2+ year enthusiastic Reader, first-time Diarist uncertain how to compose INTRO, this space used for apologies for ignorance and placement of first sentences for your determination of interest in continuing, but please take especial note of the word "PERSONAL" above so you're not appalled by finding it to be so, as well as lengthy OR maybe zip on down to about 5th paragraph from end, "So I began to think".
Help, esp. with tags, appreciated. Thanks and best regards to all at DK.
UNAMBIGUOUS
As a child growing up in the 50s, I never knew my mother was a lesbian. The voice in which I hear her tell the story of my father is not directed at me, but rather, one that I overhear.
UNAMBIGUOUS
As a child growing up in the 50s, I never knew my mother was a lesbian. The voice in which I hear her tell the story of my father is not directed at me, but rather, one that I overhear.
From my birth certificate I know that Sarah Lucille ____ (only ever called Lucille, though also known as "Bug" by her family and "Punkin" by her lover) of Charlottesville, Virginia married Edward Sorville __ of West Virginia and, as he was a storekeeper in the army, they were moved to Sharpe Depot in Stockton, California where, as she tells it, she was also employed at the Depot when, in a locker or break room area, she heard another girl exclaiming about what a wonderful time she’d had with "Eddie" the night before and, realizing the reference was to her own husband, immediately left him and filed for divorce before he knew she was pregnant. There being no further references to my father, I have in memory only the image presented by the wallet-sized army photograph of him in uniform held in place by white corner-protectors glued onto the black pages of her old album, the brownish tones in the photograph relieved by the vividly tinted carrot-orange of his short but softly waved hair.
By the time I was born, in the summer of 1946, my mother was living with a woman named Mae ____, known as Maisie. My mother’s story is that she told her family in Virginia I had been born dead as she was afraid I would be taken away from her, only telling them of my existence some years later. She says she craved salt during the pregnancy and would eat it by the handful. To this she ascribed that she was in a coma when I was born (40 days and nights comes to mind, but I’m pretty sure that’s from another story) and although she had planned to name me Sharon Lucille, the name on my birth certificate is Linda Mae which became, when upset and her Virginia accent kicked in, LinderMae.
It was never of note to me that my mother and Maisie shared a bedroom, nor that they spent all their time together and nearly all visiting friends were women. We moved several times in the 8+ years they were together and my mother, who worked in retail sales -- most contentedly as a Sherwin Williams paint expert in a small hardware store -- kept up the grounds of each small house, planting flower gardens and mowing lawns, while Maisie, who worked as a cook for the telephone company, prepared scrumptious meals and kept the house in order. Memories of melt-in-your-mouth pot roast and oven-browned potatoes, carrots and onions on Sundays and all-day-cooked beans with bricks of chili that sweated up the walls on Wednesdays (her other day "off"), can make even my mostly-vegetarian mouth water to this day. They mothered me equally and I knew I was loved by both in my early years.
They drank a lot of beer every night. I remember them bringing it home in flat wooden cases of bottles and, once, brewing their own. There were sometimes physical fights, precipitated, I now suspect, by jealousies, and I remember at least one black eye though not whose it was.
I’m sure that I was spanked and disciplined appropriately for my development. But what I remember most vividly are the blows that would come out of nowhere and for no seeming reason from my mother, sometimes a slap hard enough to knock me down. "Children should be seen and not heard" was commonly accepted wisdom, but I learned early on that children should not only not be heard, but also barely seen. I strove for invisibility in between my own flares of temper as I grew older and my mother’s behavior grew less and less predictable, along with, increasingly, my own.
I was a little more than 8 years old when my mother and Maisie parted and sold the house they had purchased together only the year before. We moved to Charlottesville to live with the grandmother who had raised her. I recall singing the then-popular "Ballad of Davy Crockett" incessantly during the 4-day train trip, but I do not remember being shushed or treated other than gently then by this woman who, at the time, must have felt near the end of her tether.
