Debate

I thought I was done talking about what happened in that nightclub when I told the story of the candle that's been burning in my heart for three decades. I flung those words out onto a page practically before the last strains of the requiem died, trying to give shape to my grief so that it could be dealt with. I almost succeeded.

I didn't see my son the day we gathered to voice the names of the dead. It's not an unusual occurrence; although he lives with me, he is an adult - a busy one at that. What was unusual was that he missed a moment of remembrance, especially one for LGBTQ+ people. When I saw him finally on Tuesday, I asked him where he'd been.

"Dad's house," he said.

"I saw the list. I couldn't read all the names."

My son came out to me as bisexual four years ago, on a bench by the sea. It was the middle of the night, very dark. He was nervous, shaking, couldn't meet my eyes. I asked him why he was scared, and he said, "I dunno. I just feel like it's something I'm not to supposed to be." I reminded him of the time when he was in third grade and he came home crying because another boy called him gay. That day, I had looked him in the eye and told him that the boy meant it as an insult, but it wasn't, because there was nothing insulting about who or how anyone loves. No one could dictate that, I had said, no one can tell you how you can love. The night my son came out, I was angry at the world that made him afraid to tell his mom that he had feelings he hadn't been taught to expect. I was angry at the world that made him think I would be angry at him for loving. No one can tell you who to love, I repeated. Not even me.

The day after the vigil, my son came to me at work and asked me to hold him. There had been fireworks in the night, he said, and he panicked, thinking they were gunshots. He was shaking, breathing too hard, holding too tight. The mother in me automatically soothed him as if he were small: "You're okay, little man. I've got you. You're safe."

He held me even closer and whispered, "Are we?"

He didn't mean me and him. 

He meant his sweet friend who is "them/him" to me and him and on social media, but who is "her" to their mom and their dad and their baby sister and to the university that made them sign a piece of paper promising not to be gay. He meant his musical theater teacher, who is wise and calm and the strongest man I've ever met - he can hold another full grown adult with one hand - and who just married the love of his life two summers ago. He meant his boss and her wife and their Latinx son. He meant the gawky blond 10 year old who planted himself next to his formless 5 year old self so they could share the illustrated story of the Nutcracker. He meant himself.

No, they are not safe. They are not safe. My queer son is not safe.

I keep seeing people saying that gun control is not the answer, and I keep wondering if they are being asked the same question. Yeah, there are a lot of ways that someone determined to hurt my kid could do it. But could they do it to a roomful of people like my son in seven minutes? What about a roomful of people like your child? - that happened, too, except most of the 24 people killed in minutes in Newtown couldn't even have hefted the gun the killer obtained legally, because they were actual children. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that the right to own a machine that was designed with the express purpose of ending another human's life took priority over HUMAN LIVES.

I am angry at the world that has told me to fear for my son's life. I am angry that it could be so easy for someone to take it. I am far, far angrier at those who refuse to make it just a little bit harder.

Vigil

The first time I went to a gay bar I was seven years old. My mother frantically wrapped me in a red plaid Pendleton blanket and firmly pushed down all the locks. I laid with my head propped on the armrest on the door in the tangerine sodium light, listening to the waves of passing cars until she returned, my Uncle Calvin tucked into the shelter of her embrace.

I don't remember his injuries; my mind has created scrapes and bruises on his freckled cheekbones and smooth forehead because at some point the story of that night became family history. I seem to recall a ripped shirt, icepacks on his kidneys and ribs, but I don't know if these are things I saw or things I heard in whispers later on. What I do remember is this: my mother's best friend - so dear I called him my uncle - begged her to marry him, begged to father my sisters and I, swore he'd be true and faithful because he had no choice. He was very young, maybe twenty two. He was gay. He'd been beaten, and was afraid. And my mother and my sisters and I were the only family he felt he had.

I loved him with a fierceness that is unique to children. Every moment I was with him, I loved him more than anyone else in the world. Now, here, half a lifetime later, I have so little left of him - his freckles, yes, and his quick smile but not the color of his eyes or the timbre of his voice. What I have left of him is the sure knowledge that I loved him, and was desperately upset with my mom when she turned down his proposal. I wanted to hold him and keep him and love him forever.

I got about three years.

