Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (4 page)

“I’m
not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” -
Groucho Marx

When Lila came out, I believed that she had opened
Pandora’s Box. I now realise the truth.  I was Pandora’s Box. The evils that
were unleashed were in fact flying out from within me: pride, envy and wrath.

In hindsight, my trauma was closely tied to the question of
identity. Immediately after the explosive two minutes when Lila announced that
she was gay, I had an out-of-body experience. I returned not knowing who I
was.  Part of what I believed to be true about myself as a person, and as a
mother, had been destroyed.

Until that moment, I more or less had it all figured out.
Like all parents, I had learned and adapted along the way, but I was always in
charge of the situation. I knew how to proceed and get the help and answers I
needed to solve my family’s problems.

I am reminded of a philosophical story about a man who went
on a weekend retreat to learn patience. On Monday morning he found himself
driving in rush hour traffic to work, a perfect opportunity to practise his new
skills. Then a tramp walked out in front of his car and started kicking it. The
man flew out of his car and grabbed the tramp by the neck in fury. The tramp
was actually the man’s guru and, by testing his patience, revealed his
limitations.    

Many religious and philosophical stories are based on this
premise: a person can only grow and change if they are challenged. I was a good
enough parent when faced with everyday situations, but now my mettle was really
being tested. Lila was my ‘tramp’ and, like the man in the story, I definitely
needed some further development.

As a mother, I thought I knew my children intimately, but I
now feared I hardly knew Lila at all. I went through a roller-coaster of
emotions.  I was angry at Lila for ‘rocking the boat’ of our perfect family and
at myself for not being there for her.  I was disappointed in Lila who was no
longer our perfect daughter and in myself for even thinking that.  Above all, I
was afraid that things would never be the same again.

When my niece said, “We’d always imagined that Lila would
marry an older, distinguished man.  Possibly another doctor, someone well
respected in his field, but with a dry sense of humour,” I realised I’d more or
less had the same thoughts.

I sensed that rebuilding my identity and self-respect would
be a long, arduous process and I rebelled against it. While I was happy to
accept the premise that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’
⁴
when it came to the option of ‘Let go or be dragged,’
⁵
I hung on to
the status quo tenaciously. One dilemma I faced was how to marry the image I’d
carried of Lila for the past seventeen years to the person she now revealed
herself to be. She told us she came out at a young age because she wanted us to
know she was still the same person. But that was just it: as far as I was
concerned, she wasn’t. Her identity was strongly tied to being gay and I was
torn between accepting the real Lila and clinging to the old and safe one I had
loved and nurtured since she was born.

Ironically, I was taking a philosophy class at the time
that focused on self-discovery. As part of my personal journey, my ego and I
squared up to each other. One day when he whispered in my ear in his most
wheedling voice,
“You’re a good person. You’re right to be upset about your
daughter being gay,”
something snapped. I took the weightiest of my
philosophical tomes and bashed him over the head with it. The voice was silent.
Momentarily freed from his influence, the fog cleared. The ugly truth now
stared me baldly in the face: I was upset and angry because Lila being gay was
not what I wanted. Finally I faced the truth. This was about Lila, not about
me. I heard a groan from deep within. My ego faltered, but he wasn’t giving up
that easily. Sadly, it would be another three years before I could begin the
long journey of speaking and acting from my heart.

I sensed how important it was for John to believe that Lila
being gay was just a phase and I hadn’t the heart to confront him with my view.
I suppose it was also a measure of my love for him that I didn’t want to see
him crushed any more than he already was. If he needed to believe it was just a
phase, I wasn’t about to destroy that belief. If he needed to vent, I never
held it against him that he had blamed me for Lila being gay. That was a pretty
upsetting accusation, but I knew he was just hurting and that he didn’t really
believe it. (However, since writing this book, I’ve consequently reminded him
that I had levelled no such accusations at
him
!) I also knew I didn’t
have the strength for an argument that neither of us could win. I was already
hurting too much and couldn’t risk putting him or myself through any more
trauma. I’m glad I was able to find alternative ways to get the help and
support I needed and was able to convince John that I was fine.

