My mother thinks I'm a lesbian. She tells me this in a letter in which she has asked me if I am depressed and also included two dollars for my son to buy an ice cream cone. She took his cousin for an ice cream several days earlier and does not want my son to miss the chance for an ice cream outing he probably didn’t even know had occurred anyway. My mother is all about fairness, even though I must have heard the words, “Life isn’t fair, so get over it” fly from her lips at least seven hundred and fifty thousand times. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe the words just glide.
And maybe she doesn’t tell me that she thinks I’m homosexual. Maybe she just asks me if I’m living “an alternative lifestyle,” but the words are still there, gliding around the page of looseleaf paper. There is no judgement. Just the question and then the next line about taking my niece to the Dairy Queen on Thursday. But I am not surprised.
My mother has bipolar disorder, and though she is at the time, as far as I can tell, perfectly lucid, she can at times wildly misconstrue a situation. I am not denying what it looks like to her: I have moved 1200 miles east to go to graduate school, left my young son in the care of his father, and through a series of circumstances moved in with another graduate student, a woman, who is in a committed relationship with another woman.
A year earlier, my mother had made the drive with me to Virginia, her car crammed with as many of my belongings as we could fit - my computer, some clothes, a portable tv, and my journals. I was to start graduate school that month and I'd secured a teaching assistantship, starting on the 16th, but the apartment I'd leased wouldn't be available for a few more weeks. The plan was for my son to join me when I'd settled in, for my things to be moved when I was in the apartment.
For the time, I'd rented a hotel room and my mother stayed on with me for a few days. We explored Richmond together - visited the campus, toured the sites, took pictures of the monuments. In the evenings, we played cards and talked about the past, the future, about how three years wasn't that long to be away, how it would just fly by. We talked more than we ever had. And in the dark hours of the night, over hands of cribbage, she finally opened up to me about her illness, about where she had been for days on end, in the throes of mania, about her stints in hospitals, about the patient who stole her food from her, about how much she missed us, how all she wanted was to go home. She told me how thankful she was, now, that we hadn't let her.
I didn't reciprocate. I didn't tell her how hard it was for us. I didn't tell her how it felt while we were searched for her for days on end, not knowing if she was even alive. I didn't tell her how it felt when she showed up at my house at two in the morning, asking to borrow a pair of shoes because her size eight pumps were on the size ten feet of the homeless man she had dragged along with her. And I didn't tell her what it was like to have to hold everything together while my marriage was falling apart.
The day she left Richmond and headed back to the Midwest, we were able to see the apartment I would be living in, and then she drove me to school and I said goodbye to her through the open car door. As she pulled away from the curb, I knew what she didn't want to know, that I could never return.
By the end of the first semester, I had decided to let my son spend a year with his father, and to save money had moved in with another grad student to whom I'd grown very close. And when I left the apartment my mother thought I would be living in, the one she had approved of, the one she could picture my life in, I neglected to tell her that my new roommate was gay. And the next summer, when my son moved out to live with me again, when my roommate and I decided to keep sharing the rent, I still said nothing.
I can't say why I didn't tell her. Maybe because I didn't think my roommate's sexual orientation was any of my mother's business. Maybe because it didn't matter to me, and I thought it would matter to her, and I didn't want to find out my mother was bigoted. Whatever the reason, I just never brought it up.
It was my son who spilled the beans. And prompted the letter.
So now she knows. And thinks she knows more.
I am not gay, I say to her. Yes, my roommate is. No, really. I’m not. I don’t know why I didn’t say anything before.
She tells me she is disappointed that I didn't tell her. Not because we are from the Midwest, where people are not lesbians, where people who are lesbians do not tell other people they are lesbians because girl on girl action is not something one discusses in polite company and now she has found out I am secretly living with a lesbian. No, my mother tells me, she is disappointed because I was silent when I didn’t need to be.
She has opened the door, allowed me the opportunity to come clean, to tell her, to tell her everything, to say what I have wanted to tell her for years. She is asking me to come in, to sit and talk, to get to know her and allow her to know me. But I don’t go through, I stand there, doorknob in my hand, waiting for her to turn away, so I can close it again.
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