by Rivka Solomon
“Busy tonight, Rivka?” Mom asked as she gathered up a half dozen economy-sized bags of generic potato chips in her arms. That was just like her, trying to grab hold of as much as she could.
“No,” I answered hesitantly, picking up the two she dropped. I still couldn’t believe that here I was, fifteen years old, and I’d ended up with nothing to do on a Saturday night. In my high school, in 1978, only the dorks were Saturday-night-stay-at-homers.
“Like to help at a fund-raiser for the theater? It’s a women’s party,” my mom said.
I thought back to the one other all-women’s party I’d been to a year earlier, when I was fourteen. I’d gone with my mom that night only because my friends were going to see Jaws and I’d already seen it twice. But I ended up having a good time. Carol, an old family friend, was a doctor—a rich doctor. She and her girlfriend of ten years had rented a yacht in Boston Harbor. Outrageous decorations, excellent food, loud music; it must have cost a mint. Most of the party-goers were lesbians. There were as many women in tuxes as there were in fancy dresses. At first I couldn’t help but stare. But by the end of the night it was nothing special. Just a bunch of boring adults—like always.
Thinking back to the good grub and loud music of the yacht party, I told my mom, “Okay. But I don’t care if it’s a fund-raiser, you better pay minimum wage, or I’ll be an exploited worker.”
“Ten bucks. But you can invite a friend if you want.”
“Naw, that’s okay.” Was she crazy? My friends weren’t interested in supporting my parent’s small, social change theater. And they certainly weren’t ready for women in tuxes. It was only a few months ago in junior high when kids were calling girls “lezzies” for acting weird—or for nothing at all.
I threw on a T-shirt and jeans and jumped in the car.
By midnight, my work for the night—collecting the cover charge at the door and filling the wine cups—was over. The place was packed. If there was a building fire code, we had long since violated it. The living room floor was dangerously creaking and rocking as over one hundred women bounced up and down in time with the music. I saw a rare open seat on the sofa and grabbed it. I wasn’t interested in joining the revelry on the dance floor. The party-goers were adults, too old for me to play with.
A stocky, almost chubby woman sat down on the arm of the couch right next to me. She was younger than many of the others but still older than me by about a decade. She had on cowboy boots and a leather vest.
She tapped her sternum and yelled over the music, “Cheri.”
I nodded. I didn’t feel like talking. “Rivka.”
“You live around here?” Cheri asked as she played with the tassel on her boots.
“Sorta. A fifteen-minute drive.”
“Need a ride home?” She grinned.
I shifted around in my seat. I was never comfortable when a guy hit on me, and now I saw it wasn’t much easier when the pursuer was female.
“That’s okay. I’ll get a ride home with my mom.” I pointed to the woman in the black sequined jacket who was banging a tambourine above her head as she danced in the middle of a circle of women. She was the center of the room’s attention, setting the tone of the whole party.
Just then she looked up and beamed a smile my way. She lit up the room; she shone.
“That’s your mom?!” Cheri gasped and pointed.
I understood; Mom looked and acted too young to be my mom. I seemed too old to be her daughter. She was playful exuberance; I was stoic maturity.
“How old are you?” Cheri asked, skeptical.
“Fifteen,” I said, hoping it would squash all thoughts of romance.
“Well, I’ll be—”
“I’m gonna help with clean-up now. Bye,” I said, bolting. Cheri was still watching my mom dance.
* * *
Behind my house—the house ten commune members called home—there was a tent. That’s where people went when they wanted to be alone, out of the chaos of the commune.
“Come on! Where else can we go?” My new boyfriend nudged me. He was brand new, days new.
“I don’t think so.” I knew what it would mean, and I wasn’t ready. He was my first boyfriend ever. It was only a week after the party, and already I had to face pressure, again, from someone who wanted something from me. Something I wasn’t eager to give.
“Come on ...” He took my hand and pulled. The rest of me reluctantly followed. Actually, I didn’t know what would happen if I went with him into the tent. And I didn’t know if I wanted to know.
I was pulled all the way to the canvas door. Jonathan pushed it aside as I stood at the entrance. He held the green cloth flap open as our eyes adjusted to the darkness inside. Then I saw what looked like movement.
“Oh! Mom! Sorry!”
“Oh. Rivka. No, that’s okay ... uh, Cheri, you remember Rivka.”
“...um, yeah. Hi, Rivka.”
“Uh, hi. Um, this is Jonathan ... Okay. Bye.” I could have died.
“What was that? That was your mom,” Jonathan asked when we were almost out of earshot. He was rushing behind me, trying to catch up. “Who was the other one?”
“Cheri.”
“Cheri? Who’s she? What were they doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Let’s go inside the house.”
“Hey, is your mom a, you know, a lesbian?”
“Cheri’s just a friend.”
