by Miriam Horn
Taking a pay cut from $55,000 to $34,000 a year, Nancy went to work for the Maine Health Care Finance Commission, an office of mostly women lawyers. “It was worth every penny. The work wasn’t fascinating, but because of all the women it was a collaborative environment. I could use all my counseling skills and often get to a compromise before litigation; in a big firm they’d just want you to roll out the heavy guns.” Nancy has been co-chair of the Maine Bar Committee on the Status of Women Attorneys, helped create the Commission on Gender Justice in the Courts, addressing such matters as the legal system’s treatment of battered women, child support, and conditions of incarceration for women, and served as president of the Maine Women’s Fund, raising money for projects on women’s health, aging, and economic independence.
Wanting to avoid “forcing our relationship or their new siblings down our kids’ throats,” Nancy and Susan lived apart for two years. When they did move in together, they had a commitment ceremony attended by twelve women, including a Wellesley classmate and her companion, who “kind of rolled their eyes at the whole thing.” The gathered women read from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s A Gift from the Sea and collectively wound together a rainbow of embroidery threads; then Nancy and Susan exchanged rings.
They have made a cozy and peaceful home together, filled with country antiques and quilts and cut flowers and many books. A Wellesley sampler hangs on the wall and a Wellesley chair has pride of place in the living room. Pink curtains hang in the kitchen, and in the bathroom are matching HERS and HERS pink towels. The backyard is planted with a bountiful vegetable garden and abundant flowers. An array of pinks—hollyhocks, phlox, impatiens, peonies, coralbells, and begonias—grow in the shape of a Gay Liberation triangle; whites grow in a half-moon and bright yellow and orange blossoms burst the edges of a round sun. Both women wear L. L. Bean T-shirts, khakis, and Birkenstocks; Nancy’s hair is now very short and gray at the temples, and her blue eyes are framed by wire-rimmed glasses. They joke that they blend in well in Maine, where all the women look like lesbians. Nancy sings in a group called Women in Harmony. She and Susan both love the outdoors; they regularly go camping with their kids and tour with the Amelia Wheelheart Feminist Biking Club (which at one point explored patenting Susan’s invention, “the Bobbitt,” a toilet seat with a spring that requires a man to hold it up while he pees, then snaps back into place when he’s done).
In one sense, Nancy’s story is a classic romance: Through passionate love she found the self she had failed to realize in her marriage. But in another sense Nancy’s is a political story. Nancy released her true being not simply by yielding to her passions but by finding a new (shared) story that seemed to describe her better than did the old story that she and her mom and Thomas had once agreed upon. She achieved personal fulfillment by drawing strength and self-understanding from a collective movement: lesbian feminism.
Nancy and Susan’s kids have settled slowly into the new arrangement. Andrew would not see Susan for some months and refused to come to an early family gathering. Peter once asked them to turn off a song about a daughter and her mother who come out to each other. Susan’s thirteen-year-old son, Seth, “acted out” with Nancy, stealing her wallet. Only Susan’s daughter, Saren, thought from the outset that it was cool to have a lesbian mom. Now the kids, all heterosexual, are outspoken allies of their mothers. While in college, Peter performed as a gay man in Torch Song Trilogy and wore a pink triangle and went on an AIDS walk with Nancy. “I think everyone thought, What a nice mom, out there with her son.” Seth defended a gay rights ordinance before his hostile classmates in high school.
One morning while I was visiting, Peter arrived for a breakfast of fresh blueberry pancakes with warm hugs and kisses for both women. “When I was a kid, my friends were jealous of what seemed my perfect family. I thought it was perfect, too. I believed a relationship like that could never fail. I can’t remember a single fight. Now I realize how much unhealthier that is; all the stuff was kept under the surface.
“The year my mom went to law school was hard. I wanted her to be happy, but it’s not easy when you just have your dad. That year ruined things. Or, I suppose, it exposed what was always there. Then Susan was there all the time. At first it seemed like she was bringing them closer together, because they all did things together. Then my father saw it escalate between them. He gave his permission, but reluctantly.
“My parents tried to make it work, and to hide the worst from us; I remember they once locked themselves in the bathroom to fight. Andrew and I both tried to persuade them to stay together, and they did delay splitting up for us, I think. But over time I became confused. I didn’t know if I wanted them to stay together, but I knew I wanted them to stop fighting. The lesbianism didn’t bother me; I’ve always been taught to respect all relationships, though that doesn’t extend to extramarital ones. But when I was seven, I’d asked my mom to promise she’d never get divorced, and then she did. I felt betrayed by that. I also found myself having to defend my mom to my grandparents. I would say how much she loved Susan, that she’d always been the way they could now see. Grandma thought the marriage had been a perfect relationship and then Susan came in and wham. But I could grasp how my parents had become different. My father assumed Mom wanted just to be sure of everything. He wants contentment and security. But my mother wants fulfillment, to go forward and discover new things. She was changing. The whole thing with including Susan was my dad’s effort to be there with her during the changes. He wouldn’t tell her not to think what she was thinking. My father is not that direct, anyway—he implies things. That was hard on my mom, too, my father’s refusal to confront problems. Even now when he’s angry he doesn’t express it; he just becomes very rational.
