Given Up for You

by Erin O. White

  22

  School Days

  When Grace was in preschool, people often asked us where we were planning to send her to kindergarten. “Private school in Northampton,” we would say. All the hilltown lesbians sent their kids there (the ones who didn’t homeschool or win the lottery of the charter school) and so I answered without really thinking too much about it.

  But when it actually came time for kindergarten we weren’t so sure anymore. I had made peace with living in the hilltowns, and I didn’t want Grace to go to school in town. I didn’t want to spend so much of my life (and June’s life) in the car. I enjoyed our days at home; I had good friends and a garden, favorite hiking trails, secret spots by the river. We spent much of our lives outside, in all seasons. Even June, who was only eighteen months old then, woke every morning and wanted to go outdoors, wanted to eat her breakfast under the pine tree while Grace did maintenance on yesterday’s fairy house.

  Chris was fine with the public school. She had never been as enthusiastic about private school as I had been. She worried about the social scene, and about the way it would limit her own involvement in Grace’s school life, considering how far the private school was from her office. And while I was worried about public school, worried about testing and budget cuts and cafeteria food, I was also hopeful. Obama’s first term wasn’t even half over yet, and I was still buoyed by the activism and victories of his campaign and early presidency. I had volunteered for the campaign, and I still felt the sway of Yes We Can. I believed it would be worthwhile and satisfying to join our neighbors in making our little school a good one for all the town’s children.

  In the weeks before the 2008 election I had also been involved in the fight against Proposition 8 in California, staying up late to make phone calls and read position statements. And when Proposition 8 passed I organized a rally in support of marriage equality in the parking lot of the Creamery, our little hilltown grocery store and de facto community center. All our friends came. Greta wore Cyndy’s wedding veil.

  By the time Proposition 8 was threatening marriage equality in California, Chris and I had been legally married for four years. And legal marriage mattered. Now laws and social systems bore much of the responsibility for instructing people how to treat us, even those who didn’t approve of our relationship. This was a powerful way to live, and it shaped the way we thought of ourselves as a couple. We wouldn’t move to a state where gay marriage wasn’t legal. We also knew that marriage equality was one of the reasons we could even consider sending Grace to public school.

  Over the summer, I wrote Grace’s kindergarten teacher a long letter explaining our family. “Grace has two moms,” I wrote, “although she calls me ‘Mom’ and she calls Chris ‘Mati,’ so it will make the most sense to her if you also refer to us that way, as in, ‘Did you go to New York with your Mom and Mati?’” I went on to explain that Grace had been conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, which she knew, and that if any particularly precocious children asked about Grace’s origins, the teacher could simply say we had help from a friend.

  “Wow,” Chris said, after she read the letter. “That’s a lot of information.”

  “Better than not enough,” I said, a little defensively.

  “Absolutely,” Chris said. She knew I was anxious. She handed me back the letter, pulled me toward her, and kissed my head. “Thanks for writing it.”

  In the weeks before school started, Grace’s teacher-to-be held playgroups at the school playground to give the children a chance to meet each other and get to know her. I immediately liked Mrs. Patton; she was a slight and quiet woman with gray hair and thick, black glasses. She wore short skirts and clogs and pretty blouses, and she didn’t ask the children questions she already knew the answer to. Because our friends’ children mostly went to charter or private schools, Grace’s kindergarten classmates were, for the most part, not children she had grown up playing with. They were the children of farmers and contractors, machinists, nurses. A few of them lived with their grandparents, and one was in foster care. There was a young scruffiness to her class that I both liked and was frightened by.

  During the first weeks of school, Chris spent as much time at school as she could. She wanted the kids to see Grace’s “other mom,” and so she dropped Grace off a few mornings a week, helped her to unpack her backpack, and chatted with all the kids. At first they asked her who she was. “I’m Grace’s other mom,” she said. “She calls me Mati.” Soon Grace’s school friends began to call Chris Mati, as though it were her first name.

  “Does that bother you?” we asked Grace. She told us she didn’t mind. Chris, who had recently attended an Out and Equal conference panel with adult kids of gay parents, later told me that they had said not to believe your kid when she tells you something doesn’t bother her. “They said she’ll be trying to protect our feelings,” Chris said.

  “Those kids on the panel were old,” I told Chris. “A totally different generation.”

  “It’s not that different,” Chris said.

  This is how we seemed to have divided, how we covered all our bases: Chris worried about Grace’s feelings about us; I worried about the world’s feelings about her.

  One evening in late fall, Mrs. Patton called me at home. There had been some discussion of marriage in the dramatic play area, she said, of who could marry whom. Most of the children were good with whatever, but a little boy had said, “Boys can’t marry boys.”

  Mrs. Patton paused. I waited for her.

  “And I know that this child comes from a religious family,” she said slowly, “and so it felt a little tricky.”

  This is it, I thought. I tried to breathe. “Well,” I said. “It’s actually a fact, here in Massachusetts, that boys can marry boys. It’s the law, regardless of what his family believes.” Only later did the absurdity of the phrase “boys can marry boys” occur to me.

