So for a second I wondered if my aunt had gotten malware on her phone or something. I sent back a message asking if she needed both our email addresses or just mine, along with a comment about our weather and asking how hers was. My intent was to make sure that she had meant to send me that message before I did anything else. When she answered she said never mind, she had found the information.
Continue reading I don’t mean to be a jerk, part 1
Goodness knows I’ve vented about crazy family members many, many times.
I think we’ve all been there, at least once. For some the ordeal happens at every visit home and every holiday. Others only experience it occasionally. Venting about it afterward can be a valuable means of relieving stress. Better to share some stories with sympathetic friends than to strangle your racist uncle, homophobic brother-in-law, or Bible-thumping sibling, at Grandma’s dinner table, right? Continue reading No one hurts us like family can
And most years, despite all that, I forget.
Forget isn’t quite the right word, because I set reminders on all of my devices. But those reminders invariably show up while I’m in the middle of something. “Okay, when I get home, I’ll take care of it,” I think.
Again, and again, and again…
When I posted earlier about my journey from my redneck Southern Baptist roots to my city-dwelling ultra-liberal gay taoist present, I phrased it as a confession, which may have seemed odd.
Because I often write about matters of conflict between some people purporting to speak for Christians and the LGBT community, and because I frequently make references to Biblical passages (sometimes quite obscure ones), and also because I have been known to construct Biblical answers to some of those conflicts, I suspect some of the folks reading my blog think that I’m speaking as a gay, liberal Christian. I don’t intend to identify that way, and don’t wish to speak on behalf of any Christians. I’m a gay, liberal taoist. And when I speak, I speak only for myself.
You might ask, why does that require a confession?
One of the moments this last weekend that I realized just how alien I felt in the town where I attended High School was when my Aunt Silly asked me if I liked living in Seattle. It wasn’t the question itself, nor was it even the extremely disbelieving tone of voice or her incredulous facial expression. It’s the fact that she, and several other relatives who live near her, have been asking me the same question, with essentially the same amount of incredulity, for at least a quarter of a century.
And they never accept, “Yes, I love it,” as an answer. They frown and ask, “Really?” If I try to explain, the puzzled expressions just get worse. The only times I’ve been able to get even a grudging acceptance is if I mention my work and how difficult it would be to find something similar there.
It made me think about a conversation I’ve seen unfold at work many times. In the tech industry there are always a number of co-workers who are from other countries, and sometimes people talk about the difficulties moving to a completely different culture, raising children and building a life on the opposite side of the globe from your own parents and siblings.
In the middle of a recent iteration of this topic (we were having some celebratory cake for a young man who was about to fly back home to get married) I had a somewhat shocking realization: it has been 25 years since I have seen my father face-to-face. This co-worker who flies to the opposite side of the planet once a year to visit his parents hasn’t even been alive that long.
So I shouldn’t be thinking about how odd it must be for him to go so far away to make his way in this world. Because by comparison, I’ve let more than mere physical distance separate us.
My dad and I have never been close. And I do mean “never.” I distinctly recall being scolded by both Mom and one of my grandmothers when I was four years old to make more of an effort to spend time with him. My other grandmother and an aunt have talked about how even when I was two we had problems—and not just the ordinary problems of an inexperienced parent with stubborn toddler.
How much of that was due to his abusiveness, and the co-dependent relationship that develops between a child and an abusive parent, I can’t say. But even without that issue, I think we would have had problems. In oh, so many ways, we are alike. But in others we’re completely different.
Physically we are so alike that it’s a bit spooky. For instance, once in high school (this was after my parents divorced, and I was living 1200 miles away), one of my friends saw some photos Mom had put up which included several of my dad in his teen years. My friend would not believe that the pictures were not of me wearing some costumes. He became so angry when I insisted that they were not pictures of me, that he stormed out of our house and wouldn’t talk to me for about a week. Even then, he only relented because he’d talked to Mom and she confirmed that the photos were my Dad (actually, one was of my grandfather, so the look-alike thing has gone on for a few generations).
We share a certain number of personality traits. While a lot of that might be learned behavior, some of them I think go deeper than that. Sometime in my late teens or early twenties I realized that some of his less pleasant personality traits were getting a bit too strong. I had to make some serious changes, because I didn’t want to carry on the cycle of abuse.
