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I've so far avoided talking too specifically about family
members. I'm overly self-conscious about what is and isn't
my story to tell. My family is a group of private folk, very
nearly to the point of being secretive. It's not entirely
healthy -- or pathological, for that matter -- but it forces me
to hold back on what I write about my siblings. It's just as
well. With the age differences between us, I don't really
know them. I know some facts about them, but their lives
are largely mysteries to me.
But my mother. How can I not write about Mama?
There's no denying one thing. Mama was the most
important person in my life. She easily had my greatest
allegiance and I would have done most anything for her.
She was my anchor and my tether for the first 30 years of
my life.
I'll start with some facts about her. Mama was born in
January of 1921, the youngest child her father would sire
but not the last her mother would bear. Her father died of an
undetermined illness when she was three or four. My
grandmother re-married, bore one more daughter, but this
second husband died young also, probably of a heart attack.
My mother, therefore, grew up in a single-parent
household through the Depression, before there was much,
if any, public assistance for such circumstances. She didn't
talk a lot about her childhood, but I do know that her family
lived in a house with a dirt floor and unfinished walls. I
imagine it was your basic shack. Her brothers hunted for
their meals. Mama remarked that if her brothers didn't come
home with a rabbit or a squirrel, they would do without meat
that day, a difficult thing to accept in days before
vegetarianism won popularity.
She walked to school with her siblings and other
children in the countryside. She told about some Mexican
children from whom she learned a few Spanish words and to
whom she taught a few German words. Her best friend, who
would remain such throughout most of her life, grew up on
the farm next to her family. After they were grown, they
became step-sisters when my grandmother married one last
time, to Mama's friend's father.
Mama's education ended at the ninth grade, where
the local Friendship community school stopped. Actually, as
I type this, I'm not sure that's correct. I know Mama's
education stopped at ninth grade, but she may have been
able to attend high school in Giddings one year. At any
rate, it was impractical to get into Giddings everyday, so she
didn't go any farther.
I know that for a short time, before she married my
father, she worked in some office in Giddings, but I don't
know what kind of office it was. She married Daddy on All
Saints' Day, 1939. Some time in late 1940, she carried to
term a girl who was stillborn for reasons they didn't
determine. In December of 1941, my mother gave birth to
my oldest brother.
Between 1941 and October 1963, when I was born,
she had six more full-term pregnancies, one of which was
another stillborn girl. Mama told me that this second
stillborn child had a birth defect which made it impossible for
her to breath. It had something to do with the air passage
not being open.
So anyway, my mother raised seven children, four
boys, three girls. I'm the youngest.
These facts of my mother's life don't say a great deal
about her, of course.
I've often called Mama the goddess of practicality.
Growing up in the Depression will do that, I suppose. We
grew up in a household that knew how to do without. I never
thought of my parents as tight with money, but they certainly
knew how to stretch a dollar farther than you average
American. I can still recall, within my lifetime, when we had
only limited running water in our house. We had a working
toilet, but no running water in the kitchen until I was nearly
in school. We didn't have a telephone until I was in high
school. These modern conveniences were not considered
priorities when it came to making sure the family was fed
and clothed. While the hundreds of books and comics in my
apartment will tell you that I'm not quite as practical as my
parents, I suppose I have learned from them the lesson of
prioritizing, sometimes against the larger culture. I own
neither microwave nor VCR, two items that seem to be
considered necessities in many American homes.
We didn't go to movies as a family. I went as a
teenager with the church group, but my parents never went.
They held memories of people during the Depression going
to movies when their family didn't have enough to eat. This
greatly offended their sense of priority. They never
discouraged us from going and even encouraged some of it
for the social aspects. It wasn't an absolute moral stand
against them, by any means. They themselves just never
went.
Food was one place we never lacked. Growing up on
a farm meant we always had food, even if we didn't have a
telephone. We raised our own pork, beef and poultry and
my mother had a large garden every year. We milked our
own cows. Those were much less health conscious days
and we ate richly: fried foods, foods in real cream, cakes
and cookies were ever present in the house. We never kept
soda water or candy bars in the house, but we also never
lacked for sweets.
