CANDACE WALSH
fRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE, I spent a Saturday afternoon in my dorm room, sitting in a big black easy chair my roommate and I had thrifted. My friends were hanging out on the lawn, catching late fall rays, on a rare balmy day in Buffalo, listening to music, laughing. I was scribbling furiously in my journal.
“When I become a mother,” I wrote, “I will do everything in my power to give my children a normal, stable life. I won’t marry the wrong man like my mother did. I will marry someone who will be a wonderful father. My kids will have nice clothes and shoes, and will never worry about the electric being shut off. We’ll drive a reliable car, nothing fancy, just not an old clunker. Otherwise, I shouldn’t have children. It’s just not responsible.”
Why wasn’t I outside enjoying myself? Why was I writing down this declaration at the tender age of seventeen? I certainly wasn’t going to have kids for at least five to ten years. But something inside me demanded that I be accountable long before I became a parent.
The distance I had from home that first semester away had given me some room to see all that I did not want to pass on to the next generation. By the time I left my Long Island home to go to college in Buffalo, I’d moved over ten times. No, we weren’t a military family. We were just a mess. Alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, irresponsible spending, religious extremism, then divorce, and my own near death at the hands of my new stepfather, who tried to strangle me one day. After that, he wasn’t thrown out of the house, I was. My mother said that she was afraid that she’d lose custody of the rest of her kids, and she didn’t think she could survive financially without him.
I sat in that black chair and scribbled furiously because I knew I had no model for a happy, stable life. I had to build it from the ground up.
I did eventually leave the chair, the room. College had its way with me. Within that bubble, I realized that I had a tendency to fall for women in more profound ways than I did for men. My relationships with guys always seemed to boil down to the same power struggle: I focused on fickle free spirits and tried to turn them into doting house cats. It was as if I thought taming them would change all of masculinity, would solve my earliest disjunction, the one with my father and later with my stepfather. The passion to remake my history fueled these pursuits more than anything else. It was so strong that it felt like love. But I never did tame a single one of those guys, or earn lasting devotion. By the time I left school, I wasn’t clear on all of this, but I was open to dating women.
But in the post-collegiate years of the mid-nineties, my aversion to being different grew with every new job and social circle I encountered. German bank in New York City’s financial district? Not gay-friendly. Fashion magazines? Gay-friendly . . . but only for gay men. My father grew warmer toward me as I encountered modest success as a young writer. Did I want to lose that precious gain for an abstract relationship with some unknown woman? And how would all that affect my desire for my own family to be steeped in normal? My life felt both as fragile and as stable as a spider web, as long as I didn’t shake it up.
I fell for another half dozen noncommittal, unreliable men. I told myself I liked a challenge, but I really think I liked my space, even if that space was oppressively filled with yearning for companionship.
Sticking to my guns, when I was twenty-six, I broke up with the charismatic, dashing man who made it clear he wasn’t husband material, both verbally and by tomcatting around at every opportunity. I had to make space for my true other half—someone who was responsible, serious, smart, and ambitious. No matter what, he had to be a good dad. That was the first criterion. Everything else was secondary.
A few months later, I met someone who was eminently promising. He was clean-cut, studious, intelligent, well-spoken. He was a hard worker and extremely tidy. He, too, had had a tumultuous upbringing, and we both were dead-set on breaking those patterns and making stable lives for ourselves. We fell in love.
Less than a year later, we were married. Another year after that, we were parents, and moved to New Mexico. Unfortunately, we were still living in reaction to our childhoods—making choices based on what we didn’t want, instead of teasing out what we did.
Then we had another child. Their needs were abundantly met, and I drove a reliable car. Their father was respectable, and I passed for the same. I took my daughter and son to the children’s museum and the park, they went to the safe choice preschool, and always brought meticulously wrapped presents to birthday parties.
But as the years went by, under the surface I was drenched in misery, and my husband was too. Although our life together was stable, we came to realize that there was a lot more to a satisfying life than that. I felt like a fraud. Sitting through birthday parties felt like getting dental work. I could barely wait to get home whenever we went out. I was withdrawn, distracted, craved inertia. There was a long time when I just thought that I was a depressed loser. But then I began to sense that I could be a livelier, happier person if my life was different. “Your children are going to be pretty confused about love if they grow up with parents who pretend to care about each other but don’t really feel it,” a friend told me.
