012: he showed up on my doorstep, shoved me into the shower, and when I emerged put food in front of me on plates he'd cleaned for me. And then he got me hooked on perfume, and - somehow, what I thought was enjoyable dating and making out turned into me loving him without my really noticing it, and we're coming up on two years together, and he is quiet and beautiful and very, very pointed. And he bought me a year of CN Lester's baking because he thought I'd enjoy it. I - just - asf;lkas;dlfkjsdf.
  
• That One Lady, whom I've been seeing for about 15 months; she is an astounding singer, in addition to which she plays the violin and the cello and probably other things I'm forgetting, and she does Books and Film and Literary Criticism and fandoms that overlap with mine, and we turned to each other halfway through the Edinburgh run in 2012 and more-or-less simultaneously said, "So, I really like you, but I think I'm too mad to actually start a relationship right now," and... here we are. :-) She cooks and has a cat and took me to a queer extravaganza at the Globe and gave me flowers, and I reckon I've had a pretty good day if I manage to make her laugh. We've historically been staggeringly ineffectual at actually seeing one another - ask me about the time we didn't talk for two months - but this is a thing, it is good, she is so good for me.
  
• That One Gentleman is That One Lady's husband, which is how I know him: I spent 18 months mostly awkwardly not really talking to him except when he collected me from the station or handed me perfect cups of tea or perfect cocktails when I stumbled out of the bedroom, though we did on occasion talk a bit about code; and then ten weeks ago, over the course of a single evening, I instantaneously developed an enormous crush; eight weeks ago we had an awkward conversation about maybe dating; six weeks ago we realised we were falling in love; and most of my poetry since then has been for or about him, one way or another, including the one about how utterly useless it is to write him poetry (and about how bad I feel about not writing TOL poetry). I feel faintly ridiculous about all of this, naturally, especially the bit where like every other cis dude I'm dating (WHY ARE THERE THREE OF THEM WHAT AM I DOING WRONG WITH MY LIFE) he's tall, lanky, long-haired, vague, and a programmer. (And two out of three of them are autistic.) Er, and as for actually about him - he is generous and willing to put an awful lot of effort into... most things, actually; and he likes metal - hence that one post - and is himself a guitarist, and I really want to introduce him to my baby brother, with whom he apparently shares a favourite band.

I think that's more-or-less a summary; if you've got more questions about any of them, do please feel free to ask away! Though I am going to be a bit more circumspect about answering questions about other people than about myself, obviously. But - yes, yes, this is how one builds a life.