When Grace was in preschool, people often asked us where we were planning to send her to kindergarten. “Private school in Northampton,” we would say. All the hilltown lesbians sent their kids there (the ones who didn’t homeschool or win the lottery of the charter school) and so I answered without really thinking too much about it.
But when it actually came time for kindergarten we weren’t so sure anymore. I had made peace with living in the hilltowns, and I didn’t want Grace to go to school in town. I didn’t want to spend so much of my life (and June’s life) in the car. I enjoyed our days at home; I had good friends and a garden, favorite hiking trails, secret spots by the river. We spent much of our lives outside, in all seasons. Even June, who was only eighteen months old then, woke every morning and wanted to go outdoors, wanted to eat her breakfast under the pine tree while Grace did maintenance on yesterday’s fairy house.
Chris was fine with the public school. She had never been as enthusiastic about private school as I had been. She worried about the social scene, and about the way it would limit her own involvement in Grace’s school life, considering how far the private school was from her office. And while I was worried about public school, worried about testing and budget cuts and cafeteria food, I was also hopeful. Obama’s first term wasn’t even half over yet, and I was still buoyed by the activism and victories of his campaign and early presidency. I had volunteered for the campaign, and I still felt the sway of Yes We Can. I believed it would be worthwhile and satisfying to join our neighbors in making our little school a good one for all the town’s children.
In the weeks before the 2008 election I had also been involved in the fight against Proposition 8 in California, staying up late to make phone calls and read position statements. And when Proposition 8 passed I organized a rally in support of marriage equality in the parking lot of the Creamery, our little hilltown grocery store and de facto community center. All our friends came. Greta wore Cyndy’s wedding veil.
By the time Proposition 8 was threatening marriage equality in California, Chris and I had been legally married for four years. And legal marriage mattered. Now laws and social systems bore much of the responsibility for instructing people how to treat us, even those who didn’t approve of our relationship. This was a powerful way to live, and it shaped the way we thought of ourselves as a couple. We wouldn’t move to a state where gay marriage wasn’t legal. We also knew that marriage equality was one of the reasons we could even consider sending Grace to public school.
Over the summer, I wrote Grace’s kindergarten teacher a long letter explaining our family. “Grace has two moms,” I wrote, “although she calls me ‘Mom’ and she calls Chris ‘Mati,’ so it will make the most sense to her if you also refer to us that way, as in, ‘Did you go to New York with your Mom and Mati?’” I went on to explain that Grace had been conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, which she knew, and that if any particularly precocious children asked about Grace’s origins, the teacher could simply say we had help from a friend.
“Wow,” Chris said, after she read the letter. “That’s a lot of information.”
“Better than not enough,” I said, a little defensively.
“Absolutely,” Chris said. She knew I was anxious. She handed me back the letter, pulled me toward her, and kissed my head. “Thanks for writing it.”
In the weeks before school started, Grace’s teacher-to-be held playgroups at the school playground to give the children a chance to meet each other and get to know her. I immediately liked Mrs. Patton; she was a slight and quiet woman with gray hair and thick, black glasses. She wore short skirts and clogs and pretty blouses, and she didn’t ask the children questions she already knew the answer to. Because our friends’ children mostly went to charter or private schools, Grace’s kindergarten classmates were, for the most part, not children she had grown up playing with. They were the children of farmers and contractors, machinists, nurses. A few of them lived with their grandparents, and one was in foster care. There was a young scruffiness to her class that I both liked and was frightened by.
During the first weeks of school, Chris spent as much time at school as she could. She wanted the kids to see Grace’s “other mom,” and so she dropped Grace off a few mornings a week, helped her to unpack her backpack, and chatted with all the kids. At first they asked her who she was. “I’m Grace’s other mom,” she said. “She calls me Mati.” Soon Grace’s school friends began to call Chris Mati, as though it were her first name.
“Does that bother you?” we asked Grace. She told us she didn’t mind. Chris, who had recently attended an Out and Equal conference panel with adult kids of gay parents, later told me that they had said not to believe your kid when she tells you something doesn’t bother her. “They said she’ll be trying to protect our feelings,” Chris said.
“Those kids on the panel were old,” I told Chris. “A totally different generation.”
“It’s not that different,” Chris said.
This is how we seemed to have divided, how we covered all our bases: Chris worried about Grace’s feelings about us; I worried about the world’s feelings about her.
One evening in late fall, Mrs. Patton called me at home. There had been some discussion of marriage in the dramatic play area, she said, of who could marry whom. Most of the children were good with whatever, but a little boy had said, “Boys can’t marry boys.”
