Making the Invisible Visible
My father was career Army. He retired when I was three. I grew up in Columbus, Georgia and Ft. Benning was a large part of my life. I had a lot of friends who were in the military, were former military or had a father who was retired Army and so forth.
I got married at age 19 to another 19 year old with whom I had graduated high school. His father had been career Army and his only dream was to be a soldier. Like his father (and mine), he also made a career of the Army.
So I was a military wife for a lot of years. And then we began a long, slow divorce that was drawn out because of my health issues and the fact that we have two special-needs kids.
When I was getting divorced, my first boyfriend was a man who had retired from the Army. We met through a mutual friend and this friend was, like me, a military wife and homeschooling mom.
The military has its own culture. I tend to get along better with people who have spent some time in the military or who have been military dependents. For the first forty years or so of my life, American military culture was my default culture more than anything else.
Tom and I had many other things in common beyond the military connection. I wanted to become an urban planner and he had been an urban planner until shortly before I met him. I was a homeschooling parent and he had recently changed careers to become a teacher. So, in some sense, we were both teachers.
My father mostly didn't speak of his Cherokee heritage. His heritage was a largely invisible influence on my life and the silence with which he treated it made things related to it invisible to me.
Like experiments where cats are raised in environments with only vertical lines and cannot see horizontal ones, I was oblivious to certain things. They simply failed to register. And then my father died and I saw that photo of Gary Farmer and my eyes were opened. I suddenly could see and I looked back on my life and noticed things that had always gone unnoticed before.
One of the things I noticed was that Tom was a full-blooded Indigenous man. That suddenly registered as significant to me in a way it never had before.
Tom was Chamorro. That's the Native people of Guam.
He went by Tom because it sounded Anglo and that was useful in pursuing a career. It helped to downplay his ethnicity.
But Tom wasn't short for Thomas. It was short for Tomas.
My understanding is that, these days, Chamorro culture has a strong Spanish influence. So his name was a mix of Spanish and Chamorro influences. His middle name was a Chamorro word and he told me it meant "happy."
He died in 2012, but it's possible to find a few mentions of him on the internet. I've debated whether or not to include some of those here.
The relationship was a long-distance relationship and I never met him in person. So it's possible that his children and other people who knew him would be surprised to hear that some woman they never heard of is claiming he was her boyfriend at one time (assuming they ever tripped across this post).
So I don't know whether it makes more sense to respect his privacy or to tell you his full name and include links to internet sources about him.
But I remember seeing a clip once where a White woman -- a celebrity of some sort -- told her Black boyfriend something like "You erase me." I interpreted his decision to mostly not speak of the relationship as protecting her privacy, but she interpreted it as denying the relationship and invalidating her.
There probably isn't a right or wrong answer per se, but after thinking about it, I decided I would err on the side of not erasing this Native man from my life. I decided to give him a little visibility in my online life and include some of those links here. The article titled A Touch of Class talks about the fact that he became a school teacher and quotes him as saying he decided it was his calling. He had been an urban planner until not long before I met him and he kept custody of the kids when his wife moved out. I suspect he changed careers because teaching is a parent-friendly occupation, but he was savvy enough to not give that explanation in an interview.
As noted above, he told me his middle name -- Megofna -- meant "Happy" in Chamorro. This Chamorro language site has a searchable dictionary. If you put in the English word "Happy," it provides the following results:
Like with the Star Trek clip above, there are many equally valid descriptors of Tom. He was a military retiree. He was a devoted father. He was an educator.
And those equally valid descriptors were equally valid reasons for us to feel a connection and to have something in common. But while I knew him I was overlooking an important detail and failing to see one of the things we had in common: That we both had some degree of Native heritage.
I met Tom because I was extremely ill. Among other things, I had terrible insomnia and was spending a lot of time online at odd hours because of it and that fostered a series of relationships to people in far flung places.
My relationship to Tom ended for the same reason it began: My health issues. The relationship was a casualty of my lengthy medical crisis.
I never fell out of love with Tom. I just couldn't be with him because of things happening in my life. I remember him with a great deal of fondness.
