A Shock of Truth: Installment Three

Courage:  from the Latin cor for heart

Integrity:  from the Latin integritatem for wholeness

I was going to need a lot of this - a lot of heart; that much I could see.  What I could not see, though, not yet, was that the blonde boy standing on the other side of the room, huddled up between the dresser and the bedroom door (in position to flee?), already possessed more heart than I on my best day.

This was far from my best day.  My best day was on sabbatical somewhere out west where it could breathe.  My best day had deserted me and was sunning itself by some pool in Arizona, sipping filtered water infused with lemons and limes.

My brain, scrambling like it had just come front and center with a word problem, refused - refused! - to assimilate the information placed in front of me.  Instead, it pulled me off to the side and whispered a million different reasons why this could. not. be. true.  I wanted to resist; surely some part of me wanted to resist - wanted to review the evidence I'd seen on the horizon, building strength like a Nebraska storm cloud in August, wanted to acknowledge that those inklings had been spot-on - but I dared not trust myself.  If I remembered nothing else from those years and years of collective pastors' voices ringing in my ears, I remembered what was etched in my mind like a tattoo: Our hearts are deceitful and wicked beyond measure.  They are never to be trusted.

Which of us was deceived?  Which of us - the boy huddled by the door, ready to flee, or the mother clasping the wooden bed post to keep from falling - which one of us was party to a lie?

It is said somewhere that courage is the foundation of integrity.

That must mean that the one who knows who he is at the heart is the one who is whole.

Oh. God.

Then where did that leave me?

The Beginning of the End of the World as I Knew It: Installment Two

When the yellow-haired boy's words dropped into my ears, they would not land there - instead, they hovered like a hummingbird working its needle-thin beak into and out of the flower.  I recognized the steady buzzing of the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of my pulse as it loomed large, affecting my ability to hear.  Instinctively I knew that something had been spoken which would alter the world as I saw it - something that would split time in two pieces like halves of a log on a chopping block, axe to wedge and crack!  Had I looked down at the floor at that moment, I'm nearly certain Before and After would have been lying there.

With the whoosh still looming large, I believe I might have uttered something ridiculous, like: 

Areyousurereallysure and pleasedon'ttellanyone because I was talking fast and foolish and fearful.

His brown eyes, registering deep pain by the way they seemed to snap backwards into his head, did the answering for him.  I babbled on senselessly, speaking without punctuation - without pause for intake of breath (where was my breath, anyway?) for far too long, but who was watching the clock any longer in a world where time had been split in half?  What was the point?

I had a problem. I had a very big problem.

Before and After were, after all, lying at my feet.

Beginnings: Installment One

In the South, coming out is the language of debutantes, those rosy-cheeked young women in long white dresses and matching white gloves up to the elbow, floating like feathers down marble staircases the size of Texas. Their introduction to society is a celebratory time of champagne and parties, of photo opportunities in green backyard gardens, of laughter and back-slapping, of proud fathers and stressed-out mothers - a kind of nuptials trial run. 

That fanfare is a far cry from the coming out of the boy I birthed on a chilly midwestern morning just seventeen summers prior - the boy who has my heart, the one who measures his words to me as carefully as a carpenter measures the wood before he feeds it to the blade.  It is in that space between his voice gathering its steam and my mental chatter slowing to a crawl that I intuit the words before he even says them.      

Mom, I'm gay.  I've known it for as long as I can remember.

Wood to the blade.