Breaking Eggs

I’m pretty good at breaking an egg with one hand.

I realize that this falls pretty far short of being a super power, but it makes me feel competent in the kitchen.  I don’t have any other particularly identifiable cooking skills. I do fine, but I make a mess, and I take longer than people who are actually good at cooking. But breaking an egg? I do great.

Whack side of sink. Crack over bowl. Shell in the garbage disposal.

This morning, I made myself some scrambled eggs. But instead of my usual skill, I goofed it up. Instead of popping open the first egg over the bowl, I opened it right down the garbage disposal. Not because I hit it too hard on the side of the sink and it leaked out. No, I just dumped it right down the drain.

I made a mistake, obviously. My first thought wasn’t, “Oops,” though. I went immediately to degenerative brain disease. It’s been ten years since my aunt died, and I remember the dismissal of her earliest symptoms. She complained that she’d find herself standing in a room with no idea why she had gone there, and my family said, “Yes, that’s called getting old.”

It’s not that the answer was a bad one. I’ve put the milk away in the cabinet instead of the refrigerator. I’ve put a tea kettle on the stove and come back an hour later to find a broken, dry tea kettle smoldering. These are signs of distraction, not a degenerative brain disease. Except that sometimes they are the signs of a degenerative brain disease.

My maternal grandmother is in hospice care. She lives in a nursing home, and has had a steady decline since my grandfather died four years ago. She’s moved from sometimes confused to often confused, from often confused to usually confused. Now we only get a rare glimpse of the person we know and love.

The staff at the nursing home have been wonderful, but they’ll never know my grandmother. My mother and I laugh whenever someone at the nursing home describes my grandmother as “sweet,” or “cute.”

“There are lots of words I’d use to describe Nana,” says my mother, “but ‘sweet’ and ‘cute’ will never be on that list.”

My Nana was an English teacher. She retired on June 19, 1978. I know the date because I happened to be born on the last day of school that year. She is whip smart, and possessed of a biting sense of humor. I like to think that she invented the side eye.

She could do flawless impressions of people. Not extended performances, but if she was telling you a story about something someone said, their words came out of her mouth in their voice, not her own.

In the mid 80s, when my brother was probably 4 or 5, she baked us a batch of chocolate chip cookies. My brother told Nana that her cookies were good, but “not as good as Almost Home,” a brand of packaged cookies my mother would often buy. I don’t think Nana ever quite forgave my brother for that slight.

Nana mostly sleeps these days, and if she happens to be awake, her speech is infrequent and incoherent. On Friday, when my mother visited, Nana was annoyed. She snapped my mother, snapped at my father, snapped at the social worker from hospice. When they went for a walk, the social director of the nursing home put her hand on my grandmother’s arm and said good morning.

My grandmother grabbed the woman’s hand and dug her nails in. My mother had to pry her fingers off.

The woman shrugged it off and said, “Oh, Agnes, you’re surprisingly strong.”

My mother laughed as she told me, “Now that’s the mother I remember.”

An Open Letter to Matt Moore

By now, you’ve probably seen the story about Matt Moore, a Christian blogger who was spotted on the gay hookup app Grindr after he wrote about his choice to no longer engage in sexual behavior because he believes sexual behavior between two people of the same sex is sinful. Much of the coverage has been focused on the hypocrisy of his public writing versus his private actions, and I think some of that coverage has been unfair. Mostly he’s been identified as a member of the “ex-gay” movement, which seems at least factually incorrect. If you’d like to read up on this story, I suggest beginning with Zinnia Jones’ piece about it, since that’s where the recent story begins.

Dear Matt,

I’m not sure exactly where to begin. I don’t want this letter to seem hurtful. Honestly, I watched the video you posted to youtube last night, and looked at your twitter feed, and my impression is that you’re a person who’s hurting an awful lot right now. I don’t want to add to that, but there’s some more that needs to be said, and I don’t see a lot of people saying it. I prefer getting the harder stuff out of the way first, so that’s where I’ll begin. If you read this, the stuff at the end is more pleasant than the beginning. So at least there’s that.

I’m glad that you’ve spoken out about being mislabeled as an “ex-gay.” You, and I, and just about everyone out there knows that’s just a hurtful fiction. It’s snake oil, and it’s being pushed on vulnerable kids and young adults, sold to their scared families. It makes their lives more difficult, and every year it drives some gay kids to take their own lives before they’ve even begun.

Here’s the tough part, though. What you’re doing is just as hurtful. Unlike the “ex-gay” folks, you aren’t lying about it. And I don’t think you intend to hurt them, so if we’re comparing morality, you’re a lot better than the “ex-gay” charlatans. But the dead teenagers are just as dead, Matt. And your writing contributes to a social structure that devalues those kids, tells them they are less than everyone else. This is why some of the coverage of your story has seemed gleeful — lots of folks feel that by discrediting you, young lives are saved. A confused mother who reads your writing isn’t going to understand the nuanced difference between “not acting on homosexual feelings” and “not being gay anymore.” She’s going to read your posts and decide that if her gay kid just works hard enough, just loves God enough, he can live the life she wants him to live. And that kid loves his mother, and he probably loves his church, and being gay is cloaked in mystery and fear for him, so he’s going to try his hardest. And he’s going to fail. Of course he’s going to fail! You’re telling him that he needs to live his entire life alone, that he must never know love. And it’s going to make him feel like the reason he failed is because he just didn’t love God enough. And if he just doesn’t love God enough, doesn’t that reflect on his value as a person, within a social/religious structure that places loving God at the very top of its priorities? It’s like Cinderella going to the ball. Her sisters get to go, and so does she. She just has to pick all of those lentils out of the ashes first. An impossible task, designed to let her know how much less value she has as a person. But gay teenagers can’t talk to birds, so they have to do it all alone.