I don't remember the last time I saw my Uncle Calvin, but I do remember the time before that, or maybe a couple times removed. He had met someone and fallen in love, and although he was stationed hours away from where we were, he and Rolf made the trip so Calvin could introduce him to my mother. Calvin was ebullient and talkative, Rolf quiet and observant behind his glasses. Rolf was thin and wore a turtleneck, even though the day was not particularly cool. They and my mother shared a bottle of the sweet white wine she was so fond of then and in passing Calvin mentioned that Rolf was having a hard time recovering from a winter's illness - bronchitis or the flu, something. The record player went on, and Calvin teased my mother about her country music. I think we must have had dinner a time or two after that - there were avocados - but that day is the last day I remember the feeling of loving him so well settling in my body like impending sleep. I was ten years old.

If you are my age or a little older, if you grew up with an Auntie Jeannie and an Auntie Ingrid who made their own pickles and didn't want kids, if you took a trip to see the quilt - you know the quilt, they could wrap the Washington Monument in it like it was a red plaid blanket - then you've been holding vigil for a long time. This afternoon I knelt, leaned my head against another and wrapped my hands around his while we struggled to light a candle while the wind whipped. All of our candles snuffed out, even after we pressed shoulder to shoulder in an effort to shield their tiny flames, but we knew that the light was there. I have to believe that it is. I am still holding vigil.

Represent

I am four years old, or five. It is the parking lot of a Kmart in either Bonifay, Florida or Great Falls, Montana. My mother is on leave, or between postings. My eldest sister leans down to me, her auburn hair in one shiny gold Goody barrette, and says: “This is it. Mom’s finally decided three is too many. She has the receipt in her purse, you know - Kmart will refund anything, no matter how long you’ve had it!”

It’s a twist on the classic favorite of eldest siblings the world over: You’re adopted. I know, though, that I am not adopted, because my mother wearily explains to strangers again and again that despite my stick straight black hair, despite my almond shaped eyes, despite my brown skin, I am indeed her biological daughter. She is very fair, with golden hair and grey eyes. My next oldest sister is her spitting image. My oldest sister, although she owes her coloring to her Sicilian father, all olive skin and auburn hair, is still light eyed. I am a changeling child, and so my sister has told me that in a moment of weakness, my mother bought me on sale at Kmart, tucking the receipt into her wallet next to the coupons for Campbells’ soup that she always clipped and never spent. There were no more blue eyed babies that day, my sister explains. Mom took pity on me, like I was the runt of a litter of puppies, but there is always the chance she’ll change her mind. She can always get her money back.

The storm of tears that follows banishes both my sisters to the car to sit, without the keys to play the radio. My mother leans in close and explains that you can’t buy real live babies in stores, only baby dolls. She takes me the aisle where the dolls sit, staring into endless nothing with sky blue eyes. She nudges me forward, tells me to choose a baby of my own to take home. I search and search, but there are no tan babies with dark eyes and stick straight black hair. I settle for a black baby, sculpted plastic curls atop her head, because she is the only one I can find whose eyes are not the color of ice.

I am six years old, just barely. One of my sisters has wandered off in a market in Seoul, and my mother, frantic and scared, is spitting angry words at a stall owner, who does not speak English. I am also angry, because I am tired and hungry and sick of being at the market. I am crying and blowing bubbles with my own spit, and my mother, whose patience has reached its end, turns on me and grabs my upper arm, not hard, but firmly. She shakes me once, twice, and raises her voice to say: “Dammit, Ning! Stop blubbering! Be. STILL.” The shopkeeper takes note of this and nearly hurdles the counter to sweep me behind her, shouting back at my mother. She crouches before me, concern painting her features, and she rapidfire questions me in Korean, pointing at my mother in her expensive American blue jeans. It dawns on my mother that this woman thinks she has stolen me, that my own mother has taken me from my real parents, who are plainly not blond and pink from the sun. She reaches into her bag and produces our passports, hers and mine, and points to her name and our visas over and over. My wayward sister chooses this moment to saunter from some far aisle, and my mother pulls too roughly on my hand.

I am eleven years old and my mother has been discharged from service. We are eating a meal together as a family in a restaurant in Louisville. Diners at the tables around us are openly staring at our booth. Esteban, my mother’s beau, shifts uncomfortably and starts to wave down our server. My mother looks him in the eye and very deliberately shakes a Marlboro out of the box. She lights it and we sit in silence until Ban asks me if I want dessert, let’s have dessert, I bet they have ice cream or something. So we order dessert and share plates.  I hear a woman seated nearby huff a noise of disgust when Ban reaches with his spoon and eats a bite of cobbler off my mother’s plate.