Mama's practicality made her an excellent mother at
the doctor's office. She wasn't one to worry excessively but
neither did she like mystery when it came to her family's
health. She had a way about her that won doctors' respect
and she was able to get them to explain what was going on
in terms she understood. She always said that if a doctor
wouldn't explain something to her, she would have found
another doctor. (This was obviously not necessary since we
had the same doctors for decades, but then we probably just
lucked out with good doctors.) Mama mentioned more than
once that she would have liked to have studied nursing and
her calm presence and practical prioritizing would have
made her a good one. Feedback I received during my
hospital chaplaincy when I was seminary seems to say I
inherited a portion of this. I am certainly less patient than
she was, but I am glad to have whatever portion I have of
her care-giving abilities.
When I am sick, even now, I cannot help but think
back on the days when Mama would sit on the edge of my
bed and pat my back or leg. She didn't say anything, just
sat there quietly, comforting me with her presence and her
strong, farmer's hands until I fell asleep.
Before I started school -- and in the first couple of
summers after I did -- Mama would let me sleep as late as I
wanted each morning. I had my share of insecurities even
then and would cry if I woke up to an empty house.
Abandonment issues? Not me. Anyway, Mama assured me
that she wouldn't run off while I slept and if she weren't in
the house when I woke up, she'd be no farther than the
chicken house or the garden. I shouldn't be scared. She
then pointed out a small round pitcher, where she would
keep milk for me. It was just the right size for me to handle.
I could get my own cereal for breakfast. In this way, she
taught me how to be independent. I don't think I woke up
afraid very often after that.
I trusted her completely. I could.
The trust was pretty much mutual. Being four years
younger than my nearest sibling, I ended up playing alone a
lot. I often joke that if you give me some blank paper and a
pen, I can entertain myself for hours. This is not an adult
development. I heard my mother tell someone once, "With
the others, if they were quiet for very long, I had to go see
what they were into. If I check on Neil, he's back in his room
coloring or playing with his puzzles." I guess we early on
learned to trust each other's silences.
I also have to admit that this trust was probably only
one of the benefits to being the youngest of seven. By the
time I was born, my oldest sibs were grown. Indeed, my
mother was a grandmother by then. I can't but imagine how
different the mother I knew was different from the mother my
oldest sibs had. More than two decades' experience in
mothering must surely make for a more calm mother. I have
to remind myself of this when I become envious that my
oldest sibs knew her as a young woman and got to have her
up to two decades longer than I did.
Her practicality played out in one way that sounds a
bit like insanity. When she found out she was pregnant with
me, she had a crazy kind of hope for me. Perhaps this was
borne of the fact that her last child was eight years younger
than the child before and she saw some hardship in that
span. I don't know, but she hoped that I would be twins.
How many women who find themselves pregnant at
the age of 42 would want twins, especially after having six
healthy children (not to mention one grandson)? Not many,
I'd wager, but my mother thought twins might be fun and
since I was so much younger than not only my sibs but also
my cousins (who were also companions for my sibs), she
thought it would nice for me to grow up with a playmate.
I gave her a hard time about that for years. I also
apologized for the time, when I was around five or so, I
asked for a baby brother or sister. I didn't know what I was
asking a nearly 50-year-old woman.
That reminds me of when she did turn 50. I was in
school by that point and one of my second grade classmates
asked me how old my mother was. When I said 50, she said
something like, "Wow, your mom's old!" I was suitably
indignant and defensive on her behalf but it was also a bit of
a shock to find out that a good many of my classmates'
moms were under 30. To confuse matters more, I had a
nephew in the same grade and the woman he called
Grandma, I called Mama. I repeatedly explained that we
weren't cousins and we knew who we were, relation-wise.
One time, my mother came to pick me up from school when I
wasn't expecting her. (I usually rode the bus home.) One of
my classmates told me my grandmother had come to pick
me up. I told him I didn't have a grandmother (another by-
product of having older parents). Now, Mama was one of
the ubiquitous classroom party moms so my classmates
knew her by appearance at least. "Yeah you do," he said,
"she's always at the parties." I finally realized that he was,
indeed, speaking of Mama. And I had another opportunity
to explain my family relations.
As I grew older, Mama did what she could to
encourage her youngest child with the creative impulses and
imagination, but that was limited. We didn't have resources
for things like piano and art lessons, which is one of the
great cosmic injustices because I actually wanted them.
How many children had these things forced upon them?
