Gone girl: my daughter's coming out DRAFT more to come

I don't believe it is homophobic to state that Northhampton, MA has a large lesbian community. Many in Western Massaschusetts attribute Northhampton's large lesbian community to Smith's presence in the town. All female colleges do seem to attract not just some lesbians but what some lesbian friends from the Berkshires once suggested to me were "college lesbians', suggesting many Smith students have gay relationships at college and then go on to marry barons of industry, captains of finance and any monied man they can get their hands on. This is an unfair characterization of Smith. It's a very  good college. Not all the students come from the monied elite, although only the elite attended Smith in the old days.

Kitty corner from the main gate entrance to Smith there is, or used to be, an inexpensive pasta bistro.  I had never eaten pasta in a restaurant before but I became a regular there, hooked by the decadent, creamy and cheap pasta. With a salad, of course.  I discovered this place because of my daughter.

Rosie had dropped out of h.s. after her sophomore year at  prep school and started college at Simon's Rock College of Bard,  which is now wholly integrated into Bard. Simon's Rock was this nation's first early college, awarding two year and four year degrees.  It's a college for smart teens who are bored in high school.

Rosie wasn't exactly bored in high school. Her prep school was demanding and rigorous, which she seemed to like. It was the social atmosphere that motivated me to let her leave home, away from  me, two years early. Her prep school was mostly newly rich families. Lots of tackiness about fashion, status, size of parents' homes. There was also a lot of sex.  A Waldorf parent friend had gone to Rosie's prep school. This friend told me that many of the kids in her class started having sex in the eighth grade. 

Rosie and I had an agreement, forged when she was, maybe, twelve. I promised her that whenever she decided to have sex, I would help her get birth control without trying to talk her out of having sex. I swore, over and over, that I would not judge her decision, that I would simply take her to a doctor for birth control.   I don't know when she started having sex but when she did, she did not come to me. She didn't have to. Because of some health issues, Rosie was put on birth control pills to get her periods better regulated.    Of course, once she got to college at age sixteen, the college infirmary  and her student health insurance covered birth control.

Rosie told me after her first party, once she had started high school and after the sheltered environment of a Waldorf School, that a couple had sex on the floor in front of all the other kids at the party.  I don't know if she had sex in high school.  It wasn't sex that motivated me to get her out of that. It was the unpleasant, elitist arrogance of most of the kids. And the parents. Rosie was constantly subjected to comments about her clothing. Boys would tell her that her clothes looked like they came from a department store and she really should shop in more unique boutiques. If the boys were saying that, what the heck did the girls say, or, maybe, think of Rosie's clothing?

At Simon's Rock, because the students are mostly 15, 16 and 17, they require the students to go home mid-semester for a week, to get some parental bonding.  I was living in Amherst MA at the time, a two hour drive from the Rock. I picked Rosie up for her first required-to-leave-dorm school break and suggested we stop in Northhampton for dinner.

First, we walked up and down all the downtown streets of Northhampton, with Katie reading all the posted restaurant menus before deciding where she would eat. Her anorexia was full blown then. Eating was always a painfully conflicted experience.

I am still surprised she chose that pasta joint. I can't believe she actually ate pasta. They must have had salads. Maybe salmon. My little anorexic did not eat pasta, not until she was in a bulimia phase of her eating disorder.

I was glad to have discovered the place. After Rosie returned to college, I went to the pasta place now and then. I was in grad school. I liked to study at the Northampton Public Library, a grand, old, wood-filled, elegant library, perhaps a Carnegie Library. The library was on the same block as the pasta place.

So I became a regular.  The pasta place had a hostess that was very obviously a lesbian, and just as obviously butch. She dressed mostly like a man, with a shirt and tie, fancy slacks.  She combed her hair into a blonde ducktail, very masculine. And I loved that ducktail.  This pasta place could get really busy. It had a full basement for diners as well as the tables on the street level. I thought she directed the traffic of a busy, cramped restaurant masterfully and once I had told her so as she seated me. After that, this hostess and I limited our communication to smiles and nods, maybe a hello but we both knew I had become a regular. And I liked that.

