Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (21 page)

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We lived together, Paula, the two younger boys and I, in a rented 1930s bungalow in Jacksonville. About a week after we moved in, there was a knock on the door. It was the people who had lived in the house just before us. They had cats, several of which had died in that house and were buried in the bushes in the back yard. Another of their cats had died that morning. They asked if they could bury the cat near its siblings in our back yard.

“Yes, of course,” I said after conferring with Paula and the boys.

“Thank you so much,” they said through their tears. “We’ll come back this evening.”

They returned just as the sun was setting and asked if they could just sit in the back yard for a while until the body was ready. Ready? It was already dead. Apparently, when the cat died that morning, they put it in a freezer. All four legs froze, going every which way. They needed to wait until the cat thawed enough to fold it up and get it into its burial box. While we wanted to be reverent for the loss of their pet, we found the situation terribly funny and muffled our laughter behind closed doors.

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I was in my last semester of coursework for my doctoral program at the University of North Florida, in January of 1994, when Shirley Webb, the then-director of the UNF Women’s Center, handed a paper to me that she’d just received on her fax. “Here’s your next job, Ronni. Go for it.”

It was the director position for the University of Michigan’s Lesbian and Gay Programs Office. Michigan??? I was a Florida girl, and besides, my kids were here. Though I hadn’t seen my children in years, what if they needed me? But by then they were adults, 22 and 18. Was this the professional break I didn’t know I needed? I became aggressive about the application process for this job. If my children needed me, they would find me since I always let them know how to contact me with every card I sent. I was hired by the University of Michigan and moved to Ann Arbor in May of 1994. I finished my doctoral dissertation while there.             

Paula and the boys, both teenagers, moved to Ann Arbor with me. Paula had the option of staying in Jacksonville and maintaining a long distance relationship with me as many academics do. I especially did not want to upset the lives and lifestyles of the two children. Over the years everyone in their world knew their mother was a lesbian, so they didn’t need to come out over and over in school and with friends. In a new town and a new situation, that’s all they’d be doing.              

“We’ll go as a family, Ronni,” Paula declared. That meant I would work while she played the self-identified role of trophy wife (her words, not mine). I’d pay for everything including the house we bought, Jonathan’s braces and James’s college. At least I didn’t have to cook or clean which I detested. Paula eventually got a job, working in the health department in Detroit.

We lived in Ypsilanti—Ypsi, the locals call it—whose claim to fame is the water tower in the heart of town that looks exactly like a circumcised penis. We chose Ypsi rather than Ann Arbor because Ypsi was more dynamically multicultural, an environment we appreciated in Jacksonville and preferred in Michigan.

James was the oldest of the two boys who lived with us. He’d wanted a tattoo since he was fifteen. Paula repeatedly told him that he must wait until he turned eighteen. James designed his tattoo—a dragon—and waited. He was such an interesting boy who perceived himself as unique and out of the mainstream. He wore outrageous unmatched clothes—striped knee socks, and unusual vests and shirts. He colored his hair purple and gold, his school colors, then wondered why other students harassed him. He said he didn’t care that they did. He just felt it was their lack of creativity and not his unusual attire that motivated their cruelty. He wondered, much like I always did as a teen, why people would go out of their way to be mean to someone who was different. On his 18th birthday, James’ first stop was a tattoo parlor to which he went without fanfare. That meant he didn’t tell us. Several weeks later we were in the family van. Paula was driving and James was lying stretched out on the second row of seats, his shirt slightly raised. Paula apparently saw James’ tummy—and tattoo—in the rear view mirror and slammed on the brakes.

In her deepest, most indignant drawl she hollered, “What is THAT on your stomach, young man?”

“My tattoo. You said I could get one when I turned 18. I’m 18. I got it on my birthday.”

“I NEVUH said any such thing,” hollered Paula, her best Southern twang at full tilt. Actually, we’d all heard her say exactly that many times over the years. Regardless, before the day was over, Paula had purchased a one-way ticket for James to fly to Florida to live with his father. That was Paula! James left the next day. Two weeks later, I flew to Florida to bring him back home to Michigan.

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While driving to work in Ann Arbor one morning, I heard an NPR radio program on which a mother who had just lost her daughter in the crash of TWA flight 800 (July 1996) was talking. Through her tears she said she was often told by well-meaning people that for as painful as the loss of her daughter is, she’ll eventually heal and get over it. Another mother called in. She had lost her daughter on the Pan Am Lockerbie flight crash (December 1988). She told the TWA mother that it’s impossible to “get over” such a devastating loss. She said, “The only thing you can do is incorporate the loss into who you are. Make your daughter’s memory a strength and move forward, with your heart full of love.”

I heard her words. She was speaking to me, too! I felt so conflicted about my children not being in my life. I mourned their loss every day of my life but they weren’t dead, just out of my view, out of my reach. It was difficult to explain to anyone. How could anyone understand why a mother would lose custody of her children short of being an ax murderer? I beat myself up over and over and friggin’ over for years, trying to move on, because that’s what people said I should do. And now here’s a mother telling me via my car radio what I needed to hear! I had memories. Hell, that’s all I had, memories and a heart full of love for my children who I hadn’t seen or heard from in ten years, yet the pain was always present. With that mother’s words—the only thing you can do is incorporate the loss into who you are. Make your daughter’s memory a strength and move forward, with your heart full of love—a small bit of the pain with which I lived had begun to heal, though the guilt remained. I shared this with no one, especially not with Paula.