  “Right,” she said, “but families have such different beliefs.” She spoke in the same warm voice I had heard her use with the children. As I listened to her I realized that in order to be a good kindergarten teacher you had to see the world in a way that I was far too self-righteous to see it.

  “Well, it’s not really about what his family believes,” I said. “Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and Grace’s mothers are married. So she needs to hear you say that boys can marry boys. She needs to hear you say that you can marry whomever you love.”

  “You are right,” Mrs. Patton said. “I hear you, and you are right. This is such a growing time for me. It’s really amazing to stretch in this way.”

  Stretch on your own time! I wanted to scream. Figure it out! I couldn’t believe that Chris and I had willingly put Grace in this situation. And why was her teacher calling me? Why wasn’t she calling the parents of the little boy?

  After I hung up the phone, I told Chris I thought we were sacrificing Grace to progress. “Calm down,” she said. “She’s hardly Amy Carter.”

  “We should send her somewhere where people know how to deal with this.”

  “Someone has to be the first,” Chris said.

  “Not Grace!”

  “But why not, really?” Chris said. “I mean, she can handle it. And so can we. Besides, these kids are products of their environments. You can’t fault them for what they say. They are parroting back what they hear from their parents.”

  “Somehow I don’t find that comforting,” I said.

  I wanted to pull Grace out of school and send her to the Montessori school in Northampton. I wanted to spare her the burden of her difference. I wanted to spare myself. But here’s the thing: I was also getting tired of trying to spare myself. I had been doing it for too long, and for what? The false promise of a life in which I kept it all—Catholicism, straight privilege, my marriage, and now, my children—yet paid no price, bore no loss? And in the meantime I had lost out on so much: my claim to a marvelous history, my place in an astonishingly powerful social movement, alliances with
queer women who were poised to be dear and intimate friends. And all that desire.

  For years I liked to say that Chris was the only woman I looked at, but this wasn’t true. I looked at women all the time. And while I had colluded with the culture that says straight is the most desirable way to be, or at least to appear, I was beginning to acknowledge—and to enjoy—the fact that this simply wasn’t true. I might not have been pushing any boundaries of gender identity myself—my hair was still long and layered, my bathroom cabinet filled with makeup—but I had long thrilled at the sight of people who were. Western Massachusetts was a lucky place to live not just because of the protections it offered but because of its queer culture, the gender-fluid students and baristas and parents who could make my day just by walking into it. For a long time I saw myself on the margins of this culture, as though I weren’t gay enough to really count. But what did my own looks matter when the sight of a buzz cut and tattooed butch with a baby strapped to her chest was enough to stop my heart? It was my desire that made me gay enough, and always had.

  My collusion was not only a personal denial but a political one. It had allowed me to ignore the responsibility I had to LGBT youth, people who needed to see me living out—all the way out—as a free and fulfilled adult. And as much as I wanted my daughters’ world to be different, I could see now that it was even more important that the lives of young queers be different, that they see their futures clearly, claim their right to be beloved and content.

  Which brought me back to the public school. Because what if a child in Grace’s class—a rural, working-class child—was gay? And what if that child, on one of her dark days, remembered the sound of Chris’s voice in the hallway, or the feeling of my coat brushing against her as I rushed in late, as I always did, and she remembered that we were gay and that we were also adults—autonomous and safe—and that thought allowed her to breathe into her future for a moment. This was bold of me, I know, to say that simply by existing I could be of any service. It wasn’t enough, surely. But this was where I could begin, where we all can begin: by taking up our rightful space, by honestly and joyously occupying our bodies, our desires and beliefs, however we may choose to express them.

  A few days after my conversation with Mrs. Patton, I decided to give her some books. I found every book I could about gay families and I bought them for the classroom. Or rather I called my parents and asked them if they wanted to buy all the books and donate them to Grace’s classroom, which they immediately did. The day after I had given the books to the teacher, she told me she had read King and King, the story of a prince who wanted to marry a prince, and that a lively discussion had ensued. She told me she had loved every minute of it. “I’m on fire with this,” she said. “We’re going to blow it all wide open.”

  23

  A Nest on the Altar

  It took three years to rebuild the West Cummington Church.

  During those years of waiting and planning, services were held in the Parish House, a grand and slightly shabby white clapboard building adorned with Doric columns and a summer garden of echinacea and bee balm. Inside we sat on long, spindle-backed benches and metal chairs arranged in rows. The walls were painted a pale Edwardian yellow; the windows were trimmed in white. There were a few old oriental rugs on the floor and blueprints for the new church on the walls. I missed the old church, and I hardly ever went to Parish House services.

  But in the year after I met Ron Ingalls I went a few times and felt a new weight. I felt it in my own body, and in my scattered but slowing mind, and I thought I heard it in Steve’s sermons, in his voice. I know, certainly, that I saw it in his shoulders. It might have been the fire, or just aging, mine and his. But that was not all it was. I had a new glimmer of understanding that this tiny church was where God had planted me, and if I wanted to bloom, then I should pass some patient seasons here. I should start showing up to receive, without comparison, without fantasy. The task was to seal my heart to the God I found here. To look around and within, but to not look back.

