More Than Just a Check in the Mail

Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human

More than Just a Check in the Mail

It speaks volumes when the government won’t even take your money; a check arrived in the mail yesterday from Multnomah County, a sixty dollar refund of our marriage license fee paid a year ago on March third, and held in fiscal limbo until Li v. State of Oregon decided the three thousand same-sex marriages from that time are null and void, resulting in our fee being spat back at us with a tersely worded explanation that comes down to “you lost” without so much as a “we regret to inform you.”

You’d think by now my skin would be adamantine – that after being refused for years the right to marry or even be civilly united with my spouse, and then, having the marriage we were finally granted by Multnomah County (after seventeen years of tax paying, mini-van driving, child rearing domesticity) roasted over the pit of public debate and editorial opinion, voted against by my fellow Oregonians, and finally annulled by the state and declared legally nonexistent, as if they could wipe our memories of our marriage clean, I would be impervious to pain.

But getting our sixty dollars back made me cry. Oh, I could have cried over a million other things that day; the pouring rain, my red and dripping nose, my two sons with pneumonia coughing on the couch, not enough time in the day to care for sick kids, an even sicker spouse (sleeping the afternoon away upstairs), our numerous pets and my mental welfare; but I am made of tough stuff.

The check, however, hammered home what I know unconsciously every day, that we, my love and I, are lesser citizens under the law – they won’t even take our money, we are so unworthy.

Is it such a huge leap to understand that we are human? That we fall in love, hope, dream, and work for a future, just like any other two adults choosing to spend their lives together, till death do they part, forever and ever, amen? It is hard for me to understand why legal protections for our unions, for our children, for our intentions in terms of wills, property, hospital visitation and custody, are denied us as citizens of Oregon, a state that constitutionally demands equality, when it has been decades since we were officially stamped as “normal” by the American Psychiatric Association, and declared just another healthy variation on the human animal.

Morally, we’re trying to do the right thing; to quit “living in sin” and get married. Goodness knows we’d have done it long ago if we’d had the option. Ethically, we’re trying to meet our spousal and parental responsibilities by ensuring security in the relationship via legal protections, and model a marriage based on mutual respect, compromise and communication. Socially, we are eager to strengthen the fabric of society, by marrying within the arms of family, friends, community and our church of choice. Where did we go wrong?

By being two women who fell in love with each other. The check from Multnomah County wasn’t really a refund, we didn’t want our money back, we didn’t return a faulty product; we had a perfectly lovely product ripped from us, and were then informed that we shouldn’t have been allowed it in the first place, and even, perhaps, that this is what we get for daring to want it at all. It was enough to make a grown woman cry.

Beren deMotier is a freelance writer who lives in NE Portland with her spouse, three kids, and a Labrador the size of a small horse. Her column, I Kid You Not, is syndicated nationally.