“My parents’ divorce was the defining emotional moment in my life. It affected the next five years of my life. I’d come home and shout at the walls. I felt they were fighting for my loyalty, trying to one-up each other. I had trouble making friends or relationships; I was afraid of being hurt. But it wouldn’t have been better for us if they’d stayed together. The damage was done. And they would be teaching us the wrong thing. If I ever had a romantic view of relationships, I don’t anymore, but that’s good. When something’s wrong, I don’t sit back and hope it will pass. I talk about it right away and don’t stop till it’s resolved. I learned to try to rectify things but to realize that when things are irreparably broken, it’s time to move on, to make decisions for myself and to not stay in relationships for anyone’s sake but my own.
“The relationship between my mother and Susan is the strongest I’ve ever seen. They are truly linked, like one person. I think my father has found happiness as well; he has left that part of his life behind. He’s stopped bad-mouthing my mother. My stepmother [whom Thomas married in 1992] has the same outlook on life as he. She wants stability, while my mom has found someone willing to go on adventures with her. I call myself a boy with three mommies.” I ask if he’s a feminist. “I don’t know how to use that word anymore. I believe that there is sexism in much of society, that boys are still taught to be aggressive and girls submissive. I’d like a job that allows me to be home a lot raising kids. Yeah, I guess that makes me a feminist.”
Peter is sweet and a bit guarded; Andrew, who followed close on his mother’s heels at the University of Maine Law School, is more blunt and less qualified in his feminism. “If [NOW president] Patricia Ireland and Bill Clinton agree on something, I’ll be there.” Like his brother, he is less distressed by the fact of the divorce than by the way it was carried out. “When my parents got married, I don’t think either realized who they were—not for another fifteen years down the road, when my dad went away for that year and my mom was forced to get more self-reliant. By the time the divorce happened, they were so different I don’t think it would have been possible for them to stay together. Anyway, I’m way past the point where I think putting things back together is always better than letting it go. What bothered me was that everybo
dy wanted me on their side. For a while I was angry at Susan—not because of the nature of their relationship, but because I saw her as a divisive element; I thought she played a critical role. My senior year in high school, the three of them were spending a lot of time together. It didn’t seem natural. When I asked them about it, they told me it was their business. I think there was a lot of confusion; neither of my parents really had control. Bad decisions were made all around. After the divorce, my grandmother, whose basic view was ‘He’s a good catch; why is she letting him go?’ invited my dad down to visit her in Pittsburgh. My grandma is great; I could see why my dad would want to keep a relationship with her for selfish reasons, but visiting your ex-in-laws is kind of odd, and it was really hard on my mom. I ended up being a go-between for Grandma and Mom. For a long time I don’t think either made a reasonable effort. My mom wasn’t trying hard enough and my grandma had to be more open-minded, accept the way it is. I don’t blame her for being jarred. In her day, people didn’t do that. And my grandfather clearly had a moral problem with the whole thing.
“Is life after the divorce better than it was during the collapse? Definitely. But is it better than twenty years ago, when I was a kid and my parents seemed okay? I don’t know. It’s different. But I certainly don’t see that anything my mother did was an abdication of her responsibility to us. It’s judgmental and old-fashioned to see it that way. Some relationships might be fixed. For my parents, it was being kept together as a front and nothing else. I’m just glad it’s over. Though it has made me a lot more cynical. I’m in no hurry to get married. You tie yourself into a family; if it doesn’t work out, you have to get out, without losing half your stuff. I hope my mom and dad each stay in their present relationships, but I’ll never be able to say anything definite again.”
After three years of estrangement, Nancy also reconciled with her mother. When Peter won the lead in his high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, his grandmother very much wanted to come. “The women in her book group said, ‘You go home and call Nancy and tell her you’re coming to this play or you’re not welcome in this group anymore.’ They knew that the connection between a mother and daughter was more important than anything. She did it, and agreed to have lunch with me and Susan. I didn’t push her to stay at our house. But that was the beginning of the change.”
Nancy’s father died soon thereafter and Nancy went to stay with her mother for the first time since her marriage’s end. “We did everything that needed to be done. And we went together to see his body, which she wouldn’t have done alone. She told me a few months later that she felt like a dog who had spent its whole life in a fenced yard; she said, ‘Now the gate is open and I’m scared to walk through.’ My father was a disappointment to her in many ways, but her mother had told her that she should not expect to come home if her marriage didn’t work out. My dad died with my mom still frustrated in her effort to get him to say ‘I love you.’ He was always paternalistic: ‘We don’t need any more dessert, Marge; we don’t need more talking.’ She’s enthusiastic, large-spirited; his job was to squelch those enthusiasms. When I told her I was going to law school, she asked, ‘Did you get your husband’s permission?’ I was enraged that she thought I needed to, but the fact is I did get his permission. I wasn’t so very different. I never would have thought I needed assertiveness training, but when I reflect on it, I wasn’t assertive at any critical juncture. We did Father Knows Best. But ultimately I made the decision not to be defined by my husband.”
