Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (8 page)

“I once wanted to become an atheist,
but I gave up - they have no holidays.” - Henny Youngman

I was forty-two when Lila came out and I had just begun
my ‘God’ phase. There’s an old adage that by the time a person reaches
forty, they’ve either found God or gardening and, for me, gardening was never
going to be a serious contender. It was an ongoing source of amusement to
John’s mum that the listing for every house we bought contained various
versions of the words, ‘suitable for the gardening enthusiast’. Clearly neither
of us would ever aspire to that title.

I don’t know any Jewish people who are into gardening and I
am in constant awe of my (non-Jewish) friend who can name every flower in our
favourite walled garden. However, I do enjoy looking at flowers, so my
gardening in Scotland consisted of an annual trip to a garden centre to buy
some fully flowering bedding plants (I don’t trust buds).On arriving home, I
arranged the plants in pots on my veranda and sat back with a cup of coffee to
admire my instant display.

John has no such religious ‘get out of gardening free’
card. He’s just plain lazy. Luckily, one of his accountancy clients was a
gardener, so we employed a barter system to manage our ‘suitable for the
gardening enthusiast’ garden. I fear the client got the raw end of that deal.

My lack of gardening enthusiasm meant that it was time to
look for God. I did not have a good track record. At the tender age of six, I
staged a rebellion against Jewish after- school activities. My parents were
forced to concede, even though both my siblings had attended ‘religiously’
before me. I like to think I had a precocious religious epiphany, but I was
probably just lazy and wanted to go home after school. I also rebelled against
finishing school early on winter Fridays to be home in time for Sabbath. It was
the class social hour and I just
knew
my friends would talk about me
behind my back.

“Don’t you dare say anything to the teacher about us
leaving early today,” I hissed to Harry, my religiously observant, goody
two-shoes Jewish classmate who, frustratingly, beat me without fail to the top
spot in the weekly class test.

“Why not? I like leaving early,” he taunted me.

I decided to change tactics. “Please,” I wheedled. “I want
to stay and chat to the other girls. I’ll do a deal with you. Leave it until
ten minutes before the bell, then act like you just remembered. We’ll still be
home on time.”

He pretended to think about it… “Nah,” he said. “Mr
Douglas, it’s time for us to go now.”

I got my comeuppance for dodging Jewish after-school when I
opted to study Hebrew as my ticket into a ‘good’ secondary school. As I
stumbled and cringed my way through reading a Hebrew text aloud, a group of
male classmates (led by a smirking Harry) enjoyed a game of cards at the back of
the room, secure in the knowledge that the teacher would be occupied for the
foreseeable future with my incompetence.

My lack of enthusiasm for gardening resulted in me being
ripe for the spiritual taking. I joined my local school of philosophy and was
introduced to Buddhism. The old saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher
will appear’ seemed appropriate. I was by no means the first Jew to take the
Buddhist path to spiritual enlightenment. In fact, there’s a long-standing joke
to the effect that there are more Cohens than koans* in Buddhism. For me,
the main attraction was that it was more accessible than Judaism. (Also, it
sort of rhymed, which I took as a good sign.)

My sister was also an enthusiast. Though fearful of being
labelled ‘spiritually promiscuous’, she attended her local Jewish Reform
synagogue in tandem with her involvement in Buddhist teachings. Buddhism
doesn’t claim to be a religion, but my sister was more conservative than I was
and had had a very different experience of growing up Jewish. She never
considered dating a non-Jew because she knew our parents wouldn’t have
approved. However, the two ideologies seemed to fit well together. I was
thrilled when I heard that the Dalai Lama was coming to Glasgow and was
granted religious leave by my school so we could both attend his three-day
teachings. The Dalai Lama actually teaches that there is no need to look
outside one’s own religion for spiritual fulfilment and that many
paths lead to one destination. I support the premise, but, as no teacher
appeared on behalf of Judaism at that time, I was sold.