Years later, John was shocked to discover that, after Lila
came out, all this activity had been going on within me. He’d genuinely been
unaware that I had taken Lila’s coming out so hard. He thought that, like him,
after the initial week or so, I’d put it on the back burner. The fact that he
was unaware of the turmoil I was going through is further proof of the chasm
that had opened up between us as, previously, we had discussed everything.

“I don’t believe for a minute that you didn’t think about
Lila being gay for three years,” my friend said to John recently. Being a
personal counsellor, her comments were of particular interest to me.

“Honestly, I didn’t,” John said. “Men are different from
women. They don’t go about analysing things. They just forget about them and
hope for the best.”

She wasn’t convinced. “Come on, I’m sure it was all going
round inside your head at the time, even if you didn’t talk about it.”

“If it was, I certainly don’t remember.”

“Well, if that’s true, men really must be from Mars, and
women from Venus,” she said, giving up and laughing.

In the context of writing this book, I’m surprised and
thrilled that people are opening up to me about their own gay friends and
relatives. An acquaintance told me that he’s finally decided to confront his
potentially gay daughter and assure her of his support. I’m hungry for stories
of gays coming out and, while I feel despondent about how badly some parents
react, I’m jealous of the minority who react positively. Lila and I were
recently discussing a YouTube video of a young man coming out and consequently
being thrown out of the house. “At least we didn’t throw you out of the house,”
I joked.

Lila hesitated before saying, “Well, actually, you sort of
did.”

“No way!” I said, incredulous. “You know that never
happened.”

“I wasn’t going to remind you,” she said, “as it’s obvious
you have no memory of it and I didn’t want to upset you. Remember when I went
to Edinburgh to stay with a friend? You said to me at the time, ‘I don’t think
you can live here anymore.’ ”

I looked across at John’s stricken face. “Is it possible?”
I asked in a wobbly voice.

“No way,” he said. “You’ve got it wrong, Lila.”

“I wrote it in my diary at the time,” she said, “Although I
was only meant to be leaving for a few days, I had packed my medical school
equipment just in case I couldn’t come home before term started.”

“I have to believe you then,” I said, through my rapidly
forming tears.

“I’m sorry,” Lila said. “I wasn’t sure if I should mention
it.”

“Why should you be sorry? I’m the one who’s sorry. Besides,
I’ve chosen to write this book and I owe it to you and to my readers to be
completely honest.”

“You did also tell me you loved me though,” my wonderful
daughter said in a tiny voice, “and when I phoned you at New Year you acted
like nothing had happened, remember? And I came home a couple of days later.
Anyway, that’s the last thing I have to reveal,” she said, trying, and failing,
to cheer me up.

“To
put it rather bluntly, I’m not the type who wants to go back to the land: I’m
the type who wants to go back to the hotel.” - Fran Lebowitz

Baby Lila and I left hospital to fly back to Islay when
she was five days old. I’d had post-birth stitches removed earlier that morning
and searing pain throbbed through my entire body with every step. Giving birth
had been a picnic compared to this. The only thing sustaining me was the
thought of the peace and quiet, collapsing into my favourite armchair when I
got home, just John and Lila and me.

“Surprise!” John said, as he opened our front door,
revealing a welcome party of neighbours.

 “Congratulations! Let’s see her then.” I seethed as I
unzipped the pink ‘baby nest’ and lifted a sleeping Lila out. Her nappy had
leaked – badly − and she was covered from neck to toe in yellow baby
shit. I collapsed into tears of shame and helplessness.
I’ll never be able
to cope with being a mother.

