How I Came Out to My Mother at 25, What That Feels Like at 58, and the Magic of Trees
An essay on old scars, new understandings, and the rings of our being
The 2 worst phone calls I ever had were with my mother. I’ll get to the first one in a minute. The second one came in March of 1993. It turned out to be the last time I ever talked to her. She sounded tinny and small. There wasn’t enough air in her throat, no warmth on her breath.
Her voice took on the rasp of a body letting go. That sound became my silence. I heard it in every part of me. Nothing was ever quiet. After she died, I floated in a sea of her absence, clinging to a life boat of wanting things I’d never have, and all this shit that was undone— the weighty anchors of being a disappointment, and the lifelong fear that I’d never belong to anyone— all sank to the ocean floor like entrails after a gutting. I wouldn’t get to fix any of it with her. My mother would never know me whole.
In those last weeks of her life, I wanted to go back and un-tell her I was gay. Press rewind and watch myself go backward in fast motion to that first worst phone call. I wanted to smash my fist on the stop button, and hit edit before it had the chance to go any farther. I wanted to rewrite us. I wanted a do over.
Figures it was the one time I didn’t keep myself a secret and wished I had. I told her when I was 25. She died when I was 27. What was 2 more years of pretending to be normal and good? I was highly skilled at keeping secrets— it would have been so easy. Not telling her would have saved me from the hurt and embarrassment of her initial disappointment that lingered for years.
My mother and I eventually made our way back to one another. It was hard and uncomfortable in a way I still struggle to describe. Aching to be loved for who you are by the person who’s responsible for your existence, is a thing that shouldn’t happen to anyone. But we made it back, and then she was gone. I’d told her the truth of me before she left, but it didn’t set me free. I just kept growing around the shame of my secret self, until I could no longer carry the weight of even my shadow.
First Worst Phone Call
There was no celebration or defiance in my coming out. Just shame. It was 1989. I remember because it was the year the Berlin wall came down. I was living all over the place— Boston, Provincetown, NY. Sometimes with friends. Sometimes in my car. I never thought of it as running then, but looking back, I was the wind.
A girl I had a crush on talked me into taking a seminar called LifeSpring. Back then, they were called human potential workshops. Today they’d be called exploitative, capitalist cults. They were marketed as lessons in reaching your highest potential by discovering how you’re experienced by others. What it really was, was a three-day shame and humiliation fest. Wildly expensive. Heavy pressure to recruit other people. Hands down, one of the worst experiences of my life.
Our ‘trainer’ looked like Will Gardner from The Good Wife. He was young, handsome, whip smart, and devastatingly good at what he did— manipulation and control by means of humiliation. He capitalized on people’s weaknesses like a shark smells blood in the water. He scared the living shit out of me. I’d taken the 4 day basic course. It was awful, but I thought that was because I was awful. I clearly needed more training. Even my crush said so. So, I borrowed more money, and signed up for the 3 day advanced course.
I’d come out reluctantly to the group in the basic course. Everything about it felt coerced. My first LifeSpring buddy, a self-proclaimed ‘good Christian woman’, immediately asked to be reassigned when I came out. Said I made her uncomfortable. Her wish was swiftly granted, which is its own kind of humiliation.
Will G had mostly looked through or past me during both courses. On the second to the last day of the advanced session however, he looked right at me. Told me to stand on the ‘hot seat’ — a chair in the center of the room that felt like a gallows. In front of roughly 100 people, I stood on the hot seat while Will asked me a series of softball questions. I was able to answer them easily and with false bravado. I wanted so desperately to belong. I wanted him to see me as worthy and good.
But he was just softening me up for the kill. He asked if my family knew I was gay. They did not, at least not by my admission, and he told me not to come back until I told my parents.
I stepped off the chair. My knees were shaking. I could feel blood rushing to my face, and sweat pooling at the small of my back. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt trapped by my own diabolical need to please whoever I was in front of. To be a good girl. A good girl who was about to please an asshole by dropping a very displeasing bomb on the person she loved more than anyone else in the world. I was devastated, caught in the iron jaws of having to tell a truth I wasn’t ready to tell, and for reasons that were not my own. If you’re wondering where was my backbone, I didn’t have one.
After class, Ginny, the sweetest woman in the world, wrapped me in a warm hug. Ginny was in her fifties. Her son Christopher had died the year before at 25 — the age I was when this was happening. He’d been gone for 3 years. Disappeared after being kicked out of the house when his military dad caught him kissing another boy.
Christopher called Ginny one summer night— I remember it was still light out at 9, she said— and he asked if he could come home because he was dying. He had AIDS. She said yes. Her husband said no.
Ginny turned Christopher’s old bedroom into a hospice while her husband packed up and moved out. Christopher died four months later, in his childhood bed, in his mother’s arms, a constellation of plastic stars twinkling on his little boy ceiling.
At the end of hot seat day Ginny found me in the crowd. She didn’t ask, but told me, Honey, you’re coming home with me. You can call your parents from my house. I will hold your hand.