While Buddhist teachings, contemplation and meditation were
invaluable to me after Lila came out, being a Jew is a core part of my identity
and I wouldn’t want to change that, though I’ve always been in a bit of a
religious conflict with myself.

Sadly, during our foray into Buddhism, my sister’s husband
died and she decided to return to her roots in the Orthodox synagogue, which he
had favoured. I went along to support her. The service was conducted in Hebrew,
and, for all we got out of it, the Rabbi may as well have been reciting
the numbers of his lottery tickets. (For all we knew, maybe he was.)

Over the years, I became more and more involved in Buddhism
and was inducted into meditation. I was pretty peeved that this was such a
source of mirth to my friends and family: “Meditation? Seriously? How could you
possibly be quiet and sit still for even one minute?” Privately, I was
conflicted. I was serious and slightly superior about meditation most of the
time, yet I berated it as being a bit hippy-dippy at others. I think meditation
is especially beneficial for frenetic people like me, for whom it’s a welcome
respite within a day of ceaseless mental and physical activity.

I like to think that Buddhism helped me become a more
spiritually aware person, which, in turn, was a positive step in helping me to
accept Lila being gay. But it was most certainly not a quick fix and required
long-term commitment. Although I no longer attend philosophy classes, I have
recently started meditating again and I find great peace in it.

When I told a friend I was writing this book, she
counselled me, “Writing a book is its own journey.”  She was right. As I
started writing I realised that so much of my own identity, not to mention my
humour, is tied into Judaism. When I tell non-Jews I’m writing this book, they
inevitably ask, “What’s the title?”

“Oy Vey, My Daughter’s Gay,”

“You’re not Jewish, though.”

“Eh… actually I am.”

“But you don’t go to the synagogue.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not Jewish,” I say, through gritted
teeth.

Across the Atlantic, Lila’s having similar conversations,
but this time mainly with Jews: “My mum’s writing a book about me and the whole
gay thing.”

“Awesome. What’s she calling it?”

“Oy Vey, My Daughter’s Gay.”

“But you’re not Jewish.”

“Yes I am. My mum’s Jewish.”

“But you don’t know anything about Judaism. When you came
to our Passover meal you had no idea about any of it.”

“Well that’s because I’m not a practising Jew.”

“Oh.”

It appears some people judge that I am not Jewish enough to
lay claim to the title – either of my religion or of my book. What am I?
Chopped liver? (A Jewish joke, so there!) My mother was Jewish, which in Jewish
law is enough by itself for me to stake my claim. My father was Jewish. Even my
cat was Jewish. (Okay, I made that up, but he did have a small black patch on
the top of his head that looked remarkably like a yarmulke.*)

However, these doubting Thomases had me worried. I decided
I needed solid evidence, so I sought out an Internet quiz to prove that I’m a
Jew. It was hard to find one that was suitably serious and searching, but here
it is, in case like me you ever find yourself having to defend your Jewish
identity:

Question1.

Do you know how to make knaidels?

Yes. The recipe is my inheritance from my mum. (I’ve
included it at the back of the book, if you’re interested.)

Question 2.

Did everyone in your house speak very loudly, even when
they were just having a normal conversation?

Yes. When I first invited John to meet my parents, he
questioned fearfully why we were all shouting at each other. I shouted,
“SHOUTING? WHO’S SHOUTING?”

Question 3.

What is Palwin Wine?

It’s kosher wine that tastes like cough medicine, and is
numbered: The lower the number, the ‘better’ the wine. Do we know from
sophistication, or what?

A few nail-biting minutes followed, but finally the results
were in: I passed. I am a Jew. I even have a printed certificate to prove it!

John was almost as upset as me when my religious validity
was questioned. He feels he has earned the title of ‘honorary Jew’ after
being so much a part of my family and its traditions, though he feels his own
identity is tied to his country rather than his religion and he can trace his
Scottish roots for generations.