Of course, I did cope − pretty well actually. Having
given up teaching when I became pregnant, Lila became my own personal one-baby
class. We read, we sang, we played, we danced and we talked. All day, every
day. Disposable nappies and breastfeeding made for minimal housekeeping and
maximum learning time. Lila was a model pupil. She was enthusiastic, well
behaved and a quick learner. When John came home from work we just sat and
stared at the amazing work of art that was our daughter, feeling very grown up
and important. And every night we all collapsed into our respective cot and
bed, exhausted and fulfilled.

As spring approached, we took long, windy walks with Lila
in her pram. Bright yellow gorse bushes lit up the whole landscape like
enormous balls of sunshine. Every night we took turns to get up bleary-eyed
from our bed to answer the inevitable crying. It wasn’t coming from Lila
though, who slept beautifully; it was lambing season and, in an attempt to
escape the feeding demands of their lambs, ewes regularly jumped the fence into
our garden. The abandoned lambs complained surprisingly loudly. We spent
countless nights stumbling through sleep and our untamed garden, trying to
chase the errant sheep out while being careful not to wake Lila.

Everything was going perfectly until, at the age of three
months, Lila suddenly and inexplicably refused to breastfeed. We were baffled,
as was our health visitor. “Maybe she’s just a really precocious baby and is
ready to feed from a cup.” That made sense. Her three months in the classroom
was probably responsible.  Twelve hours later, Lila was screaming with hunger
and I was trying to staunch the spouting milk which flowed as a natural
response to her screams. I’d relished that special bond between mother and baby
up until now, but, suddenly, it didn’t seem like such an advantage.

Meanwhile John soldiered on, trying to feed Lila with
bottles, baby cups and special bottle teats − all to no avail. As she
wailed, he desperately scanned our kitchen for any other possible milk
dispenser − and his eye fell upon a plastic teaspoon. Problem solved.
Lila happily sipped milk from the teaspoon for the next three months,
complaining loudly if we tried to exchange it for a more conventional and less
backbreaking method of feeding her.

Another trauma came when Lila was five months old and I
casually announced to my mum that my period still hadn’t returned. “Maybe
you’re pregnant again,” she said. I was horrified and scared. This was supposed
to be Lila’s and my special time together. Had I short-changed her? Luckily it
was a false alarm and Lila and I relaxed back into our private, mother and
daughter club.

Lila was our little pussycat. John still calls her that.
She displayed the qualities of a fully-grown cat rather than a kitten. Even as
a baby she was slightly aloof and self-contained. She put up with hugs and
kisses, but never initiated them. She would come close if she needed us, but,
as soon as she could walk, maintained a sense of dignified independence. John
remembers throwing her playfully onto the bed when she was about nine months
old and Lila giggling and gurgling with delight, her silky brown curls bobbling
up and down. It was memorable because, when he tried it again the next night,
her little face scrunched up and she looked at him severely as if it say,
‘Yes,
I’ll admit it was fun at the time, Daddy, but it was a one-off. Don’t even
think of repeating the exercise.’

Baby school continued apace. By the time she was ten months
old, every item in our kitchen was labelled and Lila studied the cards
thoughtfully. It never occurred to her to yank them off and chew them as most
babies would have. By now, she thankfully drank her milk from a sippy cup,
which she removed intermittently to supply the missing word or phrase of the
song I was singing. Eating or drinking was no excuse to slacken off on
learning. At a year old, Lila had an impressive vocabulary and could do a
pretty mean ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’. The only failing mark on her
report card was for walking. When she reached sixteen months and
still
didn’t
show any interest, we were really worried. A baby walker didn’t help. She was
supposed to employ her legs to make it move, but Lila just sat in blissful
immobility, enjoying her new and thoughtfully provided reading venue. She
eventually walked a couple of months later, probably realising it was the
quickest way to reach her bookcase.

Lila was a great project, but I missed teaching and adult
company. My daughter-in-law was amazed when I explained that, at the time,
hardly anyone went back to work after becoming a mother. Unfortunately,
job-share wasn’t an option back then. I can’t remember why we thought that it
would be a good plan for me to open a baby clothes shop. Now, instead of being
alone with Lila in my house, I was alone with her in a shop; barring the rare
customer. She
was
the best-dressed baby on the island, though, in her
raspberry velour pinafore with matching top and tights.