Mrs. Patton paused. I waited for her.
“And I know that this child comes from a religious family,” she said slowly, “and so it felt a little tricky.”
This is it, I thought. I tried to breathe. “Well,” I said. “It’s actually a fact, here in Massachusetts, that boys can marry boys. It’s the law, regardless of what his family believes.” Only later did the absurdity of the phrase “boys can marry boys” occur to me.
“Right,” she said, “but families have such different beliefs.” She spoke in the same warm voice I had heard her use with the children. As I listened to her I realized that in order to be a good kindergarten teacher you had to see the world in a way that I was far too self-righteous to see it.
“Well, it’s not really about what his family believes,” I said. “Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and Grace’s mothers are married. So she needs to hear you say that boys can marry boys. She needs to hear you say that you can marry whomever you love.”
“You are right,” Mrs. Patton said. “I hear you, and you are right. This is such a growing time for me. It’s really amazing to stretch in this way.”
Stretch on your own time! I wanted to scream. Figure it out! I couldn’t believe that Chris and I had willingly put Grace in this situation. And why was her teacher calling me? Why wasn’t she calling the parents of the little boy?
After I hung up the phone, I told Chris I thought we were sacrificing Grace to progress. “Calm down,” she said. “She’s hardly Amy Carter.”
“We should send her somewhere where people know how to deal with this.”
“Someone has to be the first,” Chris said.
“Not Grace!”
“But why not, really?” Chris said. “I mean, she can handle it. And so can we. Besides, these kids are products of their environments. You can’t fault them for what they say. They are parroting back what they hear from their parents.”
“Somehow I don’t find that comforting,” I said.
I wanted to pull Grace out of school and send her to the Montessori school in Northampton. I wanted to spare her the burden of her difference. I wanted to spare myself. But here’s the thing: I was also getting tired of trying to spare myself. I had been doing it for too long, and for what? The false promise of a life in which I kept it all—Catholicism, straight privilege, my marriage, and now, my children—yet paid no price, bore no loss? And in the meantime I had lost out on so much: my claim to a marvelous history, my place in an astonishingly powerful social movement, alliances with queer women who were poised to be dear and intimate friends. And all that desire.
For years I liked to say that Chris was the only woman I looked at, but this wasn’t true. I looked at women all the time. And while I had colluded with the culture that says straight is the most desirable way to be, or at least to appear, I was beginning to acknowledge—and to enjoy—the fact that this simply wasn’t true. I might not have been pushing any boundaries of gender identity myself—my hair was still long and layered, my bathroom cabinet filled with makeup—but I had long thrilled at the sight of people who were. Western Massachusetts was a lucky place to live not just because of the protections it offered but because of its queer culture, the gender-fluid students and baristas and parents who could make my day just by walking into it. For a long time I saw myself on the margins of this culture, as though I weren’t gay enough to really count. But what did my own looks matter when the sight of a buzz cut and tattooed butch with a baby strapped to her chest was enough to stop my heart? It was my desire that made me gay enough, and always had.
My collusion was not only a personal denial but a political one. It had allowed me to ignore the responsibility I had to LGBT youth, people who needed to see me living out—all the way out—as a free and fulfilled adult. And as much as I wanted my daughters’ world to be different, I could see now that it was even more important that the lives of young queers be different, that they see their futures clearly, claim their right to be beloved and content.
Which brought me back to the public school. Because what if a child in Grace’s class—a rural, working-class child—was gay? And what if that child, on one of her dark days, remembered the sound of Chris’s voice in the hallway, or the feeling of my coat brushing against her as I rushed in late, as I always did, and she remembered that we were gay and that we were also adults—autonomous and safe—and that thought allowed her to breathe into her future for a moment. This was bold of me, I know, to say that simply by existing I could be of any service. It wasn’t enough, surely. But this was where I could begin, where we all can begin: by taking up our rightful space, by honestly and joyously occupying our bodies, our desires and beliefs, however we may choose to express them.
A few days after my conversation with Mrs. Patton, I decided to give her some books. I found every book I could about gay families and I bought them for the classroom. Or rather I called my parents and asked them if they wanted to buy all the books and donate them to Grace’s classroom, which they immediately did. The day after I had given the books to the teacher, she told me she had read King and King, the story of a prince who wanted to marry a prince, and that a lively discussion had ensued. She told me she had loved every minute of it. “I’m on fire with this,” she said. “We’re going to blow it all wide open.”