Unavoidable in all this talk is the idea that love is sin. That somehow, the very best of us is the very worst. I’m not religious anymore, but I try to be a good person. I have varying degrees of success, like anyone else. My ten-year relationship with my husband, though filled with compromises (like any relationship), is not a compromise. It is the very best of me. My marriage and my children are what I have to show for my life, really. They aren’t asterisks — “Mark is a great guy. Too bad about that gay marriage and the children he and his husband raised in sin together.” But that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?

All right. If you’ve gotten this far, I’m done with the tough part, and can move onto the pleasant part.

I’d like to invite you to come to Massachusetts and spend a day with my family. You certainly won’t see a perfect family. I’ll try to clean up, but my house will still look like a mess. I’ll vacuum, but you’ll be brushing dog hair off your clothes for days after you visit. My kids are sweet, but they will cry about ridiculous things, and probably fight with each other, and each of them will have at least one tantrum. They can’t put on a show for guests. We are who we are. I’ll make dinner, and it’ll be fine, but it won’t win any awards. What it lacks in quality, I’ll at least try to make up for in quantity. You won’t go hungry.

After dinner, you’ll finally get a moment of peace. Austin and I will put the kids to bed — there will almost certainly be some more screaming at this point — and then the house will be quiet. We can go into the living room — I suggest keeping your shoes on, because legos are hazardous — and have a chat. Austin and I are pretty much open books, and we’d be happy to tell you just about anything you’d like to know about our life. We’ve had plenty of practice talking about our lives with relative strangers during the adoption process.

When you leave, I’d like you to take some time to think about my family. Once you’ve done that, I’d ask you to identify the parts of my life that you think make God unhappy, and the parts of my life — if you can find any — that you think make God happy. No tricks, no gotcha.

It’s an open invitation, Matt. No time limit. I can probably even convince Austin to use some of his frequent flier miles for you, if you need. We don’t use them for very much these days.

Sincerely,

Mark

On the Passing of Time

About a week from now, Austin and I will be celebrating our tenth anniversary. (Our before-we-could-get-married anniversary, that is.) Well, if I’m honest, we probably won’t be celebrating. If we manage to remember that it’s our anniversary (which we haven’t managed to do even once yet!) we’ll be too busy recuperating from a weekend with a Bar Mitzvah in Austin’s family and a wedding in my family. At least it’s a long weekend.

We’re not big on celebrations, though. Every time I go to a wedding, I find myself thinking, “This is nice. I’m glad we didn’t do this.” I’ve sometimes wondered if my self-consciousness is a product of internalized homophobia. Austin and I don’t kiss in public, or hold hands. Not like it’s a rule or anything. If he’s been on a long trip, I’ll hug him at the airport. But we’re certainly not showy.

And that’s fine. I come from a family that doesn’t show emotion. My best friend recently told me how uncomfortable she was at my grandfather’s funeral. My family sat, pretty stone-faced, and she felt like a professional mourner, wailing at the back of the church. A few folks who have married into my family have expressed similar sentiments, so I know she’s not alone. But Austin has never said it. I think we’re the same that way.

I have occasionally felt a little jealous of people who wear their emotions on their sleeves. Couples who are affectionate in a genuine way in public. Maybe jealous is too strong of a word, and curious would be more appropriate. I’ve wondered what it would be like to be that kind of person.

Austin and I don’t have a ton of gay friends, at least not any that we see regularly. I have lots of gay friends from college, but our interactions are mostly limited to facebook these days. And I have a bunch of gay friends in my Warcraft guild, too, people whose presence I value greatly, but I don’t run into any of them at the grocery store or at preschool drop off out here in the ‘burbs. What this means is that I’ve put a little extra value on some of the gay couples I do know. I feel like we’re all in a similar boat.

It makes me a little sad, then, to look around and see fewer boats in our little ocean. In the last couple of years, a lot of the gay couples I know have gone their separate ways. Ten years is a long time. People change, and their lives go in different directions. There have been plenty of times that I’ve wanted to throw Austin overboard. I know that he’s felt the same way, because it is a lot easier to be married to Austin than it is to be married to me. There’s no comparison. (I’m done with the boat metaphors now. I promise.)

I don’t want to talk about my friends’ divorces, because they are really none of my business, but I’m sure there must be an extra layer of disappointment when a long term gay relationship ends. There are a whole lot of negative messages out there about gay people and our relationships, and our ability to have and commit to healthy relationships. Yes, we all know those messages are garbage, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hear them. Alvin Lopez-Woods wrote a great piece about his divorce that was on Huffington Post last week.

I don’t want to say that Austin and I are doing something right, not just because that seems like a surefire way to bring a process server to my door with divorce papers, but also because I don’t imagine we’re doing anything differently from most other couples. We’re just lucky, I think.

So this week I feel pretty lucky.