Sadly, Lila and Lee say they don’t feel Jewish, which makes
me feel oddly disappointed. I suppose I presumed it would have become part of
their identity, if only by osmosis. My brother, sister and I are the end of our
family line. When we are gone, our family’s Jewish heritage will be gone, too.
Being only a second generation Scot, my roots are in my Judaism and I find
myself becoming nostalgic for a religion I never cared about and to which I
never made a commitment. Maybe it’s like Joni Mitchell says in her song, ‘Don’t
it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got 'til it’s gone!’
¹⁰

If there’s a Jewish teacher out there, now would be a good
time to appear!

* Yarmulke:    skull cap worn by Jewish men

   Koan:            a story, dialogue, question or
statement which is   

                         used in Zen practice to
provoke the ‘great doubt’

                         and test a student’s progress
in Zen practice.

                         Wikipedia

“Bisexuality
immediately doubles your chance for a date on a Saturday night.”
-
Woody Allen

Although we were for the most part tanned, happy and the
envy of all our friends back home, I suppose we always knew our Spanish
adventure would eventually come to an end. While I suspect Lee would have quite
happily adapted to being a teenage beach bum, it wasn’t satisfying Lila’s
educational needs. Also, the school fees were higher than the academic
standard. Lila was due to start secondary school soon and we knew the time was
right for the move. To top it all, John’s accountancy clients, who, up until
then, had sustained us pretty well, had severely dwindled in number. So we sold
our house, repacked our eight suitcases, grabbed my guitar and drove back to
Scotland.

The move proved to be toughest on John. Having spent most
of our savings surviving his business start-up in Spain, it was now financially
like starting all over again. We couldn’t afford the similar standard of house
we’d owned pre-Spain and our credit rating was on a par with ex-cons who had
been in jail for the past five years. We had initially planned to migrate to
Australia from Spain, but our application had been turned down. John now pinned
all his hopes on an appeal.

”John, we really need to buy a cooker.”

“Why? You know our appeal will be through any day now.”

I got impatient with him. “Look we all know we’re not going
to Australia, so why don’t you let it drop, and we all get on with our lives?
Or, if you’re that desperate to go, maybe you should just go on your own!”

The silence that followed was deafening. Eventually he
conceded, but it was an open wound for a long time and I don’t know if he’s
ever completely forgiven me for putting an end to his hopes. He reluctantly
began the slog of building up yet another accountancy practice, while I went
back to teaching. When we all went to Australia on holiday a few years later it
did nothing to lessen his enthusiasm for living there, but some things are
perhaps not meant to be.

I had worried about how Lila would fit back into Scotland
and make new friends. Lila once described herself to me as, ‘an introvert who
wants to be an extrovert’. I find it hard to accept that Lila isn’t naturally
like her ‘all singing all dancing’ mother because, during her childhood, she
hid it so well. I was puzzled when she told me she had had to push herself hard
to appear so outgoing. Inside, her introvert self was shouting, “No! I can’t do
this!” while her extrovert wannabe was demanding, “Well you’re doing it
anyway!”

Lila told me that she and Lee actually used to practise
accepting a drink before visiting friends and family, because their natural
tendency was to quietly say ‘No, thank you’ rather than cause an inconvenience.

“Okay Lee, you be the adult.”

“Okay–Hi, Lila. Would you two like a drink?”

“
Yes please. Orange juice.
Hey, that was easy. Let’s
try it again.”

“Right. Hi, Lila. Would you like a drink?”

“Yes please. Do you have orange juice? I think I’m ready,
Lee...”

“Hi Lila, nice to see you. Do you want a drink?”

“No thanks, I’m fine. Ahhhhhhh!”

Happily, Lila thrived in her last year of Scottish primary
school. Her worldly foreign air and her tan impressed her village schoolmates,
whilst her intelligence and work ethic impressed her teachers. She even pulled
off a pretty good King Rameses in her school musical about Moses. It would be
her only role as a man, but all through high school she bemoaned her lack of
good acting roles. Despite her efforts, rather than the romantic lead, she
always found herself in the chorus, or as an elderly woman who dies in the end.
“Why do all my characters’ names have to be prefaced with the word ‘old’?” she
said.