  One communion Sunday, Steve broke the round loaf of bread in half and handed it to the people on either side of him. “The molecules that are inside this bread,” he said, “were once inside a star.” He looked at the bread, and then looked around the room at all of us. “Is it the body of Christ?” he asked. He smiled, shook his head gently. “I don’t know.”

  Steve’s words rang inside me. Perhaps because of how he said them, part apology, part invitation. A doubt that did not move to diminish belief.

  Is this the body of Christ? The plate had made its way around the circle to me and I took a piece of bread and held it in my hand while I waited for the others to take theirs. I didn’t know either. But I loved it so.

  The next week I told Chris that I was going to bring the girls to church. “Maybe they are old enough now,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  For a moment I thought of asking her if she wanted to come, but I knew she didn’t. I was not bothered by her disinterest. She gave me West Cummington, all those years ago, and I was nothing but grateful, regardless of what the place might mean to her now. On Sunday morning when the girls and I put on our coats, Chris headed for the couch with the crossword puzzle. “Pray for me,” she called as we walked out the door.

  The girls and I arrived a bit late; we went in through the Parish House kitchen door and sat near the back with a bag of markers and paper, modeling clay, and juice boxes. Things went well that first Sunday, and so we went again the next week, and then the week after that. The girls were sometimes demanding, sometimes quiet. Grace always wanted to lay her head on my lap during the sermon, and controlling my annoyance at this was a spiritual exercise in itself. One Sunday, June made a small bird and nest from clay and put them on the altar during the offering. I joined a committee. I stayed for coffee hour and pretended not to notice how many cookies the girls ate. People stopped saying, “Oh, Erin, it’s been so long,” when I walked into the room. People stopped saying, “Look how these girls have grown.”

  Grace was eight and June nearly five when the new church was finished. It resembled the old church in many ways, but in many ways it did not, and people would talk about this for a long time. About what cannot be replicated. When I looked through pictures from the girls’ baptisms I could see the old sanctuary’s thin wainscoting, the red carpet, the simple sconces. I saw Steve’s broader shoulders and my younger face. I saw my babies. I couldn’t believe all that was once mine. I didn’t miss anything or anyone so much as I was glad to have had it all. And glad for the luck of what had been returned to me: the sunlight through the tall windows, the view of apple trees, of the steep road down to the creek, and to the river beyond.

  Secretly I wished for the new church to have a cross, even a small one, although I knew it never would. For years I had missed the cross at West Cummington. I wanted more cross; I wanted more Jesus. What I really wanted was my youth, the way it brimmed with possibility and all the time in the world. What I wanted was that brief Eden where I loved Chris but had not yet chosen her, when I still believed everything could be mine. But it couldn’t. It can’t. And so I have a church without a cross. “There is no cross at West Cummington,” Steve said during one of the early sermons in the new sanctuary. He turned then and looked up at the bare wall behind him, the spot where a cross would hang if West Cummington were that sort of church. Instead there were white plaster walls, and a three-paned window framing a tower of pines outside.

  “Crosses don’t have much meaning for me,” Steve continued. “I don’t really find God in them. But many years ago a dear friend gave me a cross from a monastery in Vermont, and because I love this friend, I kept the cross. And when I go out into the woods to fell trees, I bring it. It hangs from a leather cord, and when I come to a tree whose lean I can’t discern, I hang the cord from a low branch and let the cross plumb the line, tell me the tree’s direction.” He held up his hand, an invisible cord between his fingers. “The cross r
eminds me to give thanks for the tree, and to take my time in the woods.”

  Epilogue: Carol

  In the winter of 2015, the film Carol came into wide release. Carol is based on the 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt (later renamed Carol), which recounts the passion and torment of a love affair between Therese Belivet, a young and inexperienced shopgirl, and Carol Aird, a married woman with a child. The setting is midcentury New York and the affair is a dangerous one. Carol risks losing custody of her daughter to a vengeful and wounded ex-husband, and Therese, who has never loved a women before Carol, risks the end of security, the predictable future of a straight life.

  Before I had the chance to see Carol I read all the criticism, listened to all the radio interviews. The mere existence of the film struck me as extraordinary—a Hollywood feature based on a book by a lesbian—and I loved all the press, and the buzz. I loved that the film was a queer endeavor: Carol’s screenplay was written by Phyllis Nagy, a lesbian playwright and friend of Patricia Highsmith, and the film was directed by Todd Haynes, a gay man.

  Many of the articles I read referenced Highsmith’s struggle to publish The Price of Salt. Her publisher passed on the manuscript, and it was later published under a pseudonym by a different house. These articles depicted Highsmith’s publishing struggle as a tragic remnant of a distant past, as though bookstores were now chock-full of books about lesbians written by lesbians. As though even the well-read knew the name of any lesbian writer who was not Eileen Myles.

  In the last week before the movie left town, Chris and I made a date to see it together in Amherst. We met there after work, in a bar across the street from the theater. This was what we did now that our children were older. We met each other in bars. We went on trips without the girls, spent nights in hotel rooms. Our daughters were eleven and eight years old. One of motherhood’s greatest myths is the supposed bittersweetness of the children’s aging. I have found it to be only sweet.