Chapter 1 - Prologue

Sometimes couples can be deceiving. We have a sense, given to us through culture and social norms, of who “ought” to be together, and those who are somehow mismatched. I think Roan and I were always perceived as that couple, but the truth couldn’t be farther from that perception.

Now, we were obviously physically mismatched when we met. I was dark-skinned, on the shorter side at 5’3, and edging-towards-curvy. And, well, I’ll get to Roan in a minute.

I’m also from Kansas City and, despite the fact that I love Portland and so many people here, I have always felt a bit out of place here. It’s not just a racial thing -- there are enough black folks here that I’m not exactly an alien (though, sometimes it can still feel that way), but being a Black Woman in Tech has a way of isolating you, even at the best of times.

At least until I met the boys, that is. Hamish and Raj were a breath of fresh air. How the hell a trust-fund kid and the epitome of a FOB-y Indian computer science student ever got this self-aware is beyond me, but when we all graduated from PSU and our rag-tag project team decided to actually build something together, a special bond was created between us. The trust I had and have in those two goobs was and is one of the reasons I stayed here; the other, inarguably more important reason, was Roan.

I don’t exactly remember where I met Roan. It must have been at school, but I can’t exactly recall -- visual arts and mechatronic engineering don’t tend to mix too much most of the time. It’s not so much the where you were when you meet him, that tends to stick; rather, you can’t help but take in all of them.

Roan’s big. Always has been. You don’t come from hard-line Dutch stock (with a little Indonesian in there) without being fundamentally sturdy. That sturdiness was both physical, as my husband then came in around 6”5 and a solid 190-ish pounds, as well as emotional.

His parents, Marten and Marikje, who I really only met close to our wedding, were closed, quiet people. Supportive of their child’s career at a distance, they had baggage with their decision to work in the art world.

The van Meegeren’s had an interesting lineage: Hans Han van Meegeren, was a legendary Dutch art forger, who personally fooled Herman Goering during World War II with a fake Vermeer painting. His son (Roan’s grandfather) Jacque intended to follow in the family business, but lacked the talent and died penniless and alone in the 1970s. Unsettled by this tumultuous youth, Marten was eager to ply his talents in the shipping trade in America by the time he was old enough to, and left with his young wife to do so in ‘85.

Marikje, is similarly stable, but in a kinder, gentler way. Her father, an Indo-Dutch refugee who made it back to the Netherlands, was wild and traumatised by his time in the concentration camps, married her significantly younger mother in the mid-1950s and Marijke was their only child before they separated. Raised by her loving but exhausted single mother, Marikje was eager to leave the Netherlands and only too happy to do so when the opportunity with Marten came up.

Their American-born kid proved a challenge to the sober, simple life they had planned for themselves in Newark, New Jersey. I think Roan must have perplexed them from the start, and probably especially worried their dad with their artistic inclinations. Due to Roan's size, they put him in sports throughout high school though I still can’t imagine how much they must have hated that; there’s not an aggressive bone in that big, beautiful body.

Despite their misgivings, Roan’s aptitude for art was readily apparent to all, and with great reticence -- and the agreement that in addition to visual arts, they'd dual major in something more readily employable -- they let them run off to school in California.

I don’t know all of the details of their time in LA at USC, but by the time we meet in Portland, I suspect Roan was quite a different person. They had come out as non-binary late in their undergraduate, eschewing most of the traditional masculine activities they’d been forced to participate in as a younger person. Their pronoun usage was casual and flexible; it was more important to them that those close to him knew that they simply didn’t feel like a man.

I can’t say that that was the hook without feeling creepy or fetishistic, but I must admit I was drawn to them significantly because of their ability to simultaneously inhabit a body at the pinnacle of one gender’s expectations, and push back against everything toxic that came with that. Roan was always quiet, reserved, and careful, but in this one crucial way of knowing themself, they were resolute. The more I uncovered this quiet sureness about them, the more I fell in love.

I’m not the best psychoanalyst and Roan’s not always the most talkative, but I know from experience that how I looked was probably how I caught their eye.

I’m from the South and that always confounds folks’ expectations, for a variety of both utterly banal and deeply racist reasons. Bob, my dad, is a doctor, and Sharon, my mom, is an accountant. Whatever my accent and my profession betray, I have a fair bit of a debutante in me. I went to the right schools, graduated second in my class, and got a full ride to Stanford out of high school. But my body, well, my body’s always complicated that.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my body. It’s fucking sexy. I love the way my skin can glow like an effervescent ocean under the moonlight when we turn out the lights. I love the way my heavy breasts hang and pull me forward; my overdeveloped traps engaging hard to hold everything into place. Back pain aside, having a great rack has helped me more than once; every man who ever questioned my intelligence while they guessed my cup size was always in for a rude awakening a few moments later. I have an ass that won’t quit -- a gift from my mammie whose love of good food she passed onto me and I happily built upon.

When I met Roan, though, my body was already in a point of transition. While I tried to fight the “freshman fifteen” in university, I knew my priority was my grades and I made some sacrifices along the way. In the first semester we dated, I think I probably skirted that artificial dividing line between ‘sexily curvy’ and ‘charmingly chubby’ relatively early on.

My weight always tended to settle in my bust first. In graduate school, I watched as my perky-but-prominent breasts rounded out into heavy sacks of fat that truly lived up to being “knockers” with the way they would sometimes wobble side-to-side inside my shirts. By the time I finished school and Roan and I were well and truly committed, I not only had added some significant heft to the girls, but a happy little potbelly and nice, thick thighs had joined the gang.