I am thirteen years old and we have come to look at this house, the third or the fifth or the tenth this week. I like the lilac bushes arching over the walkway. There is a rounded window on the second floor where I imagine I can sit and read the hours away. We have barely unlatched the gate when the landlord throws open the front door. His gaze sweeps us, my fair mother, her Puerto Rican boyfriend, her half-Asian child. His lip curls. “It’s rented.”

I am sixteen years old and my best friend and I are riding a bus from Thornton, where we live, to Cherry Creek, which is where the mall we want to go to is. A man boards the nearly empty bus and sits directly behind us, behind me, and begins to mutter under his breath about fucking greasers and their wetback sisters, about how the girls will tease and tease with their dark lipstick and high heels but won’t ever spread their legs. He leans toward us and his voice gets louder. He goes on and on about the size of Mexican families and how ugly Mexican brats are. Daisy is frightened and begging me silently to do something. We are still seven or eight stops from our destination, we are in a part of town we do not know. I pull the cord - STOP REQUESTED - and the bus shudders at the side of the road. I grab her hand and as I pull her urgently through the side doors I yell, “I’m Cuban, you asshole!”

I am not Cuban.

I am seventeen and I am listening to Les Miserables on repeat. I am also obsessed with Disney musicals. I have memorized every word to The Little Mermaid, to Beauty and the Beast, to Aladdin. The best thing about Aladdin, for me, is Lea Salonga singing Princess Jasmine. Lea Salonga is the first Filipina that I can name who has made it to stardom. My dad boasts he is friends with her father, a fellow doctor. I buy Miss Saigon because she sings on it, too, and am unsettled, put out, by the fact that she is Filipina but the character is Vietnamese and this discrepancy is lost on everyone, seemingly, but me. Very soon I am twenty and she is cast as Eponine in Les Mis, and I am triumphant and I tell everyone who will listen that my dad and hers are friends, that I am a single degree of separation from this perfection. It makes me feel a little better, that Eponine is French. It makes me feel as though maybe someday I will be allowed to sing a lead role.

I resisted listening to Hamilton for months. I do not listen to hip hop, it is not my music, it is not a part of my cultural landscape. But Alexander Hamilton has been my favorite founding father since the seventh grade, and so I owe it to twelve year old me, Les Mis loving me, tanned, dark eyed me, to pay attention for a moment. I am listening to Angelica Schuyler celebrate the joy of intelligence, I am listening to Eliza write herself out of and into the narrative, I am listening to fighting and loving and yearning and burning and bleeding and living and writing and dying and I am listening to dozens of dark eyed, dark haired men and women resculpt our shared history. 

When I finally look at photos of the production, I am struck by a candid of Lin-Manuel as A.Ham and Philipa Soo as Eliza, with a turning chorus member behind them as he bends over her hand. The dancer is blond. Philipa’s hair hangs straight down, glossy and black. Lin-Manuel’s dark eyes snap with humor, with wit. I imagine that somewhere, just out of frame, there is a table with three half-eaten desserts.

There was a star danced

Bea's birth story

The first thing you need to know is that she saved my life. Not like, pulled me out of a burning building or gave me CPR. The saving was entirely in my head, but rest assured, I was drowning, and she pulled me to shore.

I didn't know it was her, at the time. At the time, I refused to consider a name. She was a concept, an abstraction, not a person. All I knew was that there were two hearts beating in my body, and I had to keep breathing because otherwise there was no oxygen for that second heart to push. So I kept breathing, with the vague notion that perhaps after the concept was proved, after the abstract solidified, I could take my leave, and others could assume the responsibility I was too sad, too tired and broken, to shoulder.

I sent her brother to school that morning in a fake beard and a gilt crown. He had fought his way into the world seven years before, taking the better part of two days to burst bloody into my life, a screaming stranger. I was preparing myself for battle again, because his birth was the only way I knew. I had laid in stores of candles so I wouldn't have to face the dark night ahead in the harsh glare of overhead lights. I made myself lay down to rest after the appointment where they told me to expect to wait out the weekend, to come again on Monday to talk about the option of having them end it for me. It was Friday morning. The sun was more brilliant than October sun has any right to be.