But in some fundamental ways we are very different, and I know that some of those differences were unsettling to him even when I was very small. My tendency to talk to myself in order to figure out problems certainly upset him. I resisted his efforts to make me conform to “boy’s toys” and the like. Not that I didn’t play with my army men and rockets, I did! But I was just as interested in “girl’s toys.” I could go from staging immense battles where the future of the entire world hung in the balance, to acting out hurt/comfort romances where my sister’s Barbie nursed Captain Action back to health after he nearly died saving my sister’s Ken from… well, I can’t remember the name of the monster toy I had.
And you won’t believe the drama that ensued—after months of him angrily telling me that I could not have an Easy Bake Oven, plus telling Mom in that tone of voice that meant someone was going to get slapped around if we didn’t listen that she wasn’t to let anyone buy me such a girl’s toy—when I opened a Christmas present from my paternal Grandparents and found my very own Easy Bake Oven.
And don’t get me started on the political arguments!
It was mostly because of the abuse, though, that I was happy to be separated from him after my parents’ divorce was final. I’m not entirely happy at just how deep that separation has become. Being 1200 miles from him also meant being 1200 miles from one set of grandparents, an aunt, a bunch of cousins, and more. I have a half sister who seems like a great person, for instance, but we’re really just long distance acquaintances.
But I’m obviously not unhappy enough about it to take a road trip and try to renew some acquaintances. I have my reasons, and maybe they are as good as I think there are. As it is, my other relatives who only live a few hours’ drive away only see me once or twice a year.
That’s probably the real source of those looks of incredulity when my aunt asks if I like living in Seattle. I’m not that far away, and yet I don’t get back any more often than as if they were half a world away. And that just doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?
On the subject of coming out to one’s parents, I’ve always remembered the story one acquaintance told: “When I finally came out to my mom, she said, ‘I’ve known you were gay since you were two.’ And I thought, ‘Gee, thanks, Mom, why didn’t you tell me? It would have made my teens a lot less confusing!'”
Growing up gay, particularly before the 90s, the best you could hope for if your parents learned you were gay was a reaction like his mother’s. Truth be told, since we had no positive role models, and what little we knew about the family members of gay people were that they were all ashamed or hostile to their gay child, we didn’t even hope for that.
In my early teens I recall whispers about someone’s cousins being kicked out by his parents, for instance. In my later teens I knew one classmate who was accused of being gay whose parents sent him to “reform school.” Another who was actually caught having sex with another guy was kicked out by his parents and wound up living with relatives in another city (how the quarterback of the football team who he was having sex with was able, somehow, to convince everyone in authority that the much smaller, skinnier kid had somehow forced him into the situation is a tale for another post).
When I did come out to my own parents in the early nineties (I was a gainfully employed adult living in my own place in another city, by then), their reaction could best be characterized as, “I never had any clue, I don’t accept it, and someone must have done something to you to make you think this way.”
Even today, we are surprised to hear of anything as loving and accepting from a parent as this letter that a teen-ager in Michigan received this week from his Dad:
You can read the story of a teen named Nate, from Michigan, and the note from his Dad in this story.
Note: since apparently I wasn’t being clear: I am not Nate. That isn’t my letter. My father’s reaction was, as noted above, pretty much the opposite of this in every way.
I was lucky enough, growing up, to have a bunch of wonderful grandparents. Both sets of grandparents, all four of my great-grandmothers, and two of my great-grandfathers were still alive when I was born. All four great-grandmothers lived until I was at least in my teens (one lived until I was in my 30s).
Part of the luck was simply having them. I didn’t realize that until sometime during grade school, as I learned that very few of my classmates knew any of their great-grandparents. I remember one particular friend in sixth grade who practically accused me of lying when I told him about seeing one set of great-grandparents at Christmas, and two other great-grandmothers a few weeks earlier at Thanksgiving. Not only had all of his great-grandparents died before he was born, but at least a couple of his grandparents had, as well.
My parents married quite young, and theirs had before them. Consequently, one of my great-grandfathers didn’t reach retirement age until I was in kindergarten.
And they were quite a collection of characters. One great-grandfather had been a horse wrangler (actual job title), moonshine runner, and repairman. One grandfather had repaired tanks during WWII, the other had repaired bombers. One great-grandmother spent many years working as a waitress. Another, when she was 70, rescued a horse from her son’s ranch when it was going to be put down because it was “untameable.” Within a year, it would come running when she whistled, and if it misbehaved, would stand obediently and let her spank it with her cane (and afterward he sulked around her looking like a dog with its tail between its legs until she told him he was forgiven). One grandmother was a nurse. One was a City Treasurer.
