My mother once wanted me to be straight. Years later, I asked myself a much more frightening question: If she’d known I would be gay before I was born, would she have chosen me at all?
Would My Mother Have Chosen Me If She Knew I Was Gay?
In 1997, I was living alone in Chicago with my dog, Daughter.
Yes.
My dog’s name was Daughter.
It made perfect sense at the time.
I was watching a television movie called The Twilight of the Golds.
The premise was provocative, particularly for 1997.
What if science could somehow determine that an unborn child would probably be gay?
Would the parents still have the baby?
Today, that question sounds like something designed specifically to start a screaming match on social media.
But I wasn’t thinking politically.
I was thinking about my mother.
And me.
Being Gay Hadn’t Exactly Gone Smoothly
My mother and I had traveled a considerable distance by 1997.
When I was young and she discovered I was gay, she didn’t exactly respond by ordering a rainbow cake.
There was a psychologist.
There was my boyfriend Chuck.
There were threats.
There were terrible things said.
There were years of anger.
There was a period when my mother seemed to believe that if she could just find the correct lever somewhere inside me, she could pull it and straighten me out.
She couldn’t.
Obviously.
I am remarkably resistant to heterosexuality.
Eventually, though, something much more important happened.
We changed.
Both of us.
By the time I was living in Chicago, my mother wasn’t simply my mother anymore.
She was my friend.
Actually, she had become my touchstone.
Good news?
Call Mom.
Bad news?
Call Mom.
Career problem?
Mom.
Boyfriend problem?
Mom.
Dog peed on somebody’s shoe?
Definitely Mom.
But watching that movie cracked open something I apparently hadn’t completely resolved.
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I Couldn’t Quite Ask Her
I told Mom about the movie.
I explained the premise.
I talked around the question.
This is funny because I’ve spent most of my life being a person who will ask almost anybody almost anything.
But I couldn’t ask my mother:
Would you have aborted me if you knew I was going to be gay?
I couldn’t get the words out.
Fortunately, Marie knew her son.
She figured out where I was going.
“Are you asking if I have any regrets that you’re gay?”
I choked up.
And although we were on the telephone, I nodded.
As if she could see me.
Maybe mothers can.
Then she said:
“Oh, honey. I wouldn’t change any part of you or what you or I went through together. I love you just the way you are.”
That was it.
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She Didn’t Say She’d Learned to Accept Me
That’s what makes her answer so important to me.
She didn’t say:
I’ve learned to accept that you’re gay.
She didn’t say:
I wish things had been different, but I love you anyway.
She didn’t say:
It was difficult, but I got over it.
She said she wouldn’t change any part of me.
And then she added something even more extraordinary.
She wouldn’t change what we had gone through together.
That’s different.
Because she wasn’t merely accepting the finished product.
She was accepting the journey.
The fighting.
The mistakes.
Chuck.
The psychologist.
The terrible years.
The reconciliation.
All of it.
She wasn’t rewriting our history.
She was claiming it.
Every Child Wants to Be Chosen
I’ve thought about that conversation many times since my mother died.
And I don’t think its power is limited to gay sons and their mothers.
Most children, even after becoming adults, carry some version of the same question.
If you knew exactly who I was going to become, would you still have wanted me?
The child who didn’t become a doctor.
The daughter who married someone you didn’t like.
The son who moved across the country.
The child who got divorced.
The kid who became an artist instead of an accountant.
The one who didn’t give you grandchildren.
The one who disappointed you.
The one who frightened you.
The one whose life made absolutely no sense to you.
Would you still choose me?
I was almost forty years old, and apparently I still needed to know.
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HOW I KILLED MY MOTHER
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My Father Had Already Answered the Question
Years earlier, I accidentally overheard my father talking with the mayor of Long Beach.
The mayor asked him what it was like having a gay son.
Dad didn’t hesitate.
He said he was proud of me.
I wasn’t supposed to hear that.
Which made hearing it even more powerful.
There was no performance involved.
My father wasn’t reassuring me.
He wasn’t trying to say the correct thing.
He was simply telling another man what he thought about his son.
Proud.
Years later, my mother gave me her version.
She wouldn’t change me.
Not the gay part.
Not the difficult part.
Not even the history that had once caused us both so much pain.
Between those two moments, my parents gave me something I hadn’t realized I still needed.
They chose me.
The Strange Gift of Getting It Wrong First
Here’s something I couldn’t have understood when I was seventeen.
My mother’s initial rejection eventually made her acceptance mean something different.
I wish some things hadn’t happened.
Of course I do.
I wish she hadn’t said certain things.
I wish I hadn’t said certain things.
I wish we had both been wiser.
But if I erase every mistake, I also erase the people we became because we had to confront those mistakes.
That’s what my mother meant, I think.
She wouldn’t change what we went through.
Not because it was all good.
It wasn’t.
But because it became ours.
The struggle became part of the love story.
My memoir records how completely our relationship eventually changed: by my Chicago years, Mom was the first person I wanted to call whether something wonderful or terrible happened.
That would have seemed impossible to the younger Jon-David.
I Finally Got My Answer
I started that telephone call wondering whether my mother would have preferred a straight son.
I finished it understanding that she didn’t even want a different version of the gay one.
She wanted me.
The exact one she got.
That’s about as good as parenting gets.
And about as good as being somebody’s child gets too.
My mother is gone now.
So I can’t call her when something wonderful happens.
I can’t call when something terrible happens.
I can’t call when a dog pees on someone’s shoe.
But after writing How I Killed My Mother, I realize she answered the most important question I ever asked her.
Would you still choose me?
Yes.
Every bit of me.
Even the parts that drove her crazy.
Listen to How I Killed My Mother
How I Killed My Mother is a memoir podcast about mothers and sons, depression and hope, family and forgiveness, caregiving, spirituality, humor, death, and the uncomfortable business of discovering who we really are.
The podcast also became the foundation for my upcoming memoir, How I Killed My Mother.
This isn’t a story about having all the answers.
It’s about what happened when I finally started asking myself the questions.
If you’re standing at the bottom of something right now, I can’t tell you how long your climb will be.
I can only tell you that I’ve stood at the bottom, too.
Climb with me.
— Jon-David
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