Mono On Poly – Sally
by Sally
Editor:
This piece was originally written for another project long ago and has been resurrected from the archives. So, if you notice that the style and tone are different that’s because they were written by different people at different times. But… The topics are still just as relevent today as they were then! Enjoy!
Sometimes, parents get in the way of their children’s greatness. Every parent is guilty of some occasional backseat driving. There are plenty of reasons a parent slams an imaginary break on a kid’s great idea or grabs the steering wheel in an attempt to pull a kid back on course. When children are little, this is the job. You keep your kids safe by keeping them out of harm’s way. Toddlers need someone to stop them from running into the street. Teenagers need an adult in the front seat just to get a driver’s license. But when your child is no longer a child, parenting becomes a subtler challenge.
I am blessed with three amazing progeny. They are all legal adults who happen to be intelligent, resourceful, responsible, and very funny. All three of them are my friends. Two of them are gay. My oldest daughter, who happens to be the weird one for being heterosexual, also happens to be an active supporter of same sex marriage, gay rights, and a former member of her high school’s equality club. Her senior thesis at Princeton was an in depth analysis of virginity culture. She is my shy feminist. She never came out as straight. It was always assumed she would date boys. My second child, also a member of the equality club, told me she might like both boys and girls when she was only 13. At the time, I was pretty sure it was a phase. This is what we say as parents any time the things our children express don’t fit some preconceived notion of what we think our children ought to be, do, or want. Mostly, I ignored it. After all, she had never dated anyone, male or female. How would she know whom she wants to have sex with?
Now, before you say anything, I will admit to you something that didn’t occur to me before my kids made me smarter: I do not require sex with a woman to know that I prefer sex with a man, so why should a lesbian require sex with a man to know she desires women? My daughter is very wise, and when she started telling people she was bisexual (apparently, in order to make her lesbianism more acceptable and, because sexuality is fluid, she wasn’t entirely sure about her preferences) I did what I had always done and ignored it. I thought, well, she’ll eventually fall for some wonderful boy and this edgy sexuality business will be a thing of the past. Stop laughing at me! Straight people are granted license to be stupid about sexuality because we are never required to analyze, hide, or defend it.
Eventually, my daughter did fall in love with someone wonderful. She fell in love with another amazing young woman. My husband and my children’s stepdad, whose daughter was an adult when we met, told me, “raising adults is harder than raising children.” He didn’t tell me why. I had to learn on my own that parents have no business raising adults. All we can do is support them. Because this brave new world is strange for me, I need support as well. My kids are very gentle when I say ridiculous things out of my ignorance. They protect me from publicly exposing my prejudices while teaching me how to be a more accepting, and ultimately, happier person.
My son’s coming out was entirely uneventful. Many gay men have stories of challenge and heartbreak surrounding their sexuality but, as he tells it, he grew up in a homonormative environment. He has gay uncles, gay friends, a gay sister; life has been rather gay. His only complaint about coming out is that people have blithely suggested he may suddenly become effeminate. My son is particularly annoyed by the ‘gay’ affect that a small number of people he knows took on as soon as they came out. Although he does claim to understand the need for signaling. The dating scene is fraught with pitfalls for both gays and straights. But ‘acting’ gay is different from being gay. “And this,” he says, “is why so many straight people think they don’t know any gays. They know plenty of gays, just not many gay-acting gays.”
Pitfalls and potholes abound whether you are LGBT or straight. The road to romance is never as smooth as you think it will be after a few Disney movies. But, as a parent, I have learned from my ‘children’ that I can make the experience a little easier by keeping an open mind. Young love, no matter the sexual context, is as exciting and exhilarating as it is scary and dangerous. It helps to have an adult around who will listen and reassure and listen some more. Although the vehicles we drive may be different, many of the rules of the road remain the same.