What My Mother Doesn’t Remember

In sixth grade, I often ate lunch alone.

I remember that about the year as clearly as I remember anything else: the feeling of being near other children without quite knowing where I belonged among them. I wanted what most kids want at that age. I wanted to be included, and I wanted to be sure that inclusion would last.

One afternoon, while I waited for my mother to pick me up, three boys were teasing a boy named Matthew. They were using anti-gay slurs. I stood nearby. I didn’t say anything.

I have thought about my silence many times. I could tell you how badly I wanted to belong, or how little I understood about myself then. Both are true. Neither changes what Matthew experienced while I stood there.

When I got into the car, my mother asked what the boys had been saying. I repeated the word they’d used.

She stopped the car in the middle of the highway and turned all the way around to face me.

“Don’t you EVER let me hear you joke about that word again. It’s not funny.”

I will never forget precisely what she said. She had asked me to tell her the truth, and when I did, she made sure I understood that the word wasn’t something to toss around for a laugh.

At the time, I knew she was upset with me. I didn’t yet understand all the reasons her words would stay with me.

As I grew older and began to understand my own sexuality, I returned to that afternoon in a different way. My mother hadn’t heard what the boys said until I told her. She couldn’t go back and change what happened to Matthew. But she could tell me plainly what she thought of it, and she did.

She didn’t know that I would one day hear her words as reassurance, too. I didn’t know it yet, either. Before I had the words to tell her who I was, I had heard her reject the idea that being gay was something to mock.

I was fortunate to have other people in my life who helped me feel at ease with who I was. Jack and Carl were part of that. So was this moment with my mother, though it took years before I could have explained why.

I have friends who carried a great deal of guilt and fear into the years when they were coming out. I can’t know exactly which experiences spared me some of that weight. I do know that I remembered my mother turning to face me. Long after the sting of being corrected had faded, her words remained.

Years later, I brought up the incident with her.

She didn’t remember Matthew. She didn’t remember the boys or what they’d been saying. She didn’t remember stopping the car. She didn’t remember the sentence I could still recite.

I suppose I had imagined that a moment so important to me would have been important to her in the same way. But she was raising four children. She had asked a question, heard an answer, and said what she believed needed saying. Then life went on. There were thousands of other car rides, school days, arguments, dinners, and ordinary afternoons.

For me, life went on with that moment still inside it.

What I came to understand about myself later doesn’t excuse my silence that day. Matthew deserved someone to speak up for him. I didn’t.

But my mother’s words changed what I carried forward. She took what I told her seriously, and she made sure I knew where she stood. Years later, when I was trying to understand where I stood in the world, I still knew what she had said.

She doesn’t remember saying it. I will never forget.