That is exactly what I did. That is exactly what Ginny did. It was the first worst phone call of my life.
I sat on the edge of the bed in Christopher’s old room, a yellow push button phone pressed against my sweaty ear, and dialed my parents’ number in Arizona. Ginny paid for the long-distance charges. She held my clammy, shaking hand. My dad answered. I asked him to put my mom on the extension.
I don’t remember the words I used. I don’t know how I got them to come out of my throat. I just remember feeling like I had no choice. I remember looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on Christopher’s ceiling. I thought of him needing his mother as he faced the scariest thing he’d ever have to face. I thought of his bravery in calling her, knowing the one person he needed most was also the one person with the power to devastate him completely. I felt Ginny’s warm, steady hand now in mine. I ached for it to be my own mothers hand, but had a gratitude for it being hers that I’ve never found the bottom of.
Looking back, I’m in awe of how we’re mothered in so many mysterious ways, under so many strange and unexpected constellations. That can’t be by accident. But mostly I remember it as the day I asked my mother to choose me, and she did not. Not right away.
Part of me died in her hesitation. The shame I’d been holding since I exited her body 25 years before, fell across Christopher’s old room like radioactive ash. The disappointment, the disgust in her voice was like being licked by a blow torch. I immediately wanted to take it back. My dad said they were going to hang up before my mother said something she regretted. Uncharacteristically tender for my dad, but thank god. I’d never needed tenderness more. We hung up, and I wept in Ginny’s arms. I’ll never belong anywhere, to anyone, I choked through tears.
And, I believed it. I believed it for a long, aching, destructive time.
New Understandings
Little traumas leave their signature on a soul. A ghastly YOU’RE NOT WORTHY scrawled across the inner landscape of you with a careless, rusty pocketknife. If you’re lucky, and have access to good therapy and a strong support system, you eventually move further and further away from ground zero. You learn to integrate the hurt in a way that doesn’t minimize it or gloss it over. For some of us, it does get better, thank god, but you never get back the time or the money or the joy that was stripped from you like hot car parts, and sold in the name of some fucked up version of love. And the reality is, many of us don’t make it through. I am infinitely grateful for the love of my family, and the privileged access to mental health care.
There are still times shit goes sideways, and I’m sent right back to that poisoned ground. Old factory settings are hard to overwrite. I trip and tumble to the bottom, lay there a while, staring not at glow-in-the-dark stars, but at the scar of those shitty words scrawled across the walls of my soul. Faded, but still visible.
Sometimes I’m too broken and tired to resist the pull of the lies I’ve spent so much of my life trying to bury. They vine around me like tentacles, pull me into dark corners. Neural pathways made from trauma are deep. I drop back into old ways of thinking and behaving because it’s familiar. For me, it’s shame and withdrawal. It’s smallness. It’s a fear so paralyzing, I freeze and try to disappear. I become the ghost emoji.
It manifests as an ache in the pit of my stomach, or my head, or my hips. This goddamn relentless need to be seen and the deep desire to disappear, fighting for sovereignty inside my body like feral tomcats.
The good news: I spend less time at the bottom than I used to. It always depends on how quickly I can bring myself to say things out loud, to ask for help, and let my self be seen and loved. That’s the keystone of it all, letting myself be loved— not just by others, but by me, too. It also helps to remember that it’s not regression, or living in the past when this stuff comes up over and over. Sometimes it comes up when I’m better equipped to handle it— another chance to show tenderness to 10, 12, 25-year-old Kate for surviving moments that at the time, felt unsurvivable.
Being nicer to myself— it’s as simple and hard as that. That’s how I’ve figured out how to move forward. However non-linear and chaotic it looks on paper, a little grace and open hearted curiosity go a long damn way.
Trees
When you core an oak tree, you find rings. Each one, a year of the tree’s life. Smart, science-y people can tell from the rings which years the tree thrived, and in which it suffered. None of the years are left out, not even the bad ones. New growth always happens in the layers nearest the bark. All the rings together make up the thick, gorgeous trunk, and its roots are in communion with all the other trees. They are quite literally talking, keeping one another alive. By the time you’re stretched out beneath it, admiring the way the sun comes through its leaves, it has been and is going through Some Things. Some Things you’ll never see.
Things that make it stronger. Wind, fire, rain. A hundred versions of itself scrawled on the walls of its circular soul. We love it for just being a tree. I love it because somewhere deep inside, I know I’m the same. At least, I hope I am.
I hope if someone were to core me like an oak, they would find a heart that tried its best, again and again, because only love matters. I hope they’d touch the rings and rings of atmospheric conditions I’ve lived through: 2 very bad phone calls, storms of shame and grief, eras of hiding, and eras of becoming. Nothing left out. The newest parts of me growing just under the skin, overwriting and scrawling new scriptures of faith and belonging on the walls of my soul.
I hope they touch them and see themselves— trying. Because love.
THIS!! ❤️ I love you so much sissy!!
I love you sissy and all your rings ❤️