You Can't Buy Love Like That Page 17
I could see her trying to compute things in her mind that didn’t add up—her head tilted to one side, her eyes squinting. “Yes,” I said. “I was as surprised as you are. Linda told me that she used to watch me play softball, and then she got on the team this year. I had no idea. One day after practice, she approached me about going out. She said that she and her husband had an open marriage and that she didn’t know what it might be like to be with a woman, but she was open and interested.”
My mother got up and unlocked the sliding glass door to let some air in. The cool breeze was a relief to us both. “I thought it was a fairly harmless idea, given that her husband knew about it and that they had had relationships with others during the course of their marriage. I wasn’t expecting anything big to happen—but then we fell in love.”
I didn’t know whether to stop or keep going. I didn’t want her to think that I had broken up a marriage or that I had even started the adventure. Somehow convincing her of my integrity in this situation was a bit of a stretch. Perhaps I had said enough and I should let this sink in before going on.
I heard her let out a big sigh as she stared into her cup. Without looking up, she spoke. “Aunt Noreen wrote me a letter after you and Julie went to visit her when you were twenty-two. She told me that she thought you were a lesbian and that I should encourage you to marry Mike.”
It was my turn to be shocked. For eight years my mother had kept this secret from me. I had wondered why things had been so strained between my Aunt Noreen and me when I went to visit her in Tennessee with Julie—why I had had such a miserable time at her house, why she had been so cruel. I wondered who else might have said something to my mother that she never shared with me.
“I was so furious at her for saying that that I ripped up the letter and never spoke to her again.”
I was so astonished by this revelation I could hardly form a thought in response. Was she enraged at the possibility it was true, or was she angry in defense of me? I didn’t want to ask. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I don’t know. I was really peeved at her for saying it. I guess I didn’t know how to talk about it.”
All this time I was keeping a secret from her, and she was keeping a secret from me. Well, that explained why my mother had not been as friendly to Julie as she had been with Nicky. The only difference was that she had no suspicions about the latter friendship, and there was no need to tell her now. We sat in silence for several minutes, each of us absorbing the secret once held by the other. Finally my mother spoke.
“I need some time to think about this,” my mother said.
“I know. I need a little time myself.”
I got up and turned on the light in the living room so that I could find my coat in the closet. The relief of speaking was equaled only by the fear of the consequences. I stepped toward my mother and put my arms around her to hug her goodbye. With a kiss on the cheek, I turned and walked out the door.
My mind kept replaying the conversation in my head on the way back to Ann Arbor, and I wondered if my aunt’s revelation in her letter had confirmed something my mother had long suspected or if it had never occurred to her that I might be gay. I also pondered the ways in which her secret about Aunt Noreen’s letter had kept a barrier between us—imagining she was just as afraid to lose my love by addressing something that might not be true as I was of telling her something that was.
Days went by and my mother didn’t call, even though we often spoke two or three times a week. It seemed I had lost both my parents—one to death and the other to overwhelming disappointment. Finally, midway through the third week, she phoned.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “I have done a lot of thinking about our conversation, and I want you and Linda to come over and talk. I don’t expect that I will change your mind or that you will change mine, but I don’t want to live in fear of something that I don’t understand.”
I could hardly believe my ears. I was so proud of my mother for her courage. I was proud of myself, too, for following through with my revelation. This was certainly a start toward the authenticity with her that my fear had prevented with my dad. With gratefulness and a good bit of trepidation, I said yes.
The following week, Linda and I made our way to her house, gripping each other’s hands in the car as we rode. “What do you think she will say?” Linda asked.
“No idea. She’ll probably make you promise to let me go if I fall in love with a man.”
We both laughed and then drove the rest of the way in silence.
My mother met us at the door and invited us to sit with her at the kitchen table. She put on water for tea and then sat down, her hands playing with the edges of the placemat in front of her. She was warm toward Linda but reserved. I felt like I had been called to the principal’s office for some infraction and Linda had been an accomplice. I remember her starting with something like, “This is a bit of a surprise.”
After that, I don’t remember her words as much as her energy. As a child, when I did something she didn’t like, she would talk more softly rather than yell. I could see she wanted to understand this, and even our presence seated together across from her seemed to help her realize that we were no different than the last time she had seen us seated next to each other— only now she knew more about just how special Linda was in my circle of friends.
Linda’s straightforwardness appealed to my mother, as did her gentle way of explaining her relationship with her husband and how our connection had unfolded. She talked about meeting Joe in high school and always knowing he would be a great father—something that was important to her in a man. Joe’s sister was married to her best male friend, and they spent time together as a foursome. They were intellectually matched, and he was open to her being an academic, while he was destined to become a surgeon. Everything on paper appeared to describe a dream life, but it was far more difficult living out the template than designing it in her mind.