When I woke, there was a tide rolling in me. A few short weeks before, my friends had come and wrapped my belly in plaster tape and so the first thing I saw was my effigy, festooned with flowers and dirt and an arcing rainbow. That belly did not ripple and grow taut; mine did. I called my ex, asked him to come and walk me. When my son was born, we had walked in the heart of the night to the harbor and heard the boats crying out for far waters. We did not get nearly so far with her. She let us get only blocks away before stealing my breath and the strength from my legs, forcing me to brace against the signposts and streetlamps. I turned us homeward.

I had barely reached the door when the boy returned, trailing his scarlet coat and candy wrappers. He threw himself around me, whispered to the idea in me that he was glad, so glad. He and his father dragged the birthing pool outside while I tried to sit in lotus and ride over the crests. My mother called the doula, called my best friend. The pool came in, the water came in, I stepped in, and the waves became less violent. It wasn't a storm, just the sea.

Soon my house was full of people that I loved - three of my four best friends, playing Nina Simone on the stereo, brewing tea, eating crackers; my son, holding my hand while I labored, stroking my hair, wiping my face with damp cloths; my doula, who had been my midwife with him, anchoring me with her words, keeping me from washing away. Soon I was asked to leave the pool and attend other things.

The second I stood, the waves bowled me over. I shook and gasped. They wrapped me in blankets and towels, pushed my feet into shoes, half carried, half dragged me to a car. I protested - my son had come at home, in our bed. I nursed him to sleep his first night in the very spot he'd been born. I'd do it again, we were so close to shore! No, I was told. There was no preparation for such an event.

We reached the hospital and I wouldn't let any of the nurses touch me. They could take my signs as soon as I was ready, but I was preoccupied with the swells and ebbs. My doctor came, took a single glance at my tribe surrounding me, and went to sit quietly in a corner. My son was taken out by his dad for a respite from the intensity, but returned in short order, having become distressed that his baby would make its arrival and his absence would be noticed.

She slipped into her first breath quietly, unobtrusively. Three tries and her hair was in my hand, another and I was holding her shoulders, two final ones, and they were handing her slick pink body up to my waiting lips. Her brother clipped the line between my body and hers.

Her eyes were still pools, and, no stranger, she knew me. It was Friday, just before dinner.

Her name means, "She brings joy (goodness)" It is an enormous burden to place on a damp eight pounds of sleep and hunger, but I let her be my joy, and so I lived.

She is a deep, still pool to this day, with spangles on the surface of her. She is sunny, she is sweet, she is steady. She is pragmatic, and yet delights in whimsy. She spreads joy like warm honey.

Were you born in a merry hour?, her namesake was asked.

Nay, to be sure, she answered, my mother cried. But there was a star danced...

And under that was I born.

October 29, 2004

I have spent this whole week battling my idiot brain, which appears to be convinced that it is not eventually deadly to attempt to make me survive on four hours of sleep a night. I'm not fishing for sympathy here; it's merely the window dressing you need so you can understand that I was willingly out of bed at moments before dawn on my single free day of the week. What I'm trying to say is that there are very, very few benefits to insomnia, from where I stand, but getting into the only pop-up French bakery in town right as they open is the best one I've run across thus far.

The opportunity to indulge in croissants stuffed with prosciutto or galettes adorned with oranged-scented frangipane and petals of pear is never to be waived, but when those delicacies are crafted by the hands of someone you know and care for? I thought of her with every buttery flake that tumbled onto my shirt. She is a marvel: she bakes, she cooks (grilled octopus, roasted capon, fresh pasta), she dances, she builds and wears elaborate, meticulous costumes...

And she is not alone in her gifts. All of my friends are like this - knitting baby sweaters overnight from Icelandic wool, painting landscapes on pieces of paper the size of two postage stamps, rescuing and restoring a 70 year old guitar, teaching 10 year olds to sing opera. My friends are talented. They are makers, builders, creators, players, teachers, writers, sharers, thinkers... My friends are doers, every last one of them, and they are good at the things they do.  I am fortunate to be counted amongst their ranks.

Go make stuff, and make it good. Throw it out there into the world. I'm going to start with this blog, and force myself to write a little bit again. I haven't done enough yet.

Have you?