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Paula hated Michigan from the day we arrived. Too cold. Too hot. Too dark. Too bright. Too isolated. And she hated me for taking her there, though the boys didn’t seem to mind the place too much. Paula and I separated a couple of years later. Neither of us was in love with the other and both of us were miserable. During our separation, in hopes of getting back together, I bought a ring for her. The Hebrew inscription read: This is My Beloved, This is My Friend. I looked at that ring for weeks without giving it to her. I couldn’t. My beloved? My friend? We still didn’t even like each other! I realized that I was the one who needed to be my beloved and my friend. I put the ring on my own finger and wear it to this day, next to my RSL ring.

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I was recruited by UCLA to direct their Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center and moved to Los Angeles six months after Paula and I permanently separated. Several months after my move west, Paula returned to Florida—for about six weeks. And then she did the strangest thing. She went back to Michigan, the place she detested. 

The sad part for me, which I believe was retaliation pure and simple, was that Paula forbade her sons James and Jonathan to have contact with me, knowing the power of the pain of the loss of my own children. She said if I attempted to contact the boys, she would charge me with stalking. Swell. I remain hopeful that one day those two young men, now in their 30s, will return to my life as my own children did. There’s always room for more, and they are always welcome.

25. A New Identity: Grandma

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1994

U.S. President
: Bill Clinton

Best film
: Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption

Best actors
: Tom Hanks, Jessica Lange

Best TV shows
: Ellen; My So Called Life; Party of Five; Friends; ER

Best songs
: I’ll Make Love to You, Can You Feel the Love Tonight, Without You, You Mean the World to Me, Hero, The Power of Love

Civics
: Nelson Mandela elected president of South Africa

Popular Culture
: Skater Nancy Kerrigan attacked; President Clinton accused of sexual harassment; O. J. Simpson arrested in the killing of his wife; Kurt Cobain commits suicide; American Medical Association opposes medical treatment to “cure” homosexuals; Sheila James Kuehl is the first openly gay or lesbian person elected to the California legislature.

Deaths
: Richard Nixon, Cab Calloway, Burt Lancaster, John Candy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jessica Tandy

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She stood at my front door, hands on the waist of her five-foot frame, defiant and sturdy. She was a small woman on the large covered porch of my turn-of-the-century Sears & Roebuck Victorian. I was expecting her. She sent an email to me the day before, Christmas Day, 1994, and asked if we could meet. Her email began with “Hi, Mom.” So simple, so casual, so complicated.

Now she was twenty-two years old, my beautiful daughter, my Berit. I’d not seen her since she was twelve. Her father and his parents kept us separated by lies, by miles, by years. But here she was, an adult, living in Dayton, Ohio, 1,500 miles away from her father’s family’s influence, standing on my porch in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her husband at her side.

Seven months earlier I had moved to Michigan from Jacksonville, Florida, when I accepted the position of director of the Lesbian and Gay Program Office at the University of Michigan. Berit was married to Bill whom she’d met when they both worked at Disney World in Orlando. His parents lived in Dayton, so Berit and Bill moved there, just three hours south of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

Berit and Bill, both in their early twenties, were married in December of 1993, the same weekend as World AIDS Day that year. (My mother and sisters were invited to Berit’s wedding but I was not, so they didn’t go, in solidarity for me.) I learned later that I wasn’t invited because Berit feared there might be a nasty confrontation between her father’s mother, Cynda, and me at her wedding. She didn’t want to risk it. There’s no way she could have known, of course, that I would never engage in such behavior, but now it was moot. (However, as a result, I staunchly believe that regardless of feelings and interactions, family should always be invited—and should show up—to events. You don’t have to talk to someone if they’re there but you can never undo an absence.) My AIDS guys surrounded me that day, held me, cared for me throughout the day, just as I always did for them. They were my family of choice, these dear men, and they were comforting me on the day of my daughter’s wedding.

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I was twenty-six when Berit was born. I’d never really given much thought to having children. When I was young, I’d hear my friends fantasize about marriage and children but it just never entered my thought process. It’s not that it was a bad idea; it just was a non-idea for me. Getting married was my way to legitimately remain in the closet, that secret place where I slowly disintegrated. It wasn’t something I’d ever wished for, like most girls. But pregnancy helped me feel as if I were involved in something good, something larger than myself. If I had to be married, I may as well go the distance.

“Jake! It’s time! Now! Let’s go!” We rushed to the hospital, the same one in which both he and his mother were born. As we checked in, he forgot my name. Not a good sign. Another reminder that something was amiss—like my life.

Drugs knocked me out as 8-pound 11-ounce Berit entered the world. It was 1973, before the various birthing methods gained popularity. When I regained consciousness, Berit was brought to me so I could see my little daughter, count her fingers and toes, and nurse her. I nursed her for six months—to the horror of Jake’s mother Cynda who thought nursing was disgusting and “just plain wrong.” Frankly, I would have nursed her for much longer than the six months, as I did her brother later, but I needed to go back on prednisone and azulfidine—medicine I’d taken for years—because the colitis had once again grabbed my gut.

The beautiful big blonde baby in my arms mesmerized me. Me, somebody’s mother. Berit looked directly into my eyes and touched my face when she nursed, always, until she fell asleep. I had never felt a deeper love for another human being. She looked up at me with her huge brown eyes and my tears would fall, feeling a private serenity I never knew before. No judgment from this little person, no condemnation for being different, nothing but mutual love, full and complete and unconditional.

Berit was three and a half when Erik was born. In unstated jealousy, Berit wet her bed for a few weeks but as I reinforced my love for her and she felt secure once again, she became a model big sister. The three of us—Berit, Erik, and I—were a team. Jake was peripheral, generally absent or simply disinterested.

When Erik and Berit were three and six years of age respectively, my career as a mother, at least as a legal title, came to an abrupt end when custody was taken away from me. Of all the losses in my life, this was the most devastating and despicable. I felt as if death would come from my broken heart. At the ages of nine and twelve, when my children said they wanted no more contact with me, despair planted itself into my soul.