by Lori L. Lake
“Next door can be a long ways away if you don’t try to stop in for a visit every now and then.”
I placed my hands on her thin shoulders feeling tall, awkward and undeserving. “I’m so sorry.” I folded her into my arms, feeling about as low as I did when I cut a hole in her hardwood floor to store my buried treasures. “You’re disappointed that I didn’t tell you sooner, aren’t you?”
“If—when—you become a mother, you’ll learn that your kids can hurt you like no one on this earth can. But they’ll give you more joy, too. It’ll make it all worthwhile.”
“I really am sorry, Momma.”
“Me, too,” she said, and it made me feel worse because she really seemed sorry, only I was pretty sure she didn’t mean it the way I did. In those few words, she had told me in a way only a mother could that I had messed up. I had wasted years by avoiding the possibility of my mother not loving me because I was afraid. Regardless of where she moved, I resolved to make sure we saw each other every few months. I closed my eyes tight and made her a silent promise.
“When will you know?” she mumbled against my shoulder.
“When will I know what?”
“About the baby.”
I sucked in a breath and chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, my stomach churning again. I had one nerve-racking situation down, and now I had to deal with another. “We decided to wait to do a pregnancy test until we got back. But um, maybe I can run down to the store and pick one up later.”
“Why wait until later?”
“You mean do one now?”
“Yeah, I mean you should go buy one of those tests down at the grocery store right now. Ms. Dee and me need to have a long talk. I had no idea I would have two new family members to celebrate.” The smile in her voice told me Dee was in for a long grilling, but I had nothing to worry about.
“Don’t be too hard on her, Momma. She wanted to tell you three months after we met. I was just… I don’t know, scared.”
She nodded. “I won’t lie to you and tell you that I understand fully. I mean, being a lesbian is…well, just not something I’ve ever even thought about. But why you felt so strongly that you would rather stay away than tell me…I don’t think I’ll ever get that.”
“I know,” I said sadly. “I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that. Now go to the store.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said and watched her head back into the house.
I could hear her say something to Dee; there was a moment of silence, and then Dee’s voice clearly said, “She finally told you.”
The shadows of my mother and Dee merged briefly then separated. I heard them both laugh and a soft drone as one of them, I think it was Dee, began to talk. I leaned back against the railing and looked up at the stars. The deck was new, but the view wasn’t. I hoped like hell our child took after Dee and not me. I had caused damage to my relationship with my mother and, no matter how much she loved me, no matter how accepting of our relationship she was, I knew it would take a long time, a lot of love and a lot of honesty to get our closeness back.
The hurtful part was that even though I’d feared her reaction, I had always known she would still love me. I never truly doubted it. I had let fear keep me from telling her. I had wasted so much time. My eyes were watery long before I realized how lucky I was that I had a mother who loved me and partner who I was not only in love with, but who was also my best friend.
A plane hummed overhead, interrupting my thoughts. I watched its glinting burgundy light descend toward Oakland airport. People coming, people going, lives changing and evolving, just like mine. I turned toward the house but stopped short of opening the door. Reluctant to interrupt my mother’s and Dee’s conversation, I changed course and went through the back gate.
As I climbed into the driver's seat of the rental car, it dawned on me that one day—one day soon perhaps—I would be a mother, too. I imagined I could smell traces of Dee's perfume mingling with my own anxiety, and then a vision of my partner calmly explaining to my mother that it would be me carrying our child brought a smile to my face. I started the car and pulled away from the curb, already plotting the shortcut that would bring me back home quickest.
***
ABOUT ELLEN HART
Ellen Hart is the author of twenty-six crime novels in two different series. She is a five-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery, a three-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Best Popular Fiction, a three-time winner of the Golden Crown Literary Award in several categories, a recipient of the Alice B Medal, and was made an official GLBT Literary Saint at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans in 2005. In 2010, she received the GCLS Trailblazer Award for lifetime achievement in the field of lesbian literature.
For the past fourteen years, Ellen has taught “An Introduction to Writing the Modern Mystery” through the The Loft Literary Center, the largest independent writing community in the nation. The Cruel Ever After, the eighteenth Jane Lawless mystery, was released by St. Martin's/Minotaur in December 2010. Bella Books has recently revived the out-of-print books in the Jane Lawless series by publishing them in both trade paperback and E-book. Ellen lives in Minneapolis with her partner of 34 years.
Mother Memoir: A Coming Out Story
Memoir by Ellen Hart
ALL MY LIFE I’ve been drawn to mystery in one form or another. My mother, and my relationship with her, will always remain the most profound mystery of my life.
When I was in my twenties, all I could see were the difference between my mother and me. To be sure, we are very different people. But in my forties, I started to notice similarities. Now in my mid fifties, I’ve begun to examine both the negative baggage my mother passed on, as well as the gifts. Life is a mixed bag, as we all know. We certainly don’t get to choose our parents, but neither do our parents get to choose us. The lesson there, at least in my case, has to do with love and frustration, admiration and anger, and, ultimately, understanding and acceptance. No mother-daughter relationship is simple, but when you throw sexual identity into the soup, it can be explosive.
