Iowa: a proposal.

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Invisible. There is no other word to describe how I felt in that moment.

I completed my internship as a domestic violence counselor with such flying colors that the agency hired me on for eight weeks post-graduation to fill in for someone on medical leave.  I knew there was a possibility that the temporary position would become permanent. Everyone knew it. When, in my sixth week as a fill-in counselor, another counselor left the agency and a second vacancy opened, it became all but written. My colleagues clapped me on the shoulder, whispering their certainty that I would stay on indefinitely. I learned that I would have to apply like everyone else, a formality and nothing to worry about, they said. I flew through the first interview, nailed the second interview, and after weeks of dragged-out bureaucracy, my phone rang.

I didn’t get it.

I didn’t get either of them.

I folded to the curb in the Culvers parking lot before heading back inside to tell Jenn the outcome. She knew from the look on my face before I reached the booth.

We had a lot riding on me getting that job. It had all the components I need at this bizarre post-Master’s, pre-licensure juncture in my career: salary, benefits, an ideal schedule for childrearing, supervision for my 3,000 hours [toward licensure], and more. Not to mention the friendships and client relationships I had there. In the course of a two-minute phone conversation, our plan to buy a house, my means to being insured [because I cannot be added to Jenn's health insurance plan], and my professional development stopped.

Because I was believed to be such a shoe-in, I hadn’t sent out resumes for any other positions. My student health insurance was set to expire and, once you’ve had a brother diagnosed with a terminal illness while uninsured, you just don’t go without coverage. So, it was in a frantic rush that I went online to complete the catch-all screening tool for state-issued benefits. I answered questions about my health, my household make-up, my income, and my dependents. I checked ’single’ as I am required to do by law. I clicked ’submit’, waiting only a second or two before my eligibility status appeared on the screen. Of all the benefits programs offered, I was eligible for one:

family planning with birth control.

I laughed at the absurdity before my throat began to close. In the state of Wisconsin, as a partnered, gay woman in good health, without income or children, I don’t exist except in the case when  I abandon everything I am for a heterosexual tryst, thereby threatening to balloon both the population and subsequent cost to the state?

Invisible.

Now, up to that point, we had decided not to marry in Iowa. Any marriage of ours in Iowa would be purely symbolic, not granting us any rights or protections in our home state so, we reasoned, what’s the point?

Rejection changes things. It flattens your step. It knocks the wind out of you. Rejected by my place of employment after receiving stellar reviews for nine months, and rejected by my state government as a citizen worthy of assistance, it became a sudden emergency to belong to something. Anything. The need to be identifiable in a tangible, legally binding way blared within me, so when Jenn returned from her training run, I announced with gusto that, despite our previous decision, I wanted to get married in Iowa. I explained about the screening tool and the stifling invisibility. Run-on sentences about how humans are socialized to thrive in groups, how our identities ripple to life through our families and occupations, poured out of me.

“Our love and our relationship are solid and I know that, and nothing changes that,” I argued, ”but I need some entity with some authority somewhere to look at me and say ‘Oh, yeah — she goes with her’ so I can feel visible again. And not partially or separately, but fully and completely, so I want to get married, to you, in Iowa, even if it doesn’t mean anything here.”

It was a proposal dripping with desperation, lacking any ounce of romance, yet, somehow, through the magic of our as yet unmarried, un-domestically partnered, un-civil unioned commitment, she removed her earbuds, wrapped me in a sweaty embrace, and accepted.

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