“Your mom does it with women? Awesome ... Hey, if she’s out here, can we go in your bedroom?”
* * *
It was awful. Awful. I had seen them together. On the floor of the big green tent, legs entwined. The tent, where you only went if you didn’t want to be bothered, if you wanted to be alone. Even if it had been a man I would have hated it. But it wasn’t a man; it was a woman. So, what did that mean? I didn’t know, and anyway, it didn’t really matter much who, just that it wasn’t Dad.
Cheri’s presence in my mom’s life soon became a constant. She wasn’t half bad, really, giving gift after gift of cuddly stuffed animals until there was no more room left on my mom’s bed. But I never forgave Cheri. How dare she: hitting on both daughter and mother on the same night! I carried this resentment with me into all my interactions, all my conversations with her. I also felt funny that Cheri was so young—more like an older sister’s age than someone for my mother to be dating.
My sister Tally left home at seventeen, soon after my parents separated, soon after Cheri came into the picture. Tally had been itching to get out for years. Communal living was not for her. Nor for me, but she had finished high school; I had two years to go. Tally always complained loudly, “Why can’t I just have a normal family?” We were anything but. With the other performers in the theater they ran together, Mom and Dad dressed up like bizarre creatures and performed in front of strangers, even on the streets. They smoked pot occasionally and sometimes experimented with drugs. And now one of them was having sex with her own kind. Tally was mortified. She never told anyone about Mom becoming a lesbian.
I was different. It didn’t bother me. Not now that I was almost through with my first year of high school. Not now that I had my own group of close friends—most of whom were as weird as my parents. We were ’70s teen hippies, the alternative kids at the high school. We wore long skirts with hiking boots or torn jeans with huge psychedelic patches. We led loud protests against nuclear power. Everyone at school hated us, especially the jocks who threw stones and spit when we walked by. But we were comfortable with each other. Certainly comfortable enough to all know Rivka’s mom was warm, open to kids hanging out in her new home ... and gay.
I never directly discussed my mother’s sexual orientation with my friends but never hid it either. No one reacted as if shocked when they found out. Not that any of us were gay. No, we were all safely in heterosexual relationships—or else quiet about our desires.
* * *
When I surfaced from my teen years and reached, gasping, the oxygen of my early twenties, it was the mid-1980s and the annual gay marches were just beginning to take hold in the Northeast. At the rainbow-balloon-filled march, about one thousand people in my small college town in western Massachusetts chanted and danced. I nodded my head in understanding when I heard the theme was “pride.” The sting of junior high school jabs like “lezzie” had taken its toll on all of us, leaving black and blue marks on some in its wake. Pride was the correct—the direct—contradiction.
>I went to the march to support the only out lesbian in my circle, my best friend June, and all the other lesbians and gay men of the world. Though I identified as straight, We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it! happily skipped out of my mouth with the rest of the crowd. “Another gay teacher,” sported one woman’s sign. “We are your doctors,” said a second. But when I saw the one that said, “Proud mother of a lesbian daughter,” then I knew what I had to do.
When I was a teen, being gay, lesbian, or bisexual had been readily accepted in my family environment and at the theater. Perhaps this was why it wasn’t until the Pride march that I stopped to think about how challenging life must have been for the lesbian closest to me—the lesbian I called Mom. She was a bold woman, out in our suburban town, in her work, in her life. I suddenly wanted to support her just the way I’d support any other person dedicated to a struggle for liberation. But although she regularly used the words and spoke the lingo, I had never actually done so with her. What should I say? How should I say it?
When it came time for my next visit home, I knew I needed to say the words. They were right and true, even if they felt awkward. We were sitting in the yard and talking as my mother pulled huge clumps of tall grass from what should have been a flower bed. We talked about this and that, but the most important words, the ones I wanted to say badly, still didn’t come.
Certainly I was proud of my mom. She was strong, smart, and bold—a dynamic tambourine dancer in a circle of women. Anything that made her made me proud of my mom, so that had to include her sexuality too, right?
“Mom, I’m proud you are a lesbian,” I finally blurted out without breathing. It was the only way. “And proud to be your daughter.”
“Thanks, Rivka.” She smiled, glanced up from her weeding, and said, “Pass me that bucket of mulch, will ya?”
Big whoop. She didn’t seem to care much, she was so comfortable with herself and her choices. That’s when I wondered, had I said it for her, or had I said it for me? Either way, almost every Pride march since then I’ve been sporting my own sign: “Yet Another Daughter Proud of Her Lesbian Mom!”
A version of this essay by Rivka Solomon first appeared in Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents, ed. Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). More recently, Rivka edited the anthology That Takes Ovaries!: Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002) and, together with her playwright mom, adapted the book for the stage. Rivka now leads a women and girls’ empowerment organization of the same name (www.ThatTakesOvaries.org).
