“That’s So Gay”

“Oh, that is SO gay,” my daughter said the other night at the dinner table. My husband and I looked at each other, a question there for both of us.  Do we go there?  My 22 year old son, home now post college graduation and furiously interviewing at any number of amazing companies, looked down [...]

Happy Birthday

Crazily, the summer sped by, and soon it was my birthday. I had always hated the placement of my birthday in early September.  It made it hard to have birthday parties (not that anyone really ever planned one for me as a child) because you never knew exactly who would be in your class, and [...]

Bittersweet

It had been over a month since I had heard from my dad. My brother was released from the hospital and enrolled in the private, live in Catholic school. On the weekends my father would take him back to the house he shared with his partner. I didn’t see him, I didn’t want to see [...]

Melting Away

This was the third hospital that my brother stayed in; he’d been at this one before. The name of the actual facility escapes me, but it was located down the street from a factory that made “Fruit and Nut” confections. My mother, sister and I thought that was a riot that there were two places [...]

My Brother, My Pain

It was winter, I remember that. I came home from school that day and wondered where everyone was. Where was everyone? It wasn’t that unusual to find no one home when I came home from school; and I never saw my brother on the bus coming home from school. It didn’t occur to me to [...]

No One

My brother was still angry and still hard to handle, but he was tempered by B’s presence in the house. We knew he was still stealing from my mother’s wallet; she caught him once while he thought she was showering, and he’d gone into her room to take the money. Normally she kept her door [...]

Family Therapy Hospital Style

We were supposed to have family therapy at the state hospital with the therapists there so they could understand the family dynamic.   This would be interesting; the last guy who tried to heal our family gave up after about five sessions. My father picked us up and we all drove the forty minutes to the [...]

Role Reversal

My mother didn’t have a lot of boyfriends after the divorce. I remember that she went out a lot on the weekends, especially the ones where my father took us.  Sometimes, even on the weekends we were home we’d have a sitter.  I learned later, one evening when my mother was drunk and spilling stories, [...]

Disappearing

I waited for everything to shift, change, be different after I found out about my father’s homosexuality.  My mother didn’t say much other than to simply confirm that yes, my father was indeed living with a man and having a relationship with him.  Considering the fact that my mother had never talked to me about [...]

What Is Normal, Anyway?

I sat in the backseat, stunned. “Are you guys saying…that…”  I paused, unable to even form the words.  This was the early 1980s.  Before Will and Grace, before the movie Philadelphia, before AIDS was even a well known acronym.  “Are you guys saying that Dad is gay?” My sister sighed at the wheel as she [...]