The next time Rose had to come home, and she would not have come to stay with me unless forced off campus by the college rules, we stopped for dinner at the same pasta joint. It was a relief not to have to slowly wend our way around town, closely scrutinizing every single menu.  Rosie was very rigid about food. Once she had chosen her Northhampton restaurant, that was it. No need for further exploration.  It was the only place in Northhampton that she would eat.

The second time I went to the pasta joint with Rosie, we were seated downstairs. With candlelight. The tables were so close together that the hostess had to pull the tables out for people to sit along the wall and pull them out again when patrons wanted to leave. The tables were so close together that people on either side of us could hear everything people on either side of them said.  I am pretty sure the women about my age, which was mid-forties, heard my conversation with Rosie that evening.

First we had to get past the dangerous passage of ordering dinner. She started out by snappishly reminding me not to make any suggestions. When she had first gotten sick, I might have suggested she try the salad. Or other suggestions. Rosie heard anything I said about food as judging her illness and her. She also forbid me from discussing the menu options for myself. "Just order when the waitress comes to take our order and let me go first so I don't know what you are having when I order."

Okay. I had learned, through many painfully shared meals, that food was a tense, anxiety-inducing experience between us. I could do nothing right when we ate together.  I ordered bad things. I ate too fast. I ate too slow.  I believed meals were so fraught between us because mommies feed their babies, because food is an integral part of a mother's bond with her child.  I suggested this once to an anorexic in my graduate program. This gal had had lots of treatment. She was going to be hospitalized after our weekend class was over, actually. She was quite surprised to hear my theory but once she had cooled down, she said I was right. She went on to tell me that out of all her relationships, and she was married, the only person she had food tension with was her mom. I said "I bet you were breast fed, too, right?" She nodded and seemed relieved to have an answer for one aspect of her illness.

We ordered without discussing our choices. When the waitress stepped away to place our order in the kitchen, Rose told me she had something serious to discuss.

I had ordered a beer. I have never been much of a drinker. I think, perhaps, I ordered that first beer because the beer came in a tall, frozen flute. I had seen them being served many times. Rosie asked if she could have some of my beer and I said yes, having no delusion that she was not drinking beer at college.  "Just be discreet. It is against the law for me or this restaurant to serve you beer."  She only took one sip. I think the request was about showing me she had grown up.

Once my beer was delivered, I took a big thirsty gulp. One of the benefits of drinking very little is that when you do drink, you really savor it. At least I do.

When I had almost finished my large, icy cold beer, Rose told me her big announcement.

"Mom," she said, "I am gay."

I saw one woman seated to the right of me quickly glance over at Rosie and me. I am sure she heard the announcement. I am also sure she and her dinner partner, another woman, probably two moms, stopped talking and listened to my daughter's coming out scene.

Then Rosie, who had told me a thousand times throughout her childhood and teen years that she was sure I was gay since I never dated men, said "And now that I am gay, you can't be gay."

The parties on either side of us heard that. I saw those people suppressing laughter.

I thought, but did not say, that Rosie thought she was acting very grown up but forbidding me to be gay now that she was gay suggested to me that she was full of false bravado that evening. Her angry declaration that I could not be gay now that she was seemed like a kind of tantrum. And it felt like she wanted to hurt me with both her declarations.

I gulped the rest of my beer and gestured to the masterful hostess to order another. To my surprise, the hostess, who I think may have also heard my daughter announce she was gay, said "Will you let me buy you a beer?"  If she had heard, she probably figured I needed another drink under the circumstances.  I liked that solidarity, if that was what motivated the hostess to buy me a beer.

I know hostesses have leeway to comp customers, especially regulars, a drink or a dessert here and there. That offer of a free beer might have just been coincidence.

That offer of a free beer from a bullish dyke, made instantly after my daughter had just told me "now that I am gay, you can't be gay" made me laugh, of course.  Rosie kicked me under the table.

