The Book that Never Was

After my google search on polyamory failed to turn up the result I was looking for, I went looking elsewhere on my computer -- and lo and behold, I found what I wanted on my hard drive.

It was in a document called "most recent copy of Metaphive outline."  The text was blue, in a font I don't normally use.

This is because Lilianna did the typing.  

It was Mother's Day weekend, 2007.  Lilianna and I were spending it together at a chi-chi resort, just the two of us, courtesy of Rick, her husband and my (then) boyfriend.  The mini-vacation was his birthday gift to both us (our birthdays fall less than two weeks apart).  He had even booked a couple's massage for her and me together (specifying male massage therapists for each of us, which was tres thoughtful of him!).

Unfortunately, I was so beset by morning sickness at that time (I maybe eight weeks along with Sienna) that I was unable to enjoy myself very much. There was no dancing, no drinking, no double seduction of the young, muscular men who kneaded our muscles in tandem.  Apart from that massage and one sojourn in the hot tub (I only immersed my legs, since I was paranoid about raising my core temperature and possibly harming the baby), Lilianna and I ventured out of our room only for meals. And the only thing I could really eat was Eggs Benedict, so even the food was more of a necessary evil than any kind of hedonistic indulgence.

What Lilianna and I spent most of our time doing that weekend was lying in bed -- she in hers, I in mine, each of us in silky lingerie -- and talking.  Some of the time, she typed while we talked.

By the end of the weekend, we had a fairly detailed outline for the book on polyamory that we planned to write together. One of the sections we'd slated to appear in the Introduction was called, "Our impulse to write the book," and here's what we'd come up with:

Dearth

There really isn’t much out there charting the uncharted; we frequently feel we're making things up as we go along & wouldn’t it be nice if others could benefit from all this work; it has been a source of comfort to find people to talk to who’ve had experience & we hope this book can be a similar source of comfort and guidance to others

Personal Growth

This project is helping us sort through our own experiences in a way that benefits us -- the soulishness of the art space (introduce very briefly) -- somewhere here we need to be really upfront about how lucky we are to have become such good friends, since not everyone in our situation would be getting along so well

Civil Rights

After the attacks of the past year ([Robin]'s custody trial) we feel that it is extremely important that we call attention to destructive assumptions and have a voice as people, and especially as parents

I still stand behind all those reasons for writing, even that dubious first one about the dearth of stuff already out there (see my last post, "Poly Info Glut").

No, Lilianna and I didn't end up writing that book.  Our lives got in the way.

Maybe someday we'll write a different one -- who knows?  In the meantime, all those ideas can be put to good use. (Wow, I don't have to recreate the wheel!)

So, in my next post, I'll unveil a (slightly modified) list of mainstream objections to polyamory that Lilianna and I generated almost 4 years ago, and I'll use that list to arrive at the "poly party line" answers I recently searched for, and failed to find, on the internet.