After some deliberation, a dwindling trickle of customers
and a lot of boredom, I transferred the remaining stock to Lila’s wardrobe and
volunteered to run a playgroup instead. Lila wasn’t pleased to be sharing me
with other children and studied me with a puzzled and angry expression. I
couldn’t blame her. Her class of one had suddenly morphed into a class of
twenty.  Slightly harassed, I dashed around filling paint pots and helping kids
use scissors with the suddenly not-so-independent Lila clinging to my leg.

On Lila’s first birthday, she and I went back to the
mainland to celebrate with her grandparents. It was a dark February evening
when we left Islay. John and our neighbours had battened down the hatches and
settled in for the long night of wind whistling over the moors and rain
battering against the windows. But, when Lila and I arrived at Glasgow airport,
I was blinded by lights, shops and people sipping coffee in a café. What kind
of decadence was this? I had suspected that there might be life after 7pm, but
this spectacle was beyond my wildest dreams and I wanted more.

John, on the other hand, loved island life. He was happily
ensconced in a job with the local builders: completing the accounts; making the
tea; buying the stamps and organising romantic trysts for his employers. But
when I reluctantly returned to Islay, I petitioned (nagged) to return to the
mainland and, as always, John was sympathetic to my cause. I felt guilty for
uprooting him from a job he loved so much. Granted, I’d miss the biannual beach
walks the blustery weather permitted and the excitement of queuing for the
Sunday papers coming off the ferry. Islay had been Lila’s first home and, as
such, it would always be special; but I just wasn’t cut out for island life.
Today, my memories are mostly of great swathes of nothing shrouded in mist,
lashed by rain and battered by gales.

I was so much happier being back on the mainland. Lila and
I now spent a huge amount of time ensconced at our local library. I couldn’t
believe my luck when I spied a poster advertising the annual book sale. I
pounced on that shelf like a starving man at a feast. My heart beat faster as I
recognised most of Lila’s favourite books, including ‘Clifford the Big Red
Dog,’
⁶
and, joy of joys, her current love, ‘The Tiger Who Came to
Tea.’
⁷
And they were almost like new. She owned both of these books
already, but who cared?

It wouldn’t be right to buy them
all
, would it?
I thought.
I really should leave
some
books for others, shouldn’t I?
I reluctantly limited myself to twenty books. At five pence a book, that came
to the grand total of a pound. I was cock-a-hoop as I drove home with my loot.
Our treasure hoard continued to grow. By the end of that magical week, the
contents of Lila’s home library exceeded the local one. As she carefully turned
the pages, her eyes wide, grinning and pointing out words such as ‘Clifford’,
‘dog’, ‘tiger’ and ‘teapot’, from time to time she glanced round the room with
a confused look on her chubby little face. Was this her house, or the library?
Either way, it was wonderful.

Lila’s favourite part of ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ was
when Sophie’s daddy came home from work to find that a tiger had eaten and
drunk everything in the house, including all the tea in the teapot and all the
water in the taps. Good old Daddy, in his pork-pie hat and raincoat, solved the
problem by taking them all out to a café for a tea of sausages, chips and
ice-cream. Sophie was already in her nightdress, so Daddy helped her put her
coat and wellingtons on over it and off they all went into the dark night, to
the café.

“I want to do that,” Lila said, over and over. “I want to
go out in the dark in a nightdress. I want sausagesandchipsandicecream.”

“One night we will,” I promised her. Her dream came true on
a dark November night when I had to sit an Open University exam. After dropping
me off at the exam hall, John and Lila-in-a-nightdress happily settled
themselves in a booth at the Glasgow University Café. I smiled to myself as I
wrote my exam paper, imagining Lila’s joy at living out her favourite story.
Sure enough, she talked of nothing else for weeks after.

“Mummy, I had sausagesandchipsandicecream, just like
Sophie!”