Easier to stoke was my interest in cooking and baking and I
spent hours at her elbow in the kitchen. I showed an
interest in her quilting and crocheting and she showed me a
few basics of sewing. My interest in art brought me a few
"how to draw" books and paint-by-number sets. It was as
much as she knew how to do in a community that lacked
models of people making a living in the arts. I was never
discouraged in my artistic interests, but neither was it
encouraged as anything more than a hobby.
I suppose it was during my junior high years that I
developed my playful relationship with Mama. One little
ritual I had I stole directly from Carol Burnett. It must have
been very annoying. There was a recurring character
Burnett played (Mrs. Whiggins? something like that) who
was an incompetent secretary for a character played by Tim
Conway. Whenever she did something to warrant Conway
firing her, she'd give some speech about how much she
liked working for him and end it with "And her love him so
much," punctuated with a squeaky kiss on Conway's cheek.
I loved doing this to Mama, especially when she had her
hands in dishwater. Why she put up with it, I don't know. I
at least deserved a face of dishwater suds. The most I got
as a rebuff was a complaint about the pitch of the kiss. "Oh
son, that hurts my ear!" She'd grimace and I'd giggle.
That little running gag probably ran longer than it
should have, but it is just one example of the type of thing I'd
do to tease her. In the last years of her life, it continued at
family gatherings when I would "tell on" my siblings. "Mama,
Carol's picking on me." Or the time I was her ride at some
family function and she was ready to go home. Someone
commented, "Oh, are you leaving so early?" I answered,
"Yeah, Mama wants to hit Sixth Street tonight yet." Sixth
Street, for those not in the know, is the party street in Austin,
the main center of activity for The Live Music Capitol of the
World. Mama gave me one of her playful frowns, which only
prodded me on. "This woman wears me out. I can't keep up
with her at the bars." She would have been in her late
sixties at the time.
There's one more story I want to tell, to give an idea
of what my mother was like, before I move on to the next
section. I was with Mama when she was talking to another
mother. This other mother said she was glad summer was
almost over so the kids would go back to school. Mama
replied, in a way that wasn't at all defensive and almost
embarrassed for it's emotion, "Oh I'm always a little sad
when school starts. I like having my children around." In
this age when Roseanne-like put-downs are a standard
means of communication between parents and children, I
realize I was blessed to hear my mother say this.
I may have come into my mother's life late, I may
have been unplanned, but I was never unwanted.
Since I'm writing this for a periodical about sexuality
and Christianity, I suppose I should write a bit about my
mother's relation to my faith and my sexuality.
Religiously, we were not a fanatical family by any
stretch of the imagination. I'm the most susceptible to
fanaticism and even I couldn't pull it off very well beyond the
reserved environment of German Lutherans. (Zeal is, after
all, relative. Zealous I was, for a Lutheran. For a
Pentecostal, I would have been a cold fish.) I certainly
loved Sunday school and vacation Bible school and the like,
but the most Mama did about that was take me. I guess my
religious impulse pleased her, but she didn't push it. Among
the few children's books we had, the religious titles were a
minority. We weren't a family of daily devotions or even
prayers before meals or bedtime. Church wasn't an every
Sunday kind of thing.
Still, all seven of her children maintain church
memberships, albeit at different levels of participation. I
can't say it was a home devoid of religious life. Mostly, we
were taught by example that this church thing was important
enough to do regularly, but not excessively. Something in
my disposition took this rather ordinary exposure to church
and turned me into the hyper-involved Christian I later
became.
Sexuality is a more tangled thread, mostly because I
have in my head a jumble of theories about the role of
parents in sexual development. Back when I was trying to
become heterosexual, I tried to make my parents fit the
models of a strong, dominating mother and an emotionally
absent father. This was the thing that supposedly caused
homosexuality in male children. I could never make the
accusation stick. Mama didn't become a nurse because
Daddy didn't want her to work outside the home and Daddy
didn't hang out at the feed store as much as other farmers
because Mama didn't want him to end up one of the crowd
that spent whole afternoons there, drinking beer and playing
dominoes. In other words, they compromised for each
other. I don't think anyone could say that one completely
dominated the other.