Marge Wanderer explained the break with her daughter to Frontline: “We couldn’t understand it, we didn’t want to understand it, because it was just something that we just didn’t want. And so we didn’t go into it. It wasn’t so much what I thought, it’s what I thought that other people would think. But I don’t think I realized, I know I never realized, what it is to walk away from a child that you’ve had, and it took me a while, but I couldn’t walk away, and I think when I came back, I came back as a better mother. Her father never came back.”
Nancy: “She knows she has some finite number of years left, and wants to get the most out of them and doesn’t want to do that without me, and of course that means me and Susan also. I think we’ve got it now. I don’t think anything like this will ever happen again.”
Still, Marge keeps parts of the story at bay. “My mother likes Susan,” says Nancy, “because she fixes everything in her house, and she can certainly see how much happier I am. We visit her together. It’s absolutely clear what our relationship is. But people can take in just as much as they can take in. Right after my twenty-fifth Wellesley reunion, she said, ‘You’re a feminist, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then she said, ‘But you’re not a lesbian, are you?’ and I said, ‘Mom we’ve been through this. What do you think those three years were about?’ ”
Nancy’s brother, a retired career navy officer as conservative as her father, was initially unhappy about the radical change in his sister’s life. His wife, Nancy’s Wellesley classmate Kate Harding, had to serve as a bridge between the siblings. So did Andrew, who has been well looked after by his uncle since moving to D.C. Relations with Thomas are also now “cordial,” Nancy says, “thanks to my mother paying half the kids’ college costs. Once money was not an issue, I was able to let go of my anger. I think he’s furious at me, and I don’t think he’s begun to touch it because he’s so controlled, but he did tell my mother he believed Susan was the love of my life. And after the Frontline thing, his mom wrote me to say that she was beginning to understand that the marriage wasn’t the right life for me.” When Thomas and his new wife had a yard sale in 1995, Susan and Nancy went. His wife gave them a tour of the redone kitchen, and Nancy bought a few of Peter’s old shirts and pants for herself.
Nancy’s classmates at Wellesley have had mixed responses. After her coming out on national television, Nancy became for a time a kind of public spokesperson on behalf of lesbians, speaking with her old Girl Scout’s enthusiasm to groups of young women—at tea talks at a bed and breakfast in Bluehill, Maine, and fund-raisers for the YWCA. Her sense of mission has irritated some of her classmates; they complain that she seems to expect their admiration. At her twentieth reunion, one of Nancy’s close college friends reacted coldly to news of Nancy’s divorce: “She said to me, ‘Well, you liked it all well enough then.’ And that’s right. I shared the mythology. I wanted a husband I could look up to; it’s not surprising he would expect his work and his judgment to take precedence. She and I had made similar choices, and now I was disavowing them. I think it left some people feeling that if it wasn’t enough for me, why should it be enough for them?
“I wouldn’t wish to change anything—not the twenty years of marriage or the years since. It wasn’t a sham that we were a close, connected family. Thomas was a rock. But in the end, security wasn’t enough. I couldn’t get him angry, sad, joyous, no matter how I tried. I couldn’t get him to fight, and I needed him to fight with me. I felt myself dying daily. It was placid; when you’re dead, what could be more peaceful? I don’t mean that to slam Thomas, but he didn’t love anything I did. He was so solitary in his study. I’d be casting about, but accountable to him for my time. With Susan, we’re either ecstatic or wrestling something to the ground. I’ve cried more since I met her than I did in the previous twenty years, so I must be happy. I feel like since I’ve been on my own and sharing a home with Susan that I’m an adult for the first time. I look forward to growing old with her, which I couldn’t imagine with Thomas. How could any of it have been otherwise? If you’re already married, the only way of coming out is falling in love with someone. You don’t come out in the abstract, you only know you’re a lesbian when you discover that love.
“I know other friends who live with women who are their life partners but find a way not to say that. They say they’re single mothers; they say they’re divorced. None of that felt right to me. I’ve never been very good at not telling the truth. Lesbianism is not, for me, a sexual orien
tation, but something broader. Though I think sexuality is a life spring, a great source of power, the sexual part was not leading—that could have gone either way. The main thing was wanting to have unity between my sexual life and my emotional life. I always wanted to be in communities of women. As I look back over my whole life, it has been women who have sustained me and energized me and appreciated me and collaborated with me. Except for my kids, who are in a class by themselves, men have been a disappointment, including my father. I didn’t need men except to get married and have children, so at first sex went with that, but ultimately I wanted a relationship where could I put everything together. It was a question of where could I have a more fully integrated life, where could I feel whole? I kept hoping Thomas would be that person. But I discovered that the kind of connection I was seeking wasn’t possible with him, which is not to say it isn’t possible between women and men. My whole life I was looking for a partner with whom I could re-create the intimacy I had with my mother. She gave me a tremendous gift in that way.”
