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Does your mother really know?

“Do you parents know?” - I often hear that question from my lesbian mates and as I answer positively they sigh “You’re lucky!..”
And it’s useless to explain them that I have been working for three long years upon our relations to reach mutual understanding with my parents. And I’m still working upon it. We both – me and my mother – tried to learn to understand each other and get reconciled about the things we can’t understand.
I take my mother as my best friend. Not every daughter can boast of such really understanding parents. But it hasn’t been this way always. It started just awfully...

- Did you happen to think that to read someone else’s diary is indecent?
- But you’re my daughter! I got a right to know!...

After that talking I realized that I never have my own inviolable private life as long as I live with my parents. I had two ways – to leave home or to stop my private life. I was just sixteen and had no private life that time. It started when I was nineteen – and I left my home. But I clearly know that I started to feel attraction to other girls about age of thirteen. I didn’t think about the results that time.. and the results were quick to be.

Nowadays we – me and my mother – can speak about it easily, and when I come to visit my parents we gather at kitchen, laugh and discuss our family affairs just like hundreds thousands happy daughters of glad parents. But that time – several years ago – it really was a matter of life and death.

- Mom, what you felt when I said I date with girls?
- It was a real shock for me... First, I wanted whip all this stuff out of you with a belt. I thought to take you to a doctor – for I thought it was a disease, I thought it should be cured! That’s the way I’ve been thinking that time; Mostly I cared for the father not to know about it. Men can never understand it. Still he submitted it but didn’t accept it.
- And then... How did your realtion to it change?
- I thought it was a kind of entertainment for you – you know, you hadn’t met a suitable guy, so you switched to girls... But then I realized that actually I hadn’t seen your life: I mean, you’d been living, having meal, talking with us in our flat – but you wasn’t here that time. Me and your father didn’t knew anything about your life, your friends, your successes and disappointments. I knew you had someone that time – I think it was a woman for men never called you. So i decided to fight for you.

My mother’d been fighting with me in her strange ways – she hadn’t known whose that was fauilt – so she justified her child like she only could. Shw thought that was... her fault. She decided that the problem was in her, that she’d brought up me in a wrong way, that she’d lost something important... One night she’d done a thing we both can’t explain now...
My bewildered father went with her on an ER car. He surely didn’t understand a thing. My brother, pale and caustic, pretended he “knew nothing”. (By the way, he still “knows nothing” even when with his wife comes to visit me and my wife.) He’d been gazing at me and repeating:
- That’s your fault.
What’s my fault? Can anyone explain me? Is that my fault when I – just like anybody else – want a bit of happiness and don’t let anybody (even my parents) to tell me whom I should sleep with?

Mom was brought home by the morning. She had her stomach washed; she was in shock for nurses had beaten her face with their hands...

In that morning I gathered all my belongings and moved to my girl. Both me and my parents had to think about all this for some time.

I wasn’t there when my mother told my father about it. I mean – my father for sure had known about it, but preffered to “know anything about it”, like my brother had done before him.
I wasn’t there shen my father’d been spending his sleepless nights at kitchen, smoking and thinking; “How could this happen to my daughter?”
I wasn’t there... Thanks God.
They had a year to read articles that I accidentally had forgotten for everybody to see. They had time to realize that if I’m a lesbian I’m still their daughter. They had time to to realize that it’s neither disgrace nor disease to be a lesbian. Their daughter is a usual healthy person that they’ve brought up and that they love, a person that doesn’t differ from most of people... well, maybe differs just a bit.

My father accepted me finally by chance. One of his colleagues at his job had been drinking his coffee and reading a scientific-educational newspaper where I worked that time. There was an article about lesbians signed with my name there (I never did such a stupid thing after that). A coffee drop fell down an the newspaper right on my signature. The colleague read it aloud. I don’t know if my father had a fight that day (I know he can), but he said that guy: “I’m proud of my daughter inspite of that she’s a lesbian”.
That’s why since that time everybody at his job knew it. I think that moment of public revelation led him to some thoughts. Now he’s got a label of a lesbian father. My father works more physically then menthally. How does it feels to be “a bit of gay” among proletarians? It made us closer – now we both knew how it feels to be an outcast.

My mother was really happy for such a good ending and called me to get back home. I had a fine reason for it: I’d been fired from my job, my girl had left me and I failed my exams at my post-graduate courses. Where can one beaten by life be accepted – if not at home? It’s great that there’s a place where they accept you the way you are any time of day and night.

- I was really sorry when your girl left you, my heart was tearing apart. otherwise, I hoped that girls have disappointed you finally and you will find a man this time...

Mothers are always mothers – they always want a better life for their children. But their “better” and our “better” a little differ.

- I was afraid we’ll be lonely when we get old, that you’ll stay alone, that I won’t see my grandsons... But now, when Nadja came, me and your father got calm.

Now we go to our country house with all our family. We plant potatoes and gather a harvest. Our parents can’t wait till they got their grandsons, embrace my wife and say:
- What a wonderful daughter-in-law we got! We need no son-in-law now...

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