I learned different things from each of them—skills I still use today. I can see bits of each one’s personality in myself.
And until tonight, I didn’t have to use the past tense for all of them.
My Grandma B. died earlier this evening. She was the last of my grandparents still alive.
In many ways the loss is more abstract than personal. I haven’t seen her in person in decades, as she lived in a remote town that literally is not on the way to anywhere. For various reasons—some mine, some theirs—I haven’t been close to most of the relatives on that side of the family for a long time. Because of the dementia, it’s been a few years since Grandma and I had a phone conversation where I was certain she knew who I was. So, for me, she’s been gone for some time.
I don’t feel as if I deserve condolences. Not like my aunt who has been living with and caring for her, and has now lost her mother. Or any of the other relatives who live nearby and watched her decline up close. So I feel almost like an emotional carpetbagger just writing this.
We can’t control death. We can postpone it a bit. We can certainly hasten it. But that is merely an illusion of control. We can’t change the past, and the future is slippery at best. The only thing we have control over is now. How we live, now. How we treat our neighbors, friends, and family, now.
Choose carefully.
“Bring your coat; it’s cold out!”
I was reminded recently of the last time I visited Arizona. It was 1982. I was attending college1 in southwest Washington. My mom, who had remarried a couple years before, was living in Phoenix with my stepdad and the older of my sisters2.
My sister was getting married3 on Christmas Eve, so I came to visit for Christmas break to attend the wedding and have Christmas with Mom.
Every time we left the house, Mom would urge me to bring my coat. And everywhere I went, I wound up carrying my coat draped over one arm. I regretted not packing several pairs of shorts. The temperature, as I recall, never dropped below the low 60s (Farenheit)4. My Mom and Step-dad weren’t the only people wearing coats at the restaurants, movie theaters, and so on. I was sweating, but surrounded by an entire city of people practically shivering from the “cold.”
December in Phoenix, at least that year, was like June in Seattle.
On the other hand, I start complaining about the heat when the temperature gets up into the high 70s—and whining by the upper 80s—which makes friends who live in Phoenix (and Texas, southern California, Florida, et cetera) laugh5. Since for only two or three weeks in August or July does Seattle temperatures get into what most people would classify as summer-ish, my tolerance for heat is nearly non-existent.
Mom’s acclimation to Phoenix winter was particularly amusing to me, because during my childhood we lived in much, much colder places. During my junior high years, for instance, one of my morning chores during winter months was to carry an extension cord out to the driveway and plug-in the engine block heater for Mom’s car. It was actually two heaters: one built into the oil pan, the other into the coolant system. It warmed up the engine block enough to make the car start easily in the cold. On those mornings where the thermometer out on our front porch showed the temperature was colder that -10°F (-23°C), I had to string the second extension cord out to plug in the engine block heater for Dad’s pickup.
It got cold enough to justify the second extension cord at least a couple dozen times each winter.
Some years ago when on Christmas Eve I called my grandmother who still lives in that small Colorado town, she told me it hadn’t been a terribly cold Christmas thus far. “We only got to 25-below6 once or twice this week!”7
And one of my cousins who was there chimed in that the windchill factor was only “minus fifteen.”
Mom lived in that part of the country for a good 18 years, yet only a year or so in Phoenix was all it took for her to start thinking that what I considered early summer weather required a coat. Not a jacket, but a coat!
People are adaptable. We get used to the environment we’re in (physical, emotional, or cultural), adjusting our comfort levels without concious thought. Adaptability is a good thing. It doesn’t hurt, every now and then, to try to step outside yourself and look at what you’ve learned to accept as normal. In the abstract, are those really good things? Is this really where you want to be? Are you really who you want to be?
Similarly, are the people you disagree with just looking at things from a different perspective? Just because I think it’s madness to wear a coat when the temperature is in the upper 60s doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Not in the way they would be if they were huddled under an umbrella complaining about getting wet when the sun is shining and the precipitation is zero.
It’s important to distinguish between the way a person reacts to facts and the facts themselves.
1. During the long stretch of attending part-time, while living with my grandparents and working several jobs.
2. Our younger half-sister was living with my dad and stepmother back in Utah.
3. Which is a story so convoluted that if I used it in the plot of a novel, critics would universally pan the book as being totally unbelievable.
