The Rainbow Connection

As someone who is gay, coming out is a life-altering rite of passage. For years, you will likely have avoided the truth, pretended that you are normal, and that if you just try to be straight you can survive. Slowly, you are consumed by the fear that your friends and family won’t accept you. Before you come out, you panic, and examine every word and phrase that you say, ensuring that you haven’t given away your secret. When you finish all of that, accept that you need to be honest and truthful with yourself and those around you, and finally tell people, the relief that you are finally living your truth is indescribable.

Most people don’t even have a coming out experience. They are who they are, and can live their lives without needing to explain anything about who they are. If they do, they have one coming out experience so as to live honestly. Because of the letter from Xena, I was in the midst of my second, which is why I was increasingly furious that I was going to have to do it all again.

I mean, I didn’t have to tell people I’m adopted. I have a decent poker face. I could internalize this information and live my life, right?

Except, I couldn’t just live my life with a secret of this magnitude. If you’ve had to go through the process to explain to others about why being gay isn’t a choice, and it is part of who you inherently are. Admitting something about yourself to others, when others don’t have to (and often never will) do the same with you fundamentally changes you. Once you begin this endeavor you cannot fathom staying silent anymore. You have a need to be honest in all things. Anything untruthful becomes distasteful and dangerous to your well-being and sanity, as you have survived the double-life you once lived.

I was beginning to understand more and more why me being adopted bothered me. It wasn’t the adoption. In many ways, the adoption was both an answer to many questions and a relief. It was the fact that because I was never told, I was party to an inadvertent lie.

I was not OK with that.

While I’m well aware that for a lie to be an actual lie, there has to be intent to deceive. But, because a lie had been created about me, my circumstances, and it therefore involved me, which made me party to the lie, whether or not I wanted to be. When I introduce myself to my students, or to new friends, invariably what I believed to be my ethnicity and cultural identity came up. I was proud to be British. I was proud to be Portuguese. I loved describing myself in playful oxymoronic statements, like that I love coffee, but often drink tea.  Regularly, I would joke that I’m sort-of Hispanic, because of a misunderstanding on a government form.

Now, it was both a joke and not a joke. My identity was in flux, as was my integrity. I could no longer claim to be any of the things my parents were, because they were not my biological parents. I felt uneasy talking about anything which related to my perceived identity. But I struggled with the idea of standing in front of my students and being anything other than genuine with them. How can I encourage them to live honestly, if I have not been living honestly, even if I didn’t know?  Perhaps these were irrational thoughts, but I still struggled with them as I thought about getting back to “normal” life.

I was deep in these thoughts after my work out on Tuesday. As I got into the shower, one of my work-out buddies pointedly and unexpectedly asked if I was OK.

Clearly, I was not.

Guess my poker face wasn’t that good after all. It seemed a little too literal to expose myself to someone who is between acquaintance, friend, and co-worker while in the shower. I wasn’t ready to discuss this yet with anyone who wasn’t very close to me.

But, that doesn’t mean that I was incapable of laughing when one of my coworkers arrived in my classroom with a copy of Are You My Mother? by Dr. Seuss.

Some people might have found this in poor taste. I, however, thought it was hilarious. Even more so, because it was also available in Spanish. I mean, I might be Hispanic now. Who knew? Not I. At least not yet.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I took a picture of myself reading it and sent it to a few friends. I may have suggested that it would be my holiday card this year. Even better—I could make business cards and hand them out to strangers.

I may not be ready to discuss this with people yet, but my dark sense of humor has gotten a bit of an upgrade.

So…

I am curious…

Are you my mother?