The misery was like gasoline, and one errant spark would blow our life to kingdom come.
When it did, I found myself in the reliable car, my children in the back seat, driving their innocent, unknowing little selves to their new house. Mommy’s house, in contrast to Daddy’s house, as these were now separate. There were so many tears, ones I’d always thought I could prevent by making different choices than my parents had. First I made my children, in my body, then I made them sad with my decision. Whenever your kids feel pain, you want to make it all better. I yearned to be able to neatly fix their toppled worlds. But a quick fix would only seal my fate—and theirs, to a subtler extent.
I couldn’t give my children the rock-solid, affluent, dream childhood I’d always intended. We no longer live in that particular beautiful house on the hill with two new cars. They aren’t still taking French, dance, art lessons, and they’ve moved a handful of times as my ex-husband and I have settled into our new lives and homes. I don’t buy them clothes by the bagful during trips to New York or Paris. My daughter has cello lessons, my son plays soccer, and they go to summer camp at the local rec center. The children move between our two households every other week. However, those two households are stable, run by parents who are not perfect, but definitely cheerful and content. I did choose correctly in that regard. The kids have a devoted, present, loving father, and a happy, energetic mother.
This wasn’t the plan I drew up in that black chair. Especially given that after my marriage ended, I switched teams. I clicked “Woman seeking Women” on the Match.com profile box. When the kids were with their dad, I went, quavering with fear, to women’s dances and events. I had reason to believe that having a gay mom wouldn’t make the kids’ lives easier, but I also knew that continuing to toe the heteronormative line would plunge me back into depression and dishonesty—and that would affect them negatively every day.
I had always told the kids that they could marry whoever they wanted—boy, girl—whoever they loved, hoping that by the time they were old enough to do so, marriage equality would be in place. So when I did tell them that I was dating a woman, they didn’t think it was abnormal. When I introduced them to Laura after three months of dating, they loved her on sight. My ex was supportive of my shift, so they didn’t hear anything negative from him.
It was when they talked enthusiastically at school about having three moms—me, Laura, and their father’s girlfriend—that they started to get disturbing reactions. “Your mom goes out with a woman? That’s weird/gross/wrong!” said my daughter’s private school peers. Every few months, I’d have to call the teacher, telling him that it needed to be addressed. “Can’t you just make an announcement about tolerance and difference, so that we don’t have to go through this with each kid?” I asked, but that didn’t happen. He did talk to the students, and sometimes, the parents. It was awkward. I hugged my daughter, told her that I was sorry that she had to deal with these encounters because of our family structure. And that I was sorry that she had to put up with people saying unpleasant things about me.
“There’s nothing wrong with you and Laura!” she said. “You love each other, and we love you both.”
I didn’t want to press them into activist roles, but they were indignant of their own accord when a local burger chain donated $100,000 to defeat marriage equality in California. “We’re not eating there any more,” my son declared.
When we put the kids in our local public school, my daughter had to encounter a whole new group of responses. Several kids told her that if she had a gay mom, she would surely be gay too. The ignorance that she has to wade through, attempt to dispel, just to define herself, is daunting, and it’s nothing I would have chosen for her. My son is at the age where having three moms is the coolest thing ever. I hope it stays that way. And their school teachers, counselor, and principal were amazingly responsive the first time a kid crossed the line; far more responsive than the private school had been.
We’ve been fortunate enough to be in a position to make choices that have decreased potential friction—we settled in a liberal, open-minded neighborhood, and before I got a more demanding job, I made a special point of volunteering at school to be visible as just another mom in khaki trousers and a cozy cardigan (I definitely dressed thoughtfully those days).
When New York legalized same-sex marriage in 2011, I called my daughter at her friend’s house—she was at a sleepover—to tell her the news. She and I jumped up and down on opposite sides of the phone line, screaming, “Yay!” I could hear her friend cheering, too. My son danced around the living room with Laura. We got married four months later, in my home state, with select friends and family present. It was joyous. And it still is, every day, despite the frustrations common to daily life.
I sometimes sense the reproach of the girl in the black chair. But I let it float on by. My children have a happy mother. The love that flows so freely in our household soothes them like a constant lullaby. And the concept of living one’s truth is as familiar to my children as I am.