4. I have been known to be out and about wearing shorts when the temperature is 50°F (10°C)—and sometimes colder.
5. Of course, the last time I was in Texas in the summer, I noticed how many people spent those hot, muggy months inside their homes air-conditioned down to the lower 70s, riding in air-conditioned cars to sit in restaurants or churches air-conditioned down to the upper 60s, so I’m not sure they have as much to laugh about as they think.
6. That’s -25°F, or -30°C.
7. Just today my half-sister, who lives nearby, commented that the high temperature this week had been 6°, or -14°C.
Reporter Marissa Bodnar took this video of the first same-sex couple to be married in Maine stepping out of city hall a bit after midnight:
Crowds greet first same-sex married couple
That was a big crowd to be standing outside at midnight on a snowy night, waiting for a few hours to congratulate some of their fellow citizens. News reports indicated two protestors standing some distance away, singing religious songs. Apparently they kept fleeing the reporters and cameras. One talked briefly to a print reporter and said, “This is a wicked thing,” but wouldn’t say anything more.
I would be the first to defend the right of the protestors to make their beliefs known in a public space. But if you are going to do that, have enough strength of your convictions to stand up for those beliefs. If you don’t have the courage to be photographed protesting in public, why bother? It must be a very, very fragile world you live in if the thought of two women being in love will utterly destroy it. If two middle-aged men (who have been building such a life together for nine years) showing up at city hall (with their four grown children to cheer them on) to get a marriage certificate threatens your whole belief system, it can’t be a very robust faith. No wonder they’re so afraid of everything!
When people find love and build a life together, living and working within their community, that’s a good thing. Accepting your neighbors for who they are strengthens society, it doesn’t weaken it.
Shared fear erodes all that is good in us. Shared joy uplifts and strengthens.
So, share the joy.
This time of year I often find myself saying, “You don’t have to get me anything. No, seriously.” And I mean it.
One reason I mean it is because I already have too much stuff. I’m a packrat, son of packrats, grandson of packrats, great-grandson of packrats, and things accumulate around me. I hang on to extra adaptor cables, chargers, old gadgets that have been replaced with newer models because someone might need that someday. I collect books, certain kinds of toys, pens, earrings, paper products, movies, music, and other things because I like them. Or because they have some kind of sentimental value.
And my husband has similar tendencies.
So, on one level, I literally don’t need more stuff.
On the other hand, who doesn’t like getting gifts? Particularly if it’s something really wonderful? A couple of friends found an old book I didn’t know existed, written by an author I love, illustrated by an artist I like, featuring a character both my husband and I have enjoyed reading about, and with a hilarious title which was perfectly innocent when the book was written in the 1930s, but now sounds like a sensational expose of some secret gay life of the character in question.
It was a perfect gift for us. And I was truly ecstatic when I opened it.
Several years ago, when my mom was trying to come to grips with the problems inherent in her packrat tendencies, asked me to refrain from buying her things that would just sit around taking up space. “If it isn’t something I can use up or that you know I need, please don’t.”
It has proven a valuable guideline, which I have been trying to apply to everyone I shop for at Christmas time. And I really enjoy getting that kind of present from others. For instance, another friend gave me some really comfortable, extra warm socks in my favorite color. They’re perfect for cold winter evenings when I need to keep my toes warm. And yeah, they’ll wear out eventually, but the whole point is to use them, including use them up.
Another friends got us a custom engraved photo frame with the date of our elopement. We were blessed to have several friends take some really great pictures of the event, and yes, I want to display a few of them. One of aforementioned friends gave us framed printouts of some of the best of the pictures he took. More great gifts.
I know that I have ignored others telling me that I don’t need to get them something. I’m not trying to be difficult, and I certainly don’t want them to feel obligated to reciprocate. I do it because I want to give them something. Sometimes it’s because I saw something in a store or at a craft fair or in a dealer’s den and I thought, “Oh! So-and-so simply must have that!” And sometimes it just means I was thinking of them.
And I recognize that the same thing is happening with the people who give me things when I say they don’t need to.
It’s a dilemma with no easy solution.
Well, actually, the solution is quite easy: now that I’ve typed it. Instead of telling people they don’t need to get me anything, I should just stick to a heart-felt “Thank you!”
Font Folly 