This relocation lasted but six months before my mother antagonized her relatives sufficiently that she had no other means to stay and wired a friend to borrow enough money to return by rail to California. From then until I left her when I was 12, my mother lived sometimes alone and sometimes with another woman and, in the last years, had a few drunken sexual encounters with men which took place within my awareness. Again, I never gave a thought to her sharing a bedroom with a woman, but was extremely embarrassed by her behavior in our living room or a car with the men and felt somehow guilty for being nearby. Obviously, it never occurred to me that just sharing a bedroom meant having sex. After all, when we’d had only one, my mother and I shared a bed – no big deal.
I lived in one foster home on a dairy farm for something over a year, but was moved to another when the first family’s son turned 13 because this violated some county child-welfare requirement. In addition to the parents and son, when I arrived that first family included a daughter of 14 years and a baby girl of 6 months. They practiced very simple living and a strict religion allowing no dancing, makeup or worldly pleasures, and who, in addition to their working dairy kept goats, chickens and rabbits, had fruit and nut trees and raised their own vegetables -- canning, preserving, baking their own bread, etc. Lots of indoor and outdoor chores were assigned but thorough instructions were given. Entertainment was simple and homespun. Although I sometimes rebelled against them, the rules were straightforward and easily understood, even by me.
The second family had a nice home in a small agricultural community where he worked his inherited outlying 100 acres of mostly almond and some peach orchards in three separate locations while she, who’d worked hard as he in building a home and managing it during the early years of the marriage and continued her responsibility for renting the houses on the properties, now enjoyed their new home in town, having a weekly cleaning woman and lines of credit in the best shops, and who, after 25 years of childless marriage and nearing 50 years old, took on the brand new role of parent, accepting with grace the startling presentation of teenaged me as the person in need of a home, rather than the much younger child she'd envisioned.
I, of course, had by then been subject to many years of unpredictable behavior from a parent as well as to my own increasingly confusing outbursts. She’d been treated badly in her own childhood and, attempting to cope, was undergoing shock therapy. (By the way, don’t ... ever.)
Both of us had hair-trigger tempers. The rules in this house were less apparent, my role less clearly defined, and I was often confused. We had some terrible clashes – but during them, everything was open and upfront and out there -- and over with when it was done. I was unwittingly bombarded by depression and struggling ineffectively with suicide. We were, in fact, quite horribly alike and somehow, even at our most embattled, we loved each other. Of him I do not choose to speak. They were my parents until shortly after I completed high school, when she died -- and I fell further apart inside, but carried on living.
At age 19, having shrugged aside my full academic scholarship to university after a couple months, and having completed a secretarial course at the local business school instead, I found employment as secretary to the credit manager of a well-known winery where I met and became close friends with the only other young woman working there. Having the same birthday, just a year apart, we had much in common, especially our sense of humor, and I enjoyed her roommate equally as well. We three maintained our friendship through my move to San Francisco for a time, and continued once I returned to the central valley. I enjoyed watching their softball games and occasionally filling in for a missing team member. (OK, only once – but I got a hit!) We went to movies, classes, swam at the reservoir and my apartment’s pool, celebrated each others’ triumphs and trials, and talked incessantly and with ease.
Nearly two years after we met, when her roommate was unable to travel back East for a family visit and I had the time and money available to vacation with her, my friend found it necessary to let me know they were gay, to mitigate my shock should I meet some of her hometown friends where they might feel safer in being more fully open about their identity.
It was actually the roommate who was designated to tell me and as she groped for the words, I suddenly realized what she was trying to say and blurted out, "You’re homosexuals!?" "We prefer to say gay, or lesbian," she gently corrected me.
And the light of awareness began to dawn upon my own mother’s sexual preferences. As I observed, especially in the early decades of our friendship, my gay friend’s need to be taken for straight in order to (for one) safely retain increasingly responsible jobs in the public sector, I began to have a sense of the pressure my mother had been through in those even earlier decades, never daring to publicly, fully reveal this part of her nature. Is this why she feared I would be taken away? Did these societal strictures contribute to the alcoholic and mentally unbalanced breakdowns?