She went on to explain that while they had wanted to be together, they were both interested in exploring other sexual experiences, and that open marriage appeared to be a viable solution—making it sound almost normal. She described how both she and Joe had had other relationships outside their marriage before this one, always with the consent of the other. My mother looked on, occasionally revealing her shock with raised eyebrows, as Linda described a marital union that was beyond her ability to fathom.
Because Linda had done everything expected of a young woman in our generation—graduate from college, get married to a doctor, and have two children—there was nothing my mother could say in objection to the life plan she had followed to date. In fact, it was the one she would have chosen for me. Yet it was flawed. Because Linda didn’t suffer from any religious programming that would have made it impossible to engage in the level of freedom she had acquired, she spoke about it as a rational evolution. After the description of her open marriage, the subject of being gay seemed anticlimactic. She was sure she and Joe would part amiably with a concerted commitment to make things work for their children.
Linda spoke with the enthusiasm and conviction of an evangelist asserting the importance of family and her hopes that my mother would be a part of our new union. True to form, my mother did ask her what she would do if I fell in love with a man. Fortunately, Linda didn’t let it throw her. She laughed, confident that would never happen.
We stayed for over an hour, and I could see my mother felt slightly more comfortable by the time we left. While challenges for total acceptance loomed ahead in our relationship, my mother and I had found a way to talk openly about a subject I feared might end all conversations with her. There were no more secrets between us, and I slept that night with an ease in my heart I hadn’t known for decades.
chapter
16
belonging
In January 1978, driven by a longing to find home in the big sense—a place of belonging that I returned to every day, where people loved and counted on me
, a place signifying permanence—I bought a house with Linda and moved in with her and her two children.
Coming out was one thing, but coming out like this was far beyond my knowledge and experience level. I had barely claimed my identity as a gay woman, and now I was about to become a gay parent. The term “blended family” had been coined just a few years earlier, but in 1978, it didn’t mean this blended. The powers that be would consider this more of a scrambled family, and not in a good way.
Custody cases favored the father if the mother was known to be in a relationship with a woman. Anita Bryant was still on a soapbox declaring that gays and lesbians were threatening to our children. She clearly hadn’t thought about the fact that most gay people were the products of heterosexual coupling and had grown up in heterosexual households. In vitro fertilization was only in its experimental phase. Perhaps she should have worried more about straight people. Masters and Johnson were in support of “conversion therapy” for homosexuals, asserting that they could all be “fixed.” It was not a comforting environment in which to announce your bonding preference for women, let alone that you were in a super-blended family.
Soon I would learn that being a parent was harder than being gay. Having never babysat or changed a diaper or listened to a child scream for three hours at a time, I was completely outside my comfort zone—piloting a space shuttle to Venus would have been less daunting—and if the children hadn’t been in equal portions as charming as they were exasperating, I wouldn’t have made it past the first month.
As it turned out, they became two of my most important teachers about what it means to be family and for people to count on you. This was first poignantly illustrated in a series of conversations with Sara over several weeks, during drives in the car. By now, Molly was two and Sara was four. I often picked the kids up from preschool, and, long before the day of car seats, Sara would stand up in the back as I drove, usually to reprimand me for going twenty-seven miles per hour in a twenty-five miles-per-hour zone. But today she had something else on her mind. Standing up, she leaned over the front seat and, seemingly unprovoked by anything other than her own thoughts, addressed me in an authoritative voice:
“You know, Carol. You’re not a part of our family.”
Thanks for sharing, I thought. Since it was far from easy to take up family life as a lesbian, it was good to be put in my place by a four-year-old who made it quite clear I didn’t belong there. We got home, and she asked me to cut her some salami for a snack, oblivious to my hurt feelings.
Time went on, and a week later, as I was again driving the kids home from school, and Sara, taking her usual place standing in the back seat, leaned over and said, in a more invitational tone, “Well, Carol, since you live with us, why don’t you be a part of our family?” She shrugged her shoulders as though saying without words, Doesn’t this seem like a reasonable thing to do?
“Sara, I would love to be a part of your family; thank you for that lovely offer.” We got home, and she skipped off to play with some friends—nothing more was said about it. I sat down on the couch bemused by her comment and curious about how her thinking process had unfolded.
A few days after that, Sara and I were again driving in the car when, from her usual place, she leaned into the front seat and, in an excited voice that revealed pride in her ability to reason, said enthusiastically, “Since you live with us and are a part of our family, we should change our names to the Anderwetts!” My last name being Anderson and theirs being Hewett, she had figured out a way to merge the two and make up a new name that would formally show that we belonged together.
“That’s a fabulous idea, honey,” I said. “We will have to discuss it with your mom at dinner.”