As much as it pains me to admit it, I was something of
a mama's boy. Early childhood found me feeling homesick
almost anytime I was separated from her. I much preferred
being with her in the kitchen than with Daddy in the barn or
field. I was much more interested in reading Laura Ingalls
Wilder to please her than I was to read Louis L'Amour,
Daddy's favorite. In my heterosexual wannabe days, I tried
to reverse some of these things. I tried to learn to use a
chainsaw and I read a couple of westerns. It didn't occur to
me that my interests might be because I was gay and not
the other way around. The mama's boy predilection clearly
spoke (I thought and the propaganda of ex-gays supported)
of confused gender identification and so I spent some time
later in life trying to "correct" my interests.
My mother's connection to my sexuality, therefore, is
wrapped up in a tangled net of a clinging child, non-
traditional gender roles and interests, and a few years of
reading conservative Christian pop psychology that told me
what all was wrong with me. Sometimes, I think I'd like to
spend some serious couch time to try and unravel it, but for
the most part I don't think it's worth it. It's sort of like
spending large amounts of research dollars trying to
determine the primacy of the chicken or the egg.
There is this dream, a vivid dream, probably the
earliest dream I remember. I was certainly pre-school and I
would like to guess about the age of four although I have no
way to prove it one way or the other. I think the symbolism
is pre-sexually oedipal, which lends another layer to the
confusing relationship between my mother and her gay son.
The moon had set in out backyard. It was taller than
the house, but smaller than the elm trees there. It was a full
moon, round and pale yellow. I think my sisters may have
been trying to distract me but I saw Mama and Daddy get on
the moon. The moon was a big round bed because Mama
and Daddy were lying down and covering up as if going to
sleep. I ran to the moon as it was about to rise into the sky
and climbed aboard. It was soft, spongy and my weight
was the last straw, so to speak, since it began to collapse
some under me. Daddy wanted to send me back to my
sisters in the house but Mama helped me up. I can't
remember exactly, but I think the moon began to rise as the
dream ended.
Several things about this dream fascinate me as an
adult. First, I wonder if I'd absorbed enough imagery from
television -- even in the chaste 60s when Rob and Laura
Petrie still slept in twin beds -- to make this dream
something of a child's literalist interpretation of a
honeymoon. (Parents getting away from the children for a
second honeymoon, the bed images.) Second, I wonder if I
disturbed my parents in a similar manner in the transition
from their bed to my own bed. Both of these seem likely and
even a little quaint. I can't help but be disturbed by the
oedipal image of the son supplanting the father in a bed, of
the mother choosing her son over her husband. I don't wish
to make too much of it because it was, after all, the dream of
a pre-sexualized child. Still, there is enough there to serve
as a template of my clinging to my mother. The question
I've yet to puzzle out for myself is, what exactly does an
oedipal dream mean in a gay child?
My mother died before I came to reconciliation about
my sexuality, so we never had a conversation about it. Our
relationship was so comfortable and reliable that I can't think
of any fight we ever had, any disagreement beyond an
occasional, minor irritation and most of those were when I
was a child and not getting my way. I wonder if I'd come out
as a younger man if that would have created some tension
in our relationship or if she'd have been reconciled about it
with me. She certainly wasn't the type to have tossed out
any of her children, but I can see her disappointment making
it harder to come home in adult life. Before I get too far into
that speculation, I have to back up and wonder if I would
have ever risked that disappointment by coming out while
she was still alive. Given my strong desire to please her, I
have to answer, probably not.
It is only since Mama's death that I have begun to
look at the shadows behind our bright life together. It's not
an easy thing, but necessary for me as a writer and artist to
see the deep recesses as well as the shiny surfaces. I
spent too long shining a bright light on my mother on a
pedestal until she didn't have a relationship to reality. By
association, I then had an unrealistic image of myself and by
comparison, everyone else's image was unrealistically
tarnished.
At the start of this writing, I called Mama my anchor
and tether. I chose those words carefully because both
could have positive and negative connotations. Since her
death, I have often felt like a free floating element, without a
tether to my childhood home. This sensation has made me
realize how much I stayed near home because of her and
how that's affected my choices in life. Everything I've ever
pursued -- acting, for one example -- that might have taken
me away from her, I pursued half-heartedly. I don't know
that I could have made it as an actor, but I certainly never
went to New York or Los Angeles to try. I may have turned
to writing as my creative outlet as much because it was less
demanding geographically as because its where my passion
ultimately lies.