Lila loved performing. She attended drama lessons and
belonged to two different drama clubs in addition to the one at school −
although she has  subsequently admitted to me that one of those was
largely driven by a crush she had on a girl at the time. Her gran, still
wanting to please Lila at that time, even financed voice lessons when Lila felt
her singing was what stood between her and stardom.

“So how did your lesson go today?” I asked.

“Well, the teacher said that my voice is weak and watery,
if that gives you a clue.”

I couldn’t believe a teacher could be that cruel,
especially when her client was paying her. It was becoming increasingly clear
that Lila would never achieve her ambition to get the equivalent of that
starring role she had given up in her first year of school in Spain. I realised
it was going to be up to me to make that dream come true.

“Lila, how would you feel about setting up our own children’s
theatre company?” I asked her tentatively.

Fifteen-year-old Lila was perplexed, but I saw her smile.
“What? Are you serious?”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t think it would be that hard to do.”

My fortieth birthday was looming, so I can now put the whole
idea down to a mid-life crisis. We had a great time constructing a storyline;
choosing and rehearsing songs and buying materials from charity shops. A
competent publicist from an early age, Lila contacted the local newspapers and
soon our faces beamed out from its pages.

Strangely, Lila’s character was a boy − John Jacob
Jingleheimmer Smith − who pretended to be sick to avoid singing in the
school show. Lee was the keyboard-playing ‘Dr Oldspecs’, who refused to wear
his new glasses. It was pure pantomime, complete with songs, slapstick and
sing-alongs. I was the guitar-playing mother and I made some of the costumes,
even though my talents hadn’t improved since the gorilla costume incident. John
was our roadie. It was a real family affair: a bit like the Von Trapp Family
Singers, but without the talent or the war. The Slightly Silly Theatre Company
was a surprising success, playing all over the West of Scotland for around a
year.  At that point Lee became a teenager; glimpsed himself in character and
declared, “This is an embarrassment– I’m out of here!” We didn’t hold it
against him, as the novelty had worn off by then anyway.

Like most teenagers struggling with their image, Lila
stormed her way through clothing fads. For a while she emulated Blossom, the
eponymous hippy-dippy teenager from yet another of our favourite American
sitcoms. She teamed long, flowing, voluminous skirts with richly coloured
velvet tops, her long, softly permed hair tucked behind her ears to show off
her multi-coloured, plastic, dangly earrings. She was, in effect, me twenty
years earlier− but, happily for her, six inches taller. I still pine for
those clothes, but am forced to admit that I’ve now got a serious case of ‘Old
Head Syndrome’. There’s a fine line between ‘cool and funky’ and just plain
‘old and sad’. Reluctantly I left the clothing fun to Lila.

And she did have fun. As suddenly as they appeared, the
soft flowing clothes were gone and Lila moved into a diametrically opposed
phase of long black pinafores and white high-necked blouses. It
emerged that this style was inspired not by the Amish as we had thought, but by
a crush she had on Holly Hunter in the Oscar-winning film, ‘The Piano’. During
yet another phase, she attired herself in multi-coloured outfits, with her
school friends counting how many colours she had achieved every day; then she
progressed to wearing oversized Broadway musical T-shirts paired with leggings.
Finally she discovered black crushed velvet and Doc Martin boots and a true
love affair was born.

Unusually for a teenager, Lila had little interest in
music, pop or otherwise, but she
did
own one tape of Shakespearean
chants. (Teenagers: Always out to shock the older generation.) She didn’t have
the obligatory teenage posters of pop stars either, and Shakespeare just didn’t
quite cut it. She did have one poster of Phillip Schofield, but she later
admitted it was a decoy to distract from the newspaper photos of actresses
stuck up near her bed. Then, one day, theatre posters replaced them all. During
her high school years, Lila and I were serious theatre buffs and went to a lot
of exciting and experimental theatre, exactly the kind of thing John
subsequently blamed for making her gay. She hit on the idea of a theatre theme
for her bedroom, begged out-of-date posters from our favourite theatres and
plastered them over her walls to great effect. Phillip Schofield was duly
relegated to the bin.