I want to tell you my coming out story. Along the way, I think you’ll get a sense of some of the conflicts—but also the love—that defined my relationship with my mother.
In the fall of 1992, my third novel, Stage Fright, had just been published. I was still working full time as a chef/kitchen manager at the Delta Gamma sorority at the University of Minnesota. On weekends and evenings, I did promotional events—bookstore signings, radio interviews, library talks, whatever came up. At the time, I was not only in the closet with my mother about my relationship with my partner, Kathy, but I was also in the closet about my writing. Not only would my mom have objected to the lesbian main character in the books, but being a fundamentalist Christian to the right of Jerry Falwell, she thought mystery novels were satanic. I still remember the day I took her grocery shopping—when I was writing my first book—and she did a good ten minutes on how terrible “those sorts” of books were.
For ten years, my mother and I had been part of a fundamentalist Christian group called The Worldwide Church of God. I’d attended Ambassador University, the church’s college in Pasadena, California, and graduated in 1971 with a degree in Theology. I left the church soon thereafter. The reason I left had a great deal to do with the sexual and moral corruption in the ministry, especially the head ministers, but also had perhaps even more to do with my growing feminism. My mother eventually left the church as well—not because of the corruption so much as because she felt she’d found too much doctrinal error. In her own studies, she’d discovered the truth, and the Worldwide Church of God no longer represented that truth.
My mother had always been the poster child for the iconoclastic spirit. My partner, Kathy, thinks it’s because she was a full-blooded Norwegian. She was just too damn stubborn ever to be wrong. Although she proclaimed loudly and often that she’d made many mistakes in her
life, nothing she was ever involved in at the moment was a mistake. She believed what she believed with total fervency. And what she believed was not only right, it was righteous.
My mom was an only child. She grew up in Hettinger, North Dakota, a town her family had helped found. Her father was a banker, mother a typical housewife. Marjory Rowena Anderson was a strikingly beautiful young woman who loved to date, wear beautiful clothes, and generally have a good time. She looked a lot like the movie actress Paulette Goddard. She met my father in the late thirties, when the clouds of war were lowering over Europe, and married him in 1939.
She often told the story of how they first met. It was a blind date, and she wasn’t terribly impressed. When my dad asked her out again, she said no thanks. My mother laughed when she recalled the look on my father’s face. He was dumbfounded. Herm Boehnhardt was a big man on campus: cool car, great clothes, handsome, financially clever, with a job on the sports desk at the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. Nobody had ever turned him down before. When she finally did agree to see him again, he took her home to meet his mother. My father’s mother later told him, “She’s the one. Don’t let her get away.” By that point, my father agreed.
I’m not sure where my mother’s confidence came from, but she had a view of life that told her what she thought about the world—or an idea, a person—was more important than what the world thought of her. She passed that on to me. Frankly, that particular life lesson was one she might have liked to rescind. As much as she wanted me to be happy, she also wanted me to make the same choices she had. I think many mothers want that from their daughters, and mine was no exception. In a way, if we get married, have children, share the same religious and political opinions, it validates their choices and their lives. The fact that what I believed was more important to me than what she believed always galled her. She spent a great part of her latter years trying to convince me of her points of view. Only problem was, the beliefs she held changed so often that it was hard to keep up. But that never seemed to bother my mother. Or, more accurately, she never even noticed.
My mother believed that public education was a waste of money. Public education also passed on a lot of Godless liberalism and should be done away with for that reason alone. All women should home-school their children. She thought Democrats were lying cheats, out to ruin the country financially and morally. She believed in the International Jewish Conspiracy—the Bilderbergers ran the world. All political figures were puppets. She saw no reason for welfare—anyone could get a job in this country and support themselves just fine. If they didn’t, it was because they were lazy. All minorities were lazy. The Pope was the Antichrist. Sometimes the Jews were God’s chosen people, sometimes they were behind all the evil in the world. Women should stay home and not work. The business world was for men. Men were smarter than women. The soul passed into the child’s body through the father. Women were catty and small-minded. (Except for her.) She decried all the violence on TV, but loved James Bond movies. When we went out, she couldn’t imagine why there were so many cars on the road. People should stay home. City water was polluted. All food was polluted. Doctors didn’t know anything. You should drink vinegar every day. You should also drink hydrogen peroxide—it was good for you. Wheat grass was good for you. Sugar kills more people than anything else. It should be banned. Coffee was a drug, just like cocaine. Nobody should drink it. Potatoes were part of the nightshade family—they could kill you. So could tomatoes. Corn was for pigs. Humans shouldn’t eat it. Right was good and left was bad. In her sixties, heaven and hell didn’t exist. It was a Catholic doctrine that wasn’t in the Bible. By her eighties, heaven did exist, and she was going there after she died. Income tax was illegal. Homosexuality was a sin punishable by eternal death. I think intellectuals were in the same category, but it’s hard to remember now. She didn’t leave me a handbook—just lots of tapes that run in my head.