I got married at age 19 to another 19 year old with whom I had graduated high school. His father had been career Army and his only dream was to be a soldier. Like his father (and mine), he also made a career of the Army.
So I was a military wife for a lot of years. And then we began a long, slow divorce that was drawn out because of my health issues and the fact that we have two special-needs kids.
When I was getting divorced, my first boyfriend was a man who had retired from the Army. We met through a mutual friend and this friend was, like me, a military wife and homeschooling mom.
The military has its own culture. I tend to get along better with people who have spent some time in the military or who have been military dependents. For the first forty years or so of my life, American military culture was my default culture more than anything else.
Tom and I had many other things in common beyond the military connection. I wanted to become an urban planner and he had been an urban planner until shortly before I met him. I was a homeschooling parent and he had recently changed careers to become a teacher. So, in some sense, we were both teachers.
My father mostly didn't speak of his Cherokee heritage. His heritage was a largely invisible influence on my life and the silence with which he treated it made things related to it invisible to me.
Like experiments where cats are raised in environments with only vertical lines and cannot see horizontal ones, I was oblivious to certain things. They simply failed to register. And then my father died and I saw that photo of Gary Farmer and my eyes were opened. I suddenly could see and I looked back on my life and noticed things that had always gone unnoticed before.
One of the things I noticed was that Tom was a full-blooded Indigenous man. That suddenly registered as significant to me in a way it never had before.
Tom was Chamorro. That's the Native people of Guam.
He went by Tom because it sounded Anglo and that was useful in pursuing a career. It helped to downplay his ethnicity.
But Tom wasn't short for Thomas. It was short for Tomas.
My understanding is that, these days, Chamorro culture has a strong Spanish influence. So his name was a mix of Spanish and Chamorro influences. His middle name was a Chamorro word and he told me it meant "happy."
He died in 2012, but it's possible to find a few mentions of him on the internet. I've debated whether or not to include some of those here.
The relationship was a long-distance relationship and I never met him in person. So it's possible that his children and other people who knew him would be surprised to hear that some woman they never heard of is claiming he was her boyfriend at one time (assuming they ever tripped across this post).
So I don't know whether it makes more sense to respect his privacy or to tell you his full name and include links to internet sources about him.
But I remember seeing a clip once where a White woman -- a celebrity of some sort -- told her Black boyfriend something like "You erase me." I interpreted his decision to mostly not speak of the relationship as protecting her privacy, but she interpreted it as denying the relationship and invalidating her.
There probably isn't a right or wrong answer per se, but after thinking about it, I decided I would err on the side of not erasing this Native man from my life. I decided to give him a little visibility in my online life and include some of those links here. The article titled A Touch of Class talks about the fact that he became a school teacher and quotes him as saying he decided it was his calling. He had been an urban planner until not long before I met him and he kept custody of the kids when his wife moved out. I suspect he changed careers because teaching is a parent-friendly occupation, but he was savvy enough to not give that explanation in an interview.
As noted above, he told me his middle name -- Megofna -- meant "Happy" in Chamorro. This Chamorro language site has a searchable dictionary. If you put in the English word "Happy," it provides the following results:
- magof: happy, glad, delighted. (Adjective)
- manmagof: Happy, glad, delighted. (Adjective)
What did I just say? Cup, Glass, Liquid, Clear, Brown, Hot.
Like with the Star Trek clip above, there are many equally valid descriptors of Tom. He was a military retiree. He was a devoted father. He was an educator.
And those equally valid descriptors were equally valid reasons for us to feel a connection and to have something in common. But while I knew him I was overlooking an important detail and failing to see one of the things we had in common: That we both had some degree of Native heritage.
I met Tom because I was extremely ill. Among other things, I had terrible insomnia and was spending a lot of time online at odd hours because of it and that fostered a series of relationships to people in far flung places.
My relationship to Tom ended for the same reason it began: My health issues. The relationship was a casualty of my lengthy medical crisis.
I never fell out of love with Tom. I just couldn't be with him because of things happening in my life. I remember him with a great deal of fondness.