It was just Spring and me and M2 were visiting my mother. She was busy sorting her photos and papers stacked in piles on the queen bed in the guest room, most of which I hadn’t seen before. I’ve visited over the years and helped sort photos each time. I thought I had already seen it all. But there’s always some box or file hidden or forgotten which is a burden and a delight.
When we were leaving for our flight home, my mother asked if M2 had a boyfriend. We were standing just outside her home in the hot Southern California sunshine. I said, She likes girls too. My mother said, O, okay. I’ll remember that. She said that she wouldn’t ignore it like she did with M1. That things are different now. That she’s learning. Something about a blind eye.
When the kids were growing up and the idea of love came up I would first say boyfriend. The most likely as the default. It wasn’t purposeful. It is just how things usually are or were. So I would quickly add or girlfriend. Or add unless you’re gay. Being transgendered or gender fluid wasn’t even in my mind and we never talked about it. But I wish we had.
When M1 was in ninth grade she walked into my room and told me she was gay. Which I already had come to know. I can’t remember when I had made that the default. But it was in middle school. She’s more flexible than that, but it’s easiest to say she’s gay than anything else. Our culture doesn’t allow for superficial complexity. She was nervous when she told me. I looked up from my computer and said, Okay. It was national coming out day. I said, You didn’t need to tell me that. She said, Yes I did.
When we visit my mom, we often play cards at her dining room table. Crazy Eights or Gin. Go Fish. My mom will ask questions then. What are your favorite classes? What do you do with your free time? Is there a boy you are interested in? M1 would keep her eyes on her cards and shrug. I’d say, She likes girls, Mom. My mother would purse her lips, look down at the table and rub at a spot on the wood. She’d say nothing. The cards would be dealt and the game would begin. Each time that was how it would unfold. She likes girls, pursed lips, no eye contact, gesture, redirection.
We were standing out in the Southern California heat. That sun pressing down on the back of our necks. The light sweat all throughout my hair. That damp feeling. The rental keys in my hand. My mother said that it runs in the family. That my father’s father was gay. He would disappear for weeks at a time on drinking binges, abandoning his wife and child who had to fend for themselves. This is the first time she ever mentioned she thought he was gay. She said that once he was gone for five years but I’d never heard that. Weeks, yes, but not years. It’s also the first time she said that he was out fraternizing on these binges. Anyway, he’d always let my mother know who was gay in the entertainment business. Merv Griffin was gay. Rock Hudson too. They’d be watching TV and he’d point at men. Movie stars. Musicians. He’s a queer. So’s he.
She said homosexuality is Mother Nature playing a trick on us. I don’t know what the trick is. Or why it would be perceived as trickery. There’s something in the foreground which obscures the thing back there. There’s an expectation. There’s either this or this. She mentioned children. They can adopt, she said. As if that’s the only option.
There are things I want for myself and things I want for you. I want happiness for me. I want you to have happiness too. Sometimes an idea is attached to an action. I want my children to be happy. My mother also wants my children to be happy but the happiness is attached to a family, which is a man and a wife and two children, a boy and a girl, and a white picket fence, and a dog and two cats and an apple pie made from scratch cooling on a clean kitchen counter. But that structure isn’t happiness. It’s just a way of placing things. And my mother of all people should know that.