“Wha—You are telling me this now?” She’s shaking her head. Not the best response, but it’s not the worst. She’s not screaming, she’s not backing away or leaving the room. Her ears are wide open; she’s listening to me.
“It’s not a fluke. I’ve liked women, girls, for as long as I can remember. The same time I liked boys, I liked girls, too.” My mind jumps to summer camp when I was seven years old, crushing on a beautiful blond girl several years older than me, the whip of her hair as she ran by during tag. “It’s always been this way. And I know that might be hard to hear, but I couldn’t keep it in anymore. It’s just me.”
I say the last sentence softly, and it seems to relax the panic in my mom’s eyes. She lets out a choked laugh, and now I’m the surprised one.
“Ever since the banquet, I suspected,” she says. “But you’re so girly,” she insists. “Are you sure?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, and hope it didn’t come out too lasciviously.
She covers her face in her hands and breathes out, then releases them. “Is there still a chance you will be with a man? You still like men? Or is that gone now?”
I try so hard not to be frustrated. I take a shallow breath. “I do like men, too, that hasn’t changed. There’s a possibility I mightend up with a guy. But I’m telling you this because I might end up with a woman. And you have to know this about me.”
She says, pleadingly, “It would be easier if you were with a man. For you and—I don’t like to say this to put pressure on you—for me, too.”
The whispers. I hate that this is part of the equation. I get the sense she would have almost no qualms if not for the outside intrusion, for the chorus of people yelling, “Oh the horror!” I feel for her. It’s hard to say screw everyone else. I mean, it’s what I’ve been having trouble with this whole time. I can’t expect perfection from her when I can barely bring myself to buck convention.
“I know. And I’m sorry for all the pain this might cause you. I don’t mean it to happen to us. But there’s no helping it. This is who I am.”
She shakes her head. “The community is so backward.”
My face gets hot, my eyes fill. She gets it. I knew she’d get it. “It is.”
Then her eyes well up with tears, and they don’t seem happy. I want to groan because when my mom cries I capitulate to whatever she wants and turn my back on myself. I can handle her anger and hauteur, but never her genuine sadness. She takes a small step toward me. “Does this mean you will never have babies?”
I almost laugh. Of course that’s what she’s worried about. I shake my head emphatically. “No, it doesn’t. I want kids, one day. There are ways to have kids without being married to a man.” I switch to Armenian, “One day, you will become a grandmother.”
She lets out a huge breath and crosses herself. “Then I can live with anyone you want to be with. Tantig Sona and her big mouth be damned.”
I hope she’ll do a whole lot more than just live with it, but this is huge. It feels like Tantig Sona is a stand-in for the rest of the bigotry of the community. Mom’s on my side, and I can hardly believe it.
“Mom, it will be okay. I will make you proud,” I say.
“Nareh, I am already proud,” she replies. “Diana sent me your article. It was—I couldn’t believe my daughter wrote such a thing. I felt I was there with you. And I wanted to strangle that man who did that to you.”
She... she read it? “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I was about to tell you, then you interrupt me to tell me you are gay. Or not gay, I don’t know the words for it.” She huffs, then continues, “It was very good, that’s what I’m saying. With that talent, I know you will find some new job.”
My bottom lip shuts against the top one, trying to prevent a cry from bursting out. I can’t get out the thank you, so I step over and hug my mom, and she hugs me back, and we’re in it for a while, and I forgot how good it feels to just hold and be held by your mom. I’m a little kid again; she smells and feels the same as when I was five.
When we finally pull away my mom looks at me funny. “You know, there was an essay you had to write freshman year about a classmate. You wrote about your soccer teammate, what was her name, Jasmine? It was very descriptive of her body. I thought maybe you looked up to her a lot, but now maybe I think different?”
I know the exact assignment she’s talking about. As a naive little freshman we had the weird prompt to write a descriptive essay about a classmate, and I took it as an opportunity to let my heart run free about my feelings for Jasmine on the page (not understanding it was actually lust, though I had visions of us makingout in the janitor’s closet, not included in the essay). I can’t believe Mom remembers it.
“Yep,” I say, “That wasn’t just friendly admiration. Full-on crush.”
She shakes her head. “I would never see anything like that. Back home, everyone was either married or unmarried, there was no gay. You sometimes suspected, but a woman couldn’t be walking down the street with a man you weren’t married to, much less two men holding hands. They’d be murdered on the spot.”
“That’s horrible,” I say.
She makes a sound of deep agreement. Then, her voice gets small, serious. “That stays in the mind forever. When I saw you kissing her—Erebuni—I thought,They are going to kill my daughter.”
Whoa. I never knew that. I could tell her don’t worry, that’s not going to happen. Her fear is unfounded. But she’s sharing this part of herself with me, and I can tell she doesn’t want to be reassured by facts. She wants me to know how scared she was. This is as close to an apology as I might get for the way she acted at the banquet.
“I’m sorry you felt that way.”
Mom sighs. “I know it’s stupid.”