For myself at the time, I was delighted to be learning more about this newly-opened-to-me small community. I experimented with men’s clothing (this was the 60s, it was allowed) as I discovered their pants fit me better – not the crotch, you fools! – for even when slender, I’m all wide shoulders and tummy with no hips, so men’s pants are often designed to better fit my apple shape. The shirts are great, too, as the wider shoulders and back better accommodate the obtrusive shoulder blade resulting from a spinal defect.
I never felt confusion about my own sexual identity. I believed that I could enjoy sex with another woman in the sense of scratching an itch, if I chose. I also knew that, although pleasurable, physical sex alone and of itself was not that interesting to me, and that I had no feelings of romance or desire for a woman. (I also gave thought to my knowledge that when in love, I have to be able to show it. Although the strongest public affection I comfortably display is a hug or holding hands, I knew I HAD to feel free to do so without restraint and I recognized how dearly this simple lack of safety cost my friends.)
I did occasionally wonder what others’ perceptions of me might be if based only on appearance, but was not too concerned about being misunderstood. I was, after all, quite young, fairly healthy, reasonably presentable, and could afford attractive and fashionable women’s clothing which I also greatly enjoyed. In time, while still appreciating the comfort I’d had with the menswear, those few articles gradually faded from my wardrobe.
Over the ensuing years, along with a marriage lasting only a couple of years (though the friendship has endured), other coupling relationships (some of many years), unending motherhood -- and now grandmotherhood (Bless you, my dear son and new family!), I’ve also enjoyed close friendships with both men and women, gay and straight, married and single -- some lasting nearly as long as that oldest one I’ve described.
Now approaching 63 but easily accepted for 75 if I choose, and nearing the end of my second decade of chosen celibacy, most of my single male friends have gone and I suspect I may not find more. I have some close women friends, a few of whom are gay.
I have recently (OK for several years) been in a fashion slump, feeling old, heavy and oh, so very weary. I have grown fat, had some surgical interventions resulting in disfigurement (cancer's just damned poopie), and often wear whatever misshapen garment from the thrift shop will cover and hide this heavy frame. The heels, never "spike" even in my youth, have long disappeared and now I wear flat-soled shoes (Thank You, Birkenstock!) or good hiking boots to minimize pain and, sometimes, men’s shirts for comfort.
Sporting naturally wavy hair worn short that is "wash ‘n’ fluff, ready to go" I believe I appear feminine, yet some time ago as I was walking in downtown Santa Cruz at dusk, I was approached from behind by a young man calling "Sir!", who was then greatly embarrassed to discover as I turned around that I was not a candidate for purchasing the flower he was offering to me for my "girl" ... It’s not the only time such a mistake has occurred.
So I began to think, am I presumed gay? Do even my friends wonder? One straight friend of a few years admitted, when asked, he had assumed I was at least "bi" when observing how close my gay friends and I are. I wondered why he didn’t assume I was straight because of how close my straight friends and I are.
I wondered why it bothered me. It’s not the label itself. It’s being mistakenly labeled. I hate it. And I hate that my gay friends of high integrity and strength of character have been labeled unsafe, risky, abusers, molesters ... all without regard to their individuality.
Then, suddenly as I rant here to myself in the wee hours of the morning unable to sleep, I remember reading a couple of days ago in Daily Kos what must have triggered this excavation into my past. (found here: http://www.dailykos.com/...
It is the true story, related by her father, of a young woman in the workplace recently where "there were a bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage and discussions going on across the country."
This young woman, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: "You guys don’t understand. You’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care."
And I SALUTE her. I SALUTE her generation.
Quietly adding, finally, and from deep within mySelf,
Rest in peace, mom.