Mama was not a risk-taker. I believe this was her
crippling, her scar from a Depression era, fatherless
childhood. It made for a very safe, injury-free childhood for
me and my siblings, but there are things we didn't
experience because of her caution. I did not learn to swim
as a child because it was safer to teach us to stay away
from water than it was to risk losing us in some freak
accident while we were learning to swim.
I hope that doesn't sound like my mother was a
fearful woman. She faced, head-on, any number of
obstacles in her life, from Daddy's two bouts with cancer
(and other health problems) to money management
problems to he own health issues (diabetes, detached
retina, finally cancer). Remember, she was the goddess of
practicality. Fear isn't practical. But safety is.
Growing up, I was never pushed or groomed to be a
doctor or a lawyer or anything for that matter. Since I
thrived on pleasing, I would ask Mama what she wanted me
to be. She always answered, "We made our lives, you have
to make your own. If we told you what to do and it was
wrong, then you'd be mad at us. You have to know what
you want to do."
Having heard stories of those who were groomed
since birth to be lawyers, I am grateful for the freedom they
gave us. They could have pressured us to stay on the farm
and I would have been very susceptible to it. The blessing,
of course, had it's frustrating side. Here's a compressed
example of the way a conversation on vocation might go
with Mama.
Me: Wouldn't it be exciting to get some cartoons published?
And it would go along like this until I gave up. If I
was persistent, I might get advice that generally followed a
formula of "if you're going to do this, you might want to think
about this," but it always ended with "but you have to know
what you want to do" and "if I told you what to do and it was
wrong, then you'd be mad at me."
In other words, a lot of freedom but not much
direction or encouragement, either.
For what it's worth, I seem to have inherited this
tendency toward reserved enthusiasm. I've been asked
more than once if I get excited about anything. And I just
realized, I was paraphrasing Mama when an actor friend
was seeking my advice on whether he should start his own
theater company or not. I basically told him, "You have to
know what you want to do."
We do become our parents. Even if we don't become
parents ourselves.
Despite my desire to keep this series relegated to my
life through eighth grade, it's easy to slip outside those
boundaries with a topic like my mother. Her influence was
too great on my life to relegate it to a small part. As I write
this, she has been dead for six years and just last year, as I
was contemplating a job change, I was missing her again as
if she'd just died. Even if she'd only told me, "you have to
know what you want to do," talking to her, going through the
process of getting her non-advice, would have been
reassuring somehow. Maybe I got more out of those
vocational non-counseling sessions than I realized.
I'm going to close with a dream I had about three
years after she died. I've dreamed about my mother many,
many times since her death, but this one stands out.
In this dream, we were in the house, wherein she
raised seven children. Mama was sitting in her easy chair
by the northern windows in the living room. Outside the
windows, the sun was shining brightly and the gravel road
was dusty, dry. The grass was yellow and brown. In other
words, it was the farm in summer, my favorite season. (It
was also the season of my gestation and my mother had
mentioned that the summer of '63 was especially hot, a
miserable summer to be pregnant.) Inside the house, we sat
in the half-light, no electricity in use to push back the
shadows. The darkness of the un-air conditioned house
was our best defense against the heat. I sat in what was
Mama's rocking chair, where she sat before we bought her
the recliner one Christmas. It's the same rocker that sits in
my living room now.
This is how we often sat in real life: still, soft spoken,
comfortable in each other's presence.
And my mother was giving me advice on how to come
out.
I don't think the details of this conversation (what little
I remember in the hazy "real life" after a dream) is important
but the dream leaves in me a joy and a longing. It was a gift
to speak with Mama about things never spoken about. It
gave me a homesick longing for what I took for granted and
will never come again.
It comes back around to grateful joy for the memory of
having had it for even for a little while.
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Growing Up Gay in the South : Race, Gender, and the Journeys of the Spirit James T. Sears
Rita Reed
Other Articles In This Series By Neil Ellis Orts:
With Feeling
With Feeling Two: When I Think of Home
With Feeling Three: Learning on a Nervous Stomach
With Feeling Four: Learning on a Nervous Stomach
Also In This Issue:
A Pastoral Letter From Cleveland
A Glimpse of the "Beloved" Community
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