In addition to her ‘straight-acting’ project, Lila found
time to indulge in lots of arty ones. The CDs stuck to her ceiling looked
amazing and gave the desired effect of a giant mirror, but they stubbornly
refused to stay in situ and fluttered down like giant silver snowflakes,
turning her bedroom floor into a veritable ice-rink. The never-ending stream of
ongoing papier-mâché projects (usually involving various shapes and sizes of
framed mirrors) added to the danger. I was never going to make it all the way
into her bedroom. Was that just a coincidence, or had it been arranged with the
same level of meticulous planning as the rest of her life?

Academically, Lila was going from strength to strength. We
were amazed and proud to discover at her second-year high school Parents’ Night
that she was gaining top marks in every single subject, including the sciences.

“That’s it!” I said to her, my Jewish genes rushing to the
fore. “You’ll just have to become a doctor now.”

“I don’t want to be a doctor. Don’t ever mention that
option to me again,” Lila responded with a surprising amount of venom.

Duly reprimanded, I never mentioned it  again, until in her
third year at high school when she said, “I suppose I’ll just be a doctor.” I’m
still not sure exactly what changed her mind.

Lila built up a group of close friends during high school,
including Mark and Jim, who both later came out as being gay. I suspected she
had been attracted to them as friends because she felt safe around them, but
she maintains that she never speculated on their sexuality. “I wasn’t
physically attracted to them, so I wasn’t interested either way,” she said. The
years of high school evenings spent with them designing and sewing costumes and
dying Lila’s hair outlandish colours didn’t give her any clues.

At one time or another Jim had dated every girl in the
class with the exception of Lila. “I often wondered what was wrong with me,”
Lila confided in me. “Why didn’t Jim ever ask me out? Not that I wanted to go
out with him, but he didn’t know I was gay back then.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you gave off a gay vibe,” I said.

“Hmmm,” Lila responded, obviously not convinced by my
answer.

It’s a real pity that they didn’t feel ready to come out,
as Lila, Mark and Jim could have provided a much-needed lifeline for each
other. By the time Lila came out to Mark she strongly suspected that he too was
gay. “So, do you have anything to tell me?" she asked.

“No, why would I?” Mark replied.

It would be several more years before Mark felt ready to
reveal his sexuality. I’m sure nobody was surprised, as he was very camp. I
wonder if that made it any easier for him to come out. Jim continued dating
girls for a few more years and then, eventually, Lila heard he had a boyfriend.
She wasn’t really surprised and joked that there must have been something in
the water in our village. If so, it wasn’t the beverage of choice for girls:
Lila never knowingly came across another lesbian in high school.

However, that didn’t stop her having lots of crushes on
lots of girls in general, and one girl in the school drama club in particular.
Lila used to accompany her dad and me on our daily constitutional just so she
could pass by her crush’s house and hopefully catch a glimpse of her dream
girl. Every year, she overtly sent a Valentine’s card to a random boy, and
covertly sent a card to her crush. I wonder how the girl would have reacted had
she known her secret admirer was female.

Lila had several close girlfriends and they spent a lot of
time in one another’s company. It must have been a difficult time for her as
most teenage girls relish revealing their crushes to one another. Lila told me
that, ironically, when they were fourteen-year-olds, a few of her female
classmates went through a ‘lesbian’ phase, indulging in some
experimentation. Lila shook her head knowingly. Honourable and literal girl
that she is, she refused to be drawn in. She correctly predicted that this was
strictly a temporary phase and that her classmates would soon be dating boys
again, while squirming with embarrassment and ill-concealed delight at their
audacity. Had Lila joined in, she would have been left humiliated
and frustrated on the sidelines when they reverted to heterosexuality.
Crucially, she would also have revealed her innermost self. So instead, she
penned the cryptic ‘LM loves?’ on her pencil case, and kept silent.

“I still can’t believe I passed up a golden opportunity
like that for some high school romance though,” she laughed.