This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids: A Question & Answer Guide to Everyday Life (7 page)

A PARENT’S PERSPECTIVE

“What did I do wrong?”

When my daughter came out to me at the age of twenty-five, I felt overwhelmed with emotion. As a mother, my mind quickly went to, “How could I not see this? What did I miss? What did I do wrong?” Instead of making it all about her, I made it all about me and my abilities as a parent. I searched for a reason for it not to be true. This was not the life I wanted for my daughter. I wanted the son-in-law and the grandkids. You know—the traditional life. I also knew that she was anything but traditional.

Since my daughter lived in a different city when she came out, she told me over the phone. This was not ideal, but probably worked best due to the high emotions we were both experiencing. After a tearful phone conversation, I ran to her childhood bedroom, thinking that somehow it would make me feel closer to her. I thought maybe some clue of information would be revealed that would help me get my head around this new information.

I pulled out old pictures of her in school, yearbooks, journals, anything I could find to see what I’d missed. Surely I had missed something. A perfect mom would have recognized this early, or would have raised her in a better environment where she could have felt more comfortable and discovered this earlier. Looking back at all of her struggles in high school and college, my emotions shifted from wishing she wasn’t gay to blaming myself for not allowing her to be who she truly was. She had been acting as the person I had wanted her to be, instead of finding herself. I had always harshly judged parents who lived vicariously through their children; now I was coming to the realization that I, too, was guilty of this.

I do not like emotional pain, and I try to find the quickest path through it. My husband says that I can leap to new paradigms much quicker than most people. It only took me a couple of days to realize that what I really needed to be focused on was not what I did or didn’t do in her childhood. That was in the past and couldn’t be changed. What mattered most now was what I was doing today. What mattered most was what my child needed right now: my unconditional love. I could sort things out later—if they even needed to be sorted out. A mother never wants to see her child in pain. My child was going through the most painful experience of her life, afraid she would lose our relationship because of being herself. She needed assurance that I would be there, no matter what.

I so badly wanted to jump on a plane, run to her, and scoop her up like she was three years old again, hold her, and tell her everything would be all right. Instead, we had long phone conversations, fraught with more tears and emotion. She knew, though, through these conversations, that I would continue to stand by her no matter what.

I’m proud of her, and I’m extremely proud to be her mother.

Lynn, 51

A KID’S PERSPECTIVE

“My mom said I was too girly to be gay.”

My mother takes the most beautiful photographs. Because of her profession, I can glimpse, in some small way, how she perceives the world. This has been a gift into understanding her as a person. But this is not a story about my mother’s photography. This is a story about finally seeing what my mother saw when I was seventeen.

During the latter part of my time in high school, I insisted I was going to the U.S. Naval Academy. I was going to major in chemistry, become a cargo pilot, and later be an astronaut. I spent hours reading about NASA, I went to a camp about science and technology in public policy, and I became president of my high school chemistry club. My mother, who had dated midshipmen before, was heartsick at the idea of me at the Naval Academy. A soft-spoken, sensitive child who liked poetry and cried easily—surely these were not the makings of a naval officer. Looking back, my mother worried that the Navy would crush me. I was hoping that the Navy would make me strong.

I needed strength because I feared that if anyone knew I was attracted to other girls, I would be reviled. Finally, one evening after dinner, my mother questioned me about an e-mail I’d received from a friend. I admitted to her what I feared most—that I was a lesbian. Our initial conversation was reasonably calm, but she assured me that what I was going through was a phase. Women are attractive to look at, she pointed out, and I shouldn’t mistake attraction for simply enjoying beauty in other people. Our family had endured a year of my grandparents being extremely ill, and I was probably reacting to the stress. Besides, I was so girly, and had always been girly—my mother joked
that she was more of a lesbian than I was, because she was very athletic and a dedicated tennis player in her youth. I loved doing my hair, makeup, and nails—what part of that said
lesbian
? She asked me if I was given the choice between dating a boy and dating a girl, all things equal, which would I choose? Meekly, I muttered that I would choose the girl. My mother thought I was just saying that to save face. Our talk drew to a close, and I begged her not to tell my father.

Over the next few weeks, my mother made comments about the masculine appearance of the female astronauts I so admired. She had previously joked about me having a crush on a good female friend of mine (I did); after our conversation, those jokes ceased. I withdrew. I hid my secret, cut ties with my one friend to whom I had come out, and went away to a liberal arts college. I was miserable my freshman year. I kept trying to balance my mother’s opinion that I was going through a phase with my own feelings. I had no idea which to trust; in the past, my mother had always been right. She had my best interests at heart in my childhood, and her intuition has an irritating way of usually being correct. How could she be wrong now? I drifted away from chemistry and became a French major instead. I was girly—maybe this was a field that suited me better. I dated a few men in college, briefly, but I was recognizing that the butterflies-in-the-stomach sort of feeling only happened with my female crushes.

I spoke with my parents many times during that first year of college. We spoke over the phone because I lived two hours away in a larger city. My mother grew angry when she found out that I had gone to a gay club with some friends (why I’d even told her, I’m not certain). She had looked the club up on the Internet and told me that the people in the photos looked like “freaks.” In retrospect, her “freaks” comment might have been the best thing she could have ever said. Though it
hurt, deeply, it also caused me to grow angry. Through my anger, I was able to question her judgment and evaluate whether or not her opinion was in keeping with what I knew to be true. She told me that no boys at work would ask me out with my hair that short, and if I kept acting like a lesbian, everyone was going to treat me like one. In reality, frustratingly, not one woman approached me, but the haircut gave me a confidence I’d never had before.

Somehow my mother and I moved through all of the hurt together. After a lot of tears, and a lot of talking, eventually something seemed to click. As for me, I carried my anger far beyond its usefulness. It was only after examining my frustration through therapy that I began to see the way out. I expressed annoyance that my mother didn’t even remember half the hurtful things she’d said, and my therapist told me, “Your mother has worked very hard to get to the place where she is now. She deserves some credit for that.” Initially, that, too, made me angry, then indignant, and then I finally accepted its truth. I realized my mother didn’t recall saying hurtful things because she never meant the things she said to be perceived as hurtful.

My mother has been supportive all along. Even when she used language that wounded me, she loved me. Hoping that this was all a phase was another way of trying to protect me—just like she wanted to protect me from the hardships of being in the Navy. What matters is that I love my mother more each day, and she loves me, too. My mother took a photograph of me recently. I hate most photographs of myself, but I love this one. I look beautiful seen through her eyes—a small glimpse into how much she loves me. It is my mother, after all, who gave me the courage to go my own way.

Molly, 26