marriage

For the first KYD No. 15 teaser, Michelle Dicinoski writes about getting married to her partner Heather in Toronto, where same-sex marriage is legal. But when she came home to Australia their wedding may well have not existed.

When I was a kid, I hated the idea of marriage. Marriage meant I would have to cook someone’s tea every night, wash his clothes, share a bed – all of which seemed like a lot of work. Second-wave feminism had shaken things up in the world, but my household, in Rockhampton in the 1980s, was yet to feel the effects of the tsunami. We were the first people in our street to get a microwave, but it would be years before my dad could use it.

Marriage didn’t seem to be a transition, or a rite of passage. It seemed to mark only an endless repetition of how things were: women doing women’s work, men doing men’s work, and life going on with a kind of inevitability. As a child, I didn’t know what I wanted for my future, but I knew that wasn’t it. If I could somehow have glimpsed the future, and seen myself marrying a woman, I might have fallen from my tree house in surprise.

Michelle Dicinoski is the author of Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance (Black Inc., 2013). She is the recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship 2012–2013 and a Hedgebrook Fellowship (2013). She lives, for now, in Melbourne.

To read the rest of Michelle’s piece, preorder a copy of Issue Fifteen, available online 1st October!