Out
I stare resolutely at the TV, some cartoon my kids turned on and forgot about, not believing this conversation is happening. Selective memory is one thing, but constantly "forgetting" I'm a lesbian seems to be something else, and I'm wondering if my mother kept up the gingko I got for her or if it just ran out and disappeared. At least it gives her a chance to try out all the possible reactions to me.
We've been through them all, too-everything from threats to sue for custody because she's not going to let her grandchildren "be raised by a lesbian Witch!" to "It's no big deal, honey, we had lesbians back in the Sixties!"
But this time is different, and I stare unseeing at the animated figures thwacking one another for no apparent reason on the screen, not quite certain who they are or why they're doing what they're doing.
"What do two women do in bed together, anyway?"
"Pretty much the same things." (Oh, brilliant, that's so edifying.)
"But don't you feel unfulfilled without a penis?"
Stutter, er, garble, um . . . "No." There. No. That's it, pretty simple, right? Where did that "unfulfilled" and "penis" stuff come from? I don't want to discuss with my mother whether or not I'm fulfilled!
Am I really the same woman who stood in front of a classroom full of university students and showed them how to use a dental dam?
I'm an assertive dyke with power tools, a girlfriend I'm in love with, kids who're comfortable with me . . . hell, if their teachers in a Bible-belt public school can smile at my rainbows, surely I can handle conversation with my own mother, right? Aren't I the one who got on TV a few years ago when BGALA took over the President's Office on campus? I was assertive then, wasn't I?
"Do you use an artificial vibrating penis?"
Argh! How the hell do I answer that? Assertive-me knows what to say, rants at her that when two women choose to pleasure one another with a vibrator, it's not a substitute for a penis--which would imply inferiority--but just something mutually fun that feels good. A different assertive-me tells my mother, finally, about the internal scar tissue that keeps me from finding anything pleasurable about anything at all inside my vagina, about the repeated rape that created the scarring, about her tradition-based mores that insisted I accept it all even when she knew nothing about it at the time and still doesn't. It's the perfect time to talk to her, to tell her about all the things she's never heard from me. Assertive-me sees the opening, speaks clearly and without shame, looks her in the eye and challenges her male-female paired ordering of the universe.
"No," I mumble, still staring dead at the TV screen, drawn in on myself, body language all embarrassed and uncertain.
*** *** ***
A week later, my girlfriend and I go to court with my mother to support her during her final divorce hearing, and I hold Michelle's hand while we wait for a restaurant table, and I wonder why my mother has to seem uncomfortable being seen in public with us, why she has to wish so visibly that we'd be more discreet. Why, indeed?
And a week after that, she's telling me about this movie she's just seen, with "this gorgeous man in it you'd just LOVE to sleep with," and I wonder why she can't seem to remember that I'm a lesbian.
Not just a lesbian. An out, activist, happy-with-myself, confident, full of fire lesbian, free to insist the world accept me on my own terms, free to kiss my girlfriend in public, free to work at music festivals, free to wear womyn-power T-shirts and raise children who don't remember a year we didn't march in the Pride parade.
So long as my mother doesn't ask me to explain how I can be "fulfilled" without a penis.
2:42 p.m., Saturday, April 29, 2000
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E-mail me at Weavre@graffiti.net