The cause of all of this was pretty clear to Roan and to anyone around us: I just loved to eat. Roan had an appetite too, but never really seemed to gain any weight. I think when I met Roan I was around 140, and by the time they proposed after grad school I was well into the 180s.

Two years after meeting as I struggled to fit into my dream wedding dress, I had graduated from big-boobed and curvy to a “small fat” at about 200 pounds.

I know my mom, always conscious of how big grandma was, cringed a little as she watched me almost waddle down the aisle. The dream dress I had to compromise on in the end -- my boobs were simply too big to fit the bust -- but I did get my mermaid fit in the end, and we settled for a neckline that, while theoretically modest, still raised plenty of eyebrows. Even though it was a temperate September day, all dolled up and enduring the combo of personal insulation and tightly-fitted clothes, I felt myself glistening all the way down the aisle. I know, in the end, I looked fucking hot because I saw the photos - and I still remember what Roan did to me when we got on our honeymoon. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget that.

Pretty much as soon as we were married, Hamish, Raj and I found our work really taking off. Raj had only dabbled in computer science, his true passion being in aerospace. With Hamish’s mining sector experience, and my focus on robotics, we started to coalesce around applications in near-Earth asteroid mining. The space cowboy days of Bezos and Branson had been a flash in the pan, and now the big boys from the mining industry, the Canadians, Chileans, and Australians, were looking to partner with the more serious, staid commercial space players - we – Astral Resources – were the perfect bridge.

We focused early-on on simply consulting as an integrator and translator between the two industries, but by 2017, we’d developed a modular concept for a self-contained asteroid miner, our happy baby, the MODAM. With the concept in hand, we closed a series A raise at $1.5 million in 2018, and that gave all of us some breathing room to build out the tech.

By 2019, we closed our Series C at $15 million and were bringing on ten full time employees. As the stress of building a successful startup grew, so did my appetite. Two years after our marriage, I was looking at my fattest weight at our wedding with envy. I was well and truly fat now, in the mid-250s. Roan, a gentle giant and solid as always, probably put on a few in that time, but I suspected, even with our height differences, they were a good 30-40 pounds behind me.

In any other circumstances, this kind of transformation would have been difficult, maybe even traumatic, but not with my Roan there.

I figured they were a bit of a chubby-chaser even when we met, given the way they looked at my curves and liked to play with the parts of me -- like my love handles and my FUPA -- that people who simply liked big boobs never really gravitated towards. Every added pound was one that they worshipped. Almost literally.

While Roan was a painter first and foremost, they gradually got into photography after we married. They said they enjoyed the way they had to work with the camera as an independent entity that they couldn’t always guarantee would do what they wanted. The programmer in me gritted her teeth at knowing just how much technology could do without your input -- or desire. The philosophy they brought to it was fascinating, though, and their outputs were decidedly more embodied. Through their lens, Roan photographed every inch of my body and, though they never said it explicitly, every change it underwent.

After our home started to look a little too much like a shrine to me, I asked him to adjust their displaying practices to be more bedroom oriented and they were only too happy to oblige. Through their eyes, I truly saw myself as a woman others could only dream of being. They were shockingly good at helping me pose and position my body to accentuate every feature. They didn’t always go for “flattering” poses, but rather was “trying to show the whole” of the body that I have.

As Astral Resources settled into a legitimate company with some actual revenue and not just investment dollars in mid-2020 and some of the stress of hunting for money and clients died down, Roan’s own career was really taking off. The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art had brought him on the year before as one of their part-time archivists, but on a lucky break, when their head archivist decided to retire that year, Roan was accepted for the position. What made that especially sweet was that, especially with their burgeoning photography practice, they were also afforded a small stipend to continue their own creative pursuits, too.

We settled into domestic life pretty easily. We were both so thankful to have fulfilling jobs and some financial security in our early 30s -- evening buying our own little place in the Alberta Arts District -- that we decided that it was time to have a family.

When I had been younger, I’d never thought of myself as especially mothering. I carried some of the “women in STEM” baggage from graduate school, where every male colleague seems to be waiting for you to pop out a baby and leave your job. But the safety and some of the unconventionalness of my relationship with Roan really made me want to bring another life into ours - to share in it and benefit from it. Thankfully Hamish and Raj, as always, were chill. We’d never talked about a maternity policy, but we agreed that we had the financial and strategic room for me to take some time off when I had a baby in a year or two.

As the idea started to take shape in my mind, still unspoken, it was Roan who I worried about. With their relationship with gender and the sometimes fraught relationship they had with their own family, I wondered if kids would ever be something they'd truly want to invest in.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, when they said exactly what I felt:

“What we have is so good, I want to share that with someone else.”

From that point on, we were on the track. First I went off my IUD and then after several months and a pile of negative pregnancy tests, we went to the OB/GYN for tests. Having sex all the time was great; getting poked and prodded like a lab specimen, was much less so.

The news was hard to take. I know I cried myself to sleep for more than a few nights as we digested it. My egg count was exceedingly low and, after a few specialist visits, it was clear I was unlikely to procreate without significant medical interventions. A year and a half after deciding we wanted to try to conceive, we’d been to four different specialists and I was as pregnant as the day Roan and I had met.

But after one last hail-mary visit to a specialist in Seattle, I came home to Roan with the most optimism I had felt on the subject in a year.