About a week later, when Linda and I had driven separately to visit my mother for dinner in Plymouth, Sara said she wanted to ride home with me and suggested that Molly go with her mother. We got in the car, and Sara, now buckled in the passenger’s side, said eagerly, “C’mon, Carol. Let’s race them home.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “And I know a shortcut.” I stepped on the gas, and off we went. I cut down a side street and flew as fast as the speed limit would allow. “Hang on; we’re going to make a sharp turn.” Sara squealed with glee, looking over her shoulder to make sure we had lost them.
“Faster, Carol, faster!” The pitch of her voice rose at every turn as she cheered me on for thirty minutes all the way home. Both of us overjoyed as we screeched into the driveway ahead of her mother and Molly, Sara blurted out, “You’re the best, Carol! Why don’t you and mom get married?” It was 1978, and even the shadow of such a possibility was so remote from our consciousness that no one could imagine that option in our lifetime. Yet a four-year-old had somehow, in the course of several weeks, processed the idea of home and connection and family and marriage as a totally natural conclusion for any group of people who lived together and who loved each other.
Watching Sara draw her conclusion to make me a part of her family based on love caused me to think about the arbitrary barriers adults had constructed over centuries, anchored in belief systems that overrode our basic instincts to love without judgment or conditions. I thought about the thousands of parents who lost connection with their children, of brothers and sisters who lost the companionship of their siblings, and other important family members with each other, because someone was gay. Those with the greatest privilege and power in the larger society defined the acceptable beliefs for the rest of its members, and out of those beliefs determined the norms that should be followed. Rather than listening to the voice within, people courted the voices outside of themselves, and in doing so lost touch with what most families claimed to be the most important thing: a sense of love and belonging.
I also began reframing how I identified myself. Rather than talking about my sexual orientation, I began to see my draw to women as my “love orientation.” It was in relationship to women that I felt most seen, valued, and respected for the whole of me, and with that kind of love, I could most fully be myself. Sexual connection was a natural extension of intimacy, not its primary focus.
Because of the social attitudes about gays and the Christian dogma that led me to fear my own family’s rejection, I never had the joy of telling my father the truth about me. The damnation from the outer world terrorized me into believing the opinion of outsiders was more powerful than my father’s love and his capacity to reach beyond all of that and embrace me anyway.
Coming out to my mother showed me I had been wrong, and while it was a disappointment to her that I would never marry a man, it was one from which we both could recover. What was not possible to reclaim were the four thousand days of close connection I lost with my father in the twelve years I kept that secret from him.
chapter
17
the struggle
Once we settled into our new family system, Linda and I set goals for ourselves. I continued my full-time job as a school psychologist and started a doctoral program in educational psychology at the University of Michigan. Linda enrolled in a PhD program in nursing and taught part-time. We were like many young families—juggling work and school and children—and we shared joint custody with Joe. We found other lesbian couples with children and built a community of support around us. We formed a group of women homeowners and taught each other how to install garbage disposals, caulk windows, and strip and refinish solid oak doors. It was empowering to be competent in the physical world and have the knowledge needed to be able to do things for ourselves instead of calling a handyman.
The first couple of years, I immersed myself in family life. To entertain the kids, I brought home a rabbit puppet that was so lifelike that people in the store came up to pet it as I nestled his nose into the crook of my arm and made him peek out at customers as I wandered through the store.
During dinner that night, I brought her to life with a shrill whiney voice as she declared, “My name is Samantha. I am here to give fines at dinn
er time.”
“What for?” Molly asked, looking worried but intrigued.
Samantha whipped out a list of infractions that included talking with your mouth full, eating with your fingers, and not finishing your supper. And she started by penalizing Linda.
“Ohhhhhh—I saw that! I saw that!” Samantha wailed as she pointed at Linda eating a potato chip with her fingers. “Ten cents,” she screamed with elation. Linda objected, “But we all eat chips with our fingers.”
Samantha broke in, “Talking with your mouth full. Twenty-five cents.” The kids screeched with laughter. Sam’s presence at dinner kept things lively, and we posted a chart of all the fines on the refrigerator—recording penalties at each evening meal. I enjoyed making them laugh and finding my own way of relating to them that was different than the other adults who cared for them.
These moments of victory were contrasted with their random refusals to eat breakfast or lunch if their mother didn’t make it, or rejections of me when I tried to read a bedtime story. Years later I discovered that those things happen with all parents and had little to do with me personally.
The second year into my PhD program, I added a master’s program in film and video to my educational load, envisioning my future role as an organizational consultant making my own visual media. At the same time, my advisor introduced me to Roger Stanley, an internal consultant at Ford Motor Company, who was looking for an assistant. I won a merit scholarship and took a leave of absence from my job to attend school full-time and to work with Roger in a consulting role at Ford.
We took family vacations in Northern Michigan in the summers, so Linda could supervise nurse practitioners in rural communities while the kids and I worked on crafts, played miniature golf, and went to the beach. On the outside, we looked like we could have been featured as a happy, successful family in Lesbian Homes and Gardens, had there been such a magazine.