I’ve often written about my mother in my books. Any author who tells you their writing isn’t a form of therapy is lying. In my most recent mystery, Death on a Silver Platter, I describe a woman very much like my mother:
“Simply put, Millie Veelund was a bigot. She preceded most of her pronouncements with ‘I’m not prejudiced, but—’ The spirit of Joe McCarthy was alive and well and living in Minnesota. Margaret Thatcher was her political hero, as was Ronald Reagan, except that he was involved far too much with those Jews over there in the Middle East. Then again, he’d taken on the labor unions and won. He had a good heart. Millie Veelund was Archie Bunker without the twinkle. She used religion and politics like a flame-thrower. She was human Agent Orange. Danny hated her. And he loved her. And that was the problem.”
You get the picture. Not only was my mother a cantankerous, self-righteous, know-it-all, but she revered ideas—believed they ruled the world. She passed that knowledge on to me. In fact, ideas do rule the world, and those you come to accept and call your own profoundly affect who you become.
Perhaps you can see why the thought of coming out to my mother was a scary one. I was of two minds about it. I thought she might never want to see or speak to me again. If that happened, I didn’t know what would happen to her. By that time in her life—her late seventies—I was her primary caregiver. She was able to stay in her house largely due to the help Kathy and I gave to her. If we became estranged, I feared for her future. But I wondered if her natural iconoclasm might kick in and she might be okay with the fact that I was a lesbian—not condone it, of course, but she’d be willing to live with it. The bottom line was, would her love for me—which I never doubted—be greater than her need to condemn.
Back to the coming out story. The winter that Stage Fright was published, I had been asked to do a noon radio program at a U of M station. My mother didn’t get out much, and since I wrote under the name Ellen Hart (Ellen is my middle name, Hart is the last part of my very unpronounceable last name), she wouldn’t have put the two together if she’d seen something in the newspaper. But...she did listen to the radio. The show I was asked to be on wasn’t terribly popular. Actually, I figured that only people surfing the dial—or a few shut-ins—would be listening.
After the show was over and I’d returned home, I got a call from my mother. Her first words were a question. “Do you know who Ellen Hart is?”
I panicked. I saw my entire life pass before my eyes. “Who?”
“Ellen Hart. I just heard her on the radio and she had a laugh just like yours. You two could be sisters.”
“Really?”
“She writes mysteries.”
“Oh?” I tried to sound normal.
“It was amazing. I guess we all have doubles out there somewhere.”
We moved on to another subject, but that was the turning point for me. I knew I had to tell her the truth. Not only did I need to come out of the closet about my sexuality, I had to come out of the mystery closet as well.
The week after I was almost busted was a busy one. I had book signings every night until Friday. On Friday night, Kathy and I, armed with three of my books, drove over to my mother’s house. I remember thinking: this is it. This may be the last time I ever walk into this house, the last time I talk to her face to face. And yet, part of me couldn’t believe she’d toss me out on my ear.
We walked into the kitchen. My mother smiled at us, invited us in, asked if she could make us some tea. (Tea was okay at that point. Later, it got put on the list of items that could kill—especially herbal teas.) She was always happy to see us, and always very gracious. (Unless she was in the middle of a tirade.) In fact, my mother was an incredibly kind and generous person to those she loved. As I pointed out before, humans are an almost insane mixture of qualities.
Before I even took off my coat I said: “You wanted to know who Ellen Hart is.”
“Yes,” she said, moving over to the stove. “I did.”
“I’m Ellen Hart.”
She looked over at me. “Well...I thought so!”
I handed he
r the books.
“Let me get my glasses,” she said, limping out into the dining room.
I looked at Kathy. She looked at me.
“Sit down in the living room and I’ll join you in a second.”
Kathy and I continued to shoot each other meaningful glances as we took up positions on either side of the picture window. This wasn’t what either of us had expected.
Finally, my mother sat down in her chair and turned on the light. She opened one of the books and started to look through it. “I knew that was your laugh on the radio the other day. See, I wasn’t wrong.”
“The main character in the book is gay.”
“Oh?” She kept paging through Vital Lies. The irony of the title wasn’t lost on me.
“And there’s something else you need to know about me, Mom. Something I haven’t told you before.”
“Yes?” she said, glancing at the back of the book.
“Kathy and I are partners. We’ve been together for sixteen years.”
That stopped her. She looked up, her eyes moving back and forth between us. I couldn’t read the expression on her face.
She studied us a moment more, then returned her attention to the book. “Oh, I know that,” she said, almost matter-of-factly.
I nearly fell out of my chair.
“How did you get this published?” she asked.
“It’s a mystery novel, Mom.”
“Yes, I see that.”
And we were off and running. She had so many questions. Did I have an agent? How did I know I could write a book? Where were the books sold? Just in Minneapolis? All over the world! She was fascinated.
We talked for about an hour. When Kathy and I left, we were in a daze. We went to a restaurant, ordered some food and a couple of beers, and just sort of fell apart. Neither one of us knew what her response would be, but although it hadn’t been, “Well isn’t that wonderful. You’re lesbians!!” it also wasn’t the end of the world. She hugged us both before we left the kitchen. Kathy and I had both been under so much tension. And now it was over.
