How I Learned to Think Outside the Box Thanks to a Lesbian Daughter
Testimony of Carmella Van Vleet* published on the site My Kid is Gay (United States), freely translated by Chiara Benelli
One of the things I prefer of the New Year is to start a new calendar. Don't transig on which one to choose: big boxes and no figures. Only and only a glorious white space to be filled with notes, birthday reminder and appointments.
I tell you because I want you to know that they are the kind of person who wants everything to be well arranged - sometimes even if only metaphorically - in ordered and easily labeled boxes. And things did not change at all even when I discovered that my daughter, Abbey, then fifteen, was a lesbian.
Like so many parents of homosexual kids, I also had many questions: "Why do you think you are a lesbian?", "How long do you think you are?", "If you are a lesbian, then why do you come out with the boys so far?", "But if you have never kissed a girl, how do you know you like?" (Yes, I know. Stupid question. But I want to be honest with you.)
Since I did not know from her of her homosexuality, - but this is another story, and I will tell you again -, Abbey did not have the opportunity to take time to understand things calmly. To his immense merit, it must be said that he immediately did his best to answer my questions and my concerns promptly. At the end of that first conversation between us, she told me: "I don't know. I think I am bisexual ". And I said to myself: "Maybe it's just curious".
Then I thought, all satisfied, that she would change my mind when she kissed a girl for the first time. I do not be proud of my reaction from "It is probably just a phase", But, once again, I want to be honest with you.
In the following weeks, further doubts arose: "Are you a lesbian for real?", "Isn't that you want to be just because some of your friends are also?". But the most popular question was: "Will you get married to a man or a woman?".
Most of the time I caught me the usual "I do not know", and I was sick. My love for Abbey has never been in doubt, and as a longtime accomplice, it was well well that my son or daughter were homosexuals. Or at least it was well in theory: in reality, I was realizing that things were much more complicated than that. There were no precise and ordered boxes.
One afternoon, while we returned home from school, I once again put my daughter to the stroke: "But are you only 15 years old, how can you know that girls like them?".
It was the right time that Abbey's patience, already put to the test, ended definitively. He crossed his arms, looked out the window and refused to answer me.
It was then that I realized that my inexhaustible questions and my claims to know "everything immediately" had dropped our communication lines. I was trying to make mental clarity regarding this revelation, cataloging it and putting it in a box. Put in an Abbey box. And all because doing so would have helped me to feel better.
During that silence in the car, I thought back to when I was 15. I fell in love for the first time in my life of a boy named Shawn. I know for sure that my parents considered me too young to understand the affairs of the heart, but they respected me and my feelings.
I knew myself well, so why would I have not had to trust that Abbey knew herself and her heart?
From that moment on I stopped asking all those questions, or at least I tried. Said among us, I have not always succeeded. It is in my nature as a hyper-analyzing writer, surprising me and sticking my nose. But that moment marked the beginning of my renunciation of the need to have all the answers.
Abbey è apertamente omosessuale da quasi tre anni ormai. Attualmente si definisce lesbica, e frequenta le ragazze. Quando parliamo del suo futuro matrimonio, parliamo di sua “moglie”. Qualche settimana fa, però, mi ha detto che potrebbe considerare l’idea di mettersi con un ragazzo. Lo ammetto, mi ha colta completamente alla sprovvista. “Ma tu sei lesbica!” le ho detto io.
Poi mi sono ricordata cos’è successo quando ho provato a catalogarla, e mi sono zittita. È mia figlia: non va in una scatola, e non ha bisogno di etichette. Lo scoprirà da sola. E quando lo farà, io sarò lì ad aspettare che mi racconti tutto al riguardo.
* Carmella Van Vleet è moglie, ex insegnante e madre di tre giovani di 22, 20 e 18 anni. Pensa che siano bravi ragazzi, che però hanno insistito per crescere. È scrittrice per bambini a tempo pieno e si impegna a includere le famiglie LGBTQ nelle sua opere ogni volta che è possibile. Potete incontrarla su www.carmellavanvleet.com
Original text: Thinking Outside of the Box
