The beginning of the seasons

Into Winter

I cannot say for sure when I knew I was a lesbian. For years, the word itself held the fascination and fear of a flame. At first, it was appealing, warming parts of me and crackling in a way that nothing else did. I couldn’t look away. But eventually, as I reached out my hands to better experience the heat, my parents slapped those hands away. This is an imperfect analogy. While I have no doubt that some of my parent’s motivation was protective, the truth is that embracing that word, and the reality that it represents, would not have burned me.

But because of my father’s casual disdain, and my mother’s furious disgust, I believed that being a lesbian would burn the heart out of me, so I kept away from the fire.

Of course, if you stay away from a fire, you need to find other ways to stay warm. It’s not so hard in the warmth of a summer day. But none of us walk in the sun all the time, and for some, the climate is such that it’s more often wintry cold, and dark.

Abuse is hard to write about. Writing involves dwelling on something, calling up emotion and connection, and these are memories and feelings I have tried to cut away for a long time. But suffice it to say that my father’s selfish neglect led to me being left vulnerable to things I was too young to understand, and my mother’s own mental instability and suffering was vented on me with a regularity that took me years to acknowledge as abnormal behaviour.

Because what is ‘normal’? Normal is what we see every day. I faced her mercurial moods every day, sometimes loving and jovial, well thought of in the community, sometimes resentful and violent, because she had such difficult children.

We were difficult, that much is true. All children are, if you’re parenting properly. I suspect my dad thought I was an easy child for a long time, because I did all I could to try and please him as he became more and more distant, pursuing the calling of his libido.

My mother, though, wasn’t distant. She was always there. She was there with hugs and support. She was there with fury when I talked too much, or talked back, or said things she didn’t want to hear.

She didn’t mind me having friends. The girls who popped by seemed nice enough, and a girl needs friends. She was ok with picking me up the morning after that night out clubbing for the first time, girls need to have a little fun, just be sensible next time, catch the last train, you know your brother needs to be supervised.

She’d always had a skeptical view of women together like that. Not only was it not proper sex, you were only supposed to touch that place to clean it. I spent a long time, as a tomboy, wishing I had a penis, feeling I must be broken because I liked girls and I didn’t have the right equipment to do it with them. Not that I understood what ‘doing it’ was. My only knowledge was charged onscreen kisses between Han Solo and Princess Leia (I was Han, of course) and a hideous submission when I was around 8 or 9 to a boy who had the equipment and did horrible things with it.

So, when I came out to her, and told her that I was gay (I chose the word because lesbian was still too hot to handle) I’m not sure what I expected. She was furious. It was the kind of anger that feels almost unmoored, like she herself didn’t know why she raged or what drove her to pick up the cheap table by her chair and smash it over me as my arms flew up to protect myself. It broke apart easily, held together with staples and old glue, and I had no resistance to her forceful disgust. The only thing she said was “No, you’re not.”

Dad was gone by that point, she had been struggling along raising two difficult children on benefits, and while I didn’t yet understand that her violence was wrong, I didn’t like it.

So, in this wintry darkness, unable to warm myself by the fire safely, convinced it would consume me instead of comfort, I sought out other consolations.

I found religion.