"Rosie, I'm not gay but if I were, you being gay would have nothing to do with my gender identity."

I was a bit tipsy from just the one beer because I so rarely drank alcohol. And they were big glasses. And then I gulped down the second one, bought for me by my lesbian hostess pal.

Rosie kicked my leg under the table again when I accepted that free beer.  I believe she was angry that I accepted.  Rosie thought the hostess was flirting with me, ruining her insistence that now that Rosie was gay, I couldn't be. She kicked me again as she said "If you laugh right now, mom, I'm going to kill you."

"I can't help it, honey," I said through laughter.  "The timing of that woman's offer to buy me a drink is funny. Come on. Lighten up.  I'm not upset that you are gay."

On either side of us, two women were having dinner together. None of them seemed gay but it was Northhampton. Who knows? All four of those women heard the whole thing and did their best to not laugh about the obviously gay hostess offering to buy me a beer right after my daughter had come out to me. I wonder if the hostess had heard Rosie's coming out announcement and had bought me a beer to be supportive.

Now I wonder if my not being upset over her announcement was why she was in such a snit, being so unpleasant. She had loved telling me she was gay. It had not been hard for her.  I also wonder, in hindsight, if part of the reason my daughter was a lesbian for just a few months her first year in college, for she soon went back to hot boys, was to provoke me.  I have had other parents tell me that one of the ways teens revolt nowadays is they have same gender affairs, a way to unsettle the folks and their circle of friends.  Rosie used to get angry with me because I didn't argue with her, would always insist on waiting until our anger had passed before we talked about the inevitable conflicts of teenage girl and her mom.  She would pound on my bedroom door, demanding I come out at 1 a.m. and fight with her. It pissed her off that I insisted on waiting until morning, when we had slept on it.

Rosie's friends at college were angry about her lesbian fling with Anna. Many kids told her, repeatedly, that she was just being a lesbian because at Simon's Rock, anything goes. She was just being gay, they said, because the place was so free and open.

I didn't think Rosie was gay.  I had considered it. My best friend while she grew up was a lesbian. That friend had always insisted she could tell Katie was gay.  I still don't think my disbelief that my daughter was a lesbian was because of homophobia.  I was ready to accept a gay daughter. I just didn't think Rosie was gay.

So I said that at the restaurant.  I said "I accept you however you choose to show up in the world, honest I do, but I don't think you are gay."

"What do you mean you don't think I am gay?  I just told you I am."

"I think this is a phase, perhaps a rebellious gesture. I've watched you for sixteen years, seen you in all kinds of situations. I know you. My deep instinct is that you aren't gay."

"Mom," she said as sneeringly as she could muster, "I'm here, I'm queer, get over it."

"I'm sorry, honey, but I know you pretty well. And you have grown up surrounded by gay people so you know I am not homophobic. I don't think you are gay and I am sorry if my belief upsets you."  She kicked me again and sneered "Don't make fun of me." I dropped my position and tucked into my dinner.

Rosie and I had talked about gays all her life. My best brother, and her the only uncle out of many that ever showed up in her life, is gay.  When she was getting to school age, I thought I should give her some exposure to spirituality. We church shopped for a couple years. My criteria was we had to go to a church that would accept Uncle Dave. The last time I ever went to a Catholic service was when the priest, during the sermon, said "If anyone in this church right now doesn't think homosexuality is a sin, you aren't a Catholic, you are a sinner and you should leave."  Fortunately, Rosie and I were seated close to the front, because she was very little, maybe three or four and smack dab in the middle of a long center row. I was pleased to jump up and crawl over about twenty people, dragging my dolly, making a noisy spectacle as a gay-loving sinner. And I was glad that happened, glad I could make that dramatic departure.

