My mother's revelation
Last week, my mother came to me after attending a local PFLAG meeting.
Let me be clear:
I've been out of the closet as bisexual for two decades and nonbinary for a couple years. In all that time, she's shown no interest in PFLAG or GLAAD or any of the others.
This year, however, she's made the decision to be more active in local politics and rights movements, and those drove her to attending this meeting. She's been a member of the [local municipality] Women's Club for a few years, but now she's joining the ranks of the LWV. (Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see her so active and getting involved in the community. It beats decaying in her retirement like my maternal grandmother did.)
She's even been participating in political protests and rallies.
I couldn't be more proud.
Genuinely.
This meeting was comprised of several independent lectures from an array of community advocates, driving LGBT and women's rights, including more education on the trans experience than she'd previously been exposed to.
It's not unusual for her to come to me after she had been exposed to new terminology, our dual teaching experiences and my card-carrying membership to the LGBT lending to the ease of walking her through these newfound concepts to a degree of understanding that someone on the outside might have neither the time nor the familiarity to walk her through.
This time started out the same...
But it didn't end the same.
She came back from the meeting with a revelation about the nonbinary and trans experience.
After completing all her questions, she offered me an apology.
In my childhood, I had been exploring myself, and tried on my sister's swimsuit. And got caught. I didn't get caught wearing it, but the location it was found in told the tale as well as if I had.
That is a memory that has haunted me for almost three decades. When my brain is being mean, it has a replay reel of experiences that it throws back in my face, and that memory is one of them. Not the feeling of wearing it, but the feeling of getting caught, the guilt and humiliation that followed... that I've been carrying all these years.
My mother apologized to me for it.
For how she handled it.
She knew that gay people existed, but they were still something that happened in other people's families. Her cousins hadn't yet come out of the closet. Transgenderism or transexualism weren't even on her radar, let alone mine.
I knew I was different from the other kids, especially the other boys, but I didn't have the words to describe it, to explain it. All I had was the lack of friends and the incessant bullying. I got along better with girls (that's not to say the bar was particularly high, or that I got along with them particularly well). I was an intelligent and curious child, seeking a new sensation.
I'm still reeling.
I know that there are moments in my life that are trapped in the amber of my memories... that nobody else remembers. For me they were stepping stones. For everyone else, they were just random days of no particular bearing.
I'd long thought that this was one of them.
Leave a comment or continue reading: other Monday posts, LGBT experiences, or delve into my memories.