Rosie and I spent a lot of time with my gay baby bro and his partner of twenty years. She loved both of them. My brother, Dave, wasn't exactly in the closet. He lived with Tom and had since he was 19, years before Katie was born. And they were both very effeminate. Tom has now passed,  but not from AIDS. Once, Dave and Rosie went to an video store to rent a couple movies for her visit. Dave told the cashier that he shared a membership with her roommate. Katie, about age ten, said loudly at the register, "Uncle Dave! Tom is your partner. He's not your roommate. Call him your partner." And Dave did ever after that.  He realized he had been semi-closeted. After that, he came out at work, which was probably unnecessary. He is a hairdresser. And he thanked Rosie over and over for teaching her to call his lover his partner, not his roommate.  Some of that conservativism was probably Tom, who was a lot older than Dave.

Rosie knew that it was a top priority for me that she accept gays and people of other races and ethnicities.  And I did try to be a lesbian. For years, my best friend was a PhD psychologist and lesbian named Joni. Our entire social life revolved around Joni and her partner's life and friends. It was a circle of PhD's, me being a lightweight with my JD. These were women who had, for the most part, always been out, and women five or more years older than me. I concluded it took a lot of will and a drive to self actualize for women of their age to have been out in college, or even high school. And they were all so smart. I wanted to be a lesbian because I was too damaged from my marriage to be with a man. Rosie came to know some of this as she grew up, not when she was little.  She knew I wanted to be a lesbian.

Then one day, Marti, Joni's other best friend and also a lesbian, said to me "If you are going to be a lesbian, you have to have sex with a woman. You can't just hang out with us and pretend."  Marti wasn't kicking me out of the club. She probably was trying to encourage me to come out. Her words, however, frightened me. I didn't want to have sex with a woman. I just wanted to hang out with brilliant, well educated and empowered women. I left that social circle, lost Joni.  And Rosie knew about these things. It was during the years I refer to as 'my lesbian years' that Rosie started haranguing me, telling me I was gay and should just accept it.

There was also an incident when Rosie was about fourteen. In a contact improv dance class, she really loved the instructor, an adult member of the dance company in her late twenties. Once Rosie had told me, after a contact improve class, Rosie remarked that she was very attracted to the adult instructor. Then she said she meant she really liked doing contact improv with her, that her attraction was not romantic. And I said "Rosie, if you are a lesbian, that's okay by me. It is not okay for a fourteen year old to date a twenty eight year old. So if you have a crush on this dancer, forget it. Not gonna happen. You cannot date adults at age fourteen, male or female."

In that pasta restaurant across from Smith, hearing my sixteen year old come out while a little boozie was actually somewhat pleasant and funny.  Keep in mind that Rosie had been with a girl for only two weeks when she came out to me, an indication of how close we were.  What a conversation to have while having my first, and large, beer in years. Then a second one. Since I drink so little, a single beer gets me tipsy. That second beer left me drunk. And silly. And happy.

I was happy Rosie was home for a week. I was always happy when I was with her. The mother in me lit up like Christmas lights whenever Rosie was within my sight. So I happily dropped my comments indicating I did not believe she was gay.

This exchange took place at Thanksgiving time. Add Xmas in New Mexico story here.  In January, she and Anna broke up, Rosie went back to boys and she's been with boys, then men, ever since.

The following semester, when Rosie had to come home for a week, had to get out of the dorms, she came home with Rob. Rosie, Rob and I went to that same pasta joint. The hostess greeted me warmly. Rosie poked me, rolling her eyes at the same time.  That poke and eye roll was to warn me not to flirt with the hostess. As if.  Rob knew about her gay fling. On a tiny campus with only 300 students, everyone knows everyone's business.  When Rosie had first moved into the dorm, a cartoon was published in the campus newspaper showing a thought bubble over the freshman boys dorm. The thought bubble said "Rosie". The cartoon implied all the freshmen boys thought Rosie was hot. They did. So did some of the girls.

I liked Rob. Over that dinner, right in front of me, he told Katie that she treated me unkindly and it hurt him to see it. Man, I liked Rob. It damned near broke my heart when they broke up. It also damned near broke hers.  I remember suppressing an urge, when Rob broke up with her, to say "Honey, boys or girls are like the bus downtown. There's another one in twenty minutes."