Coming Out as a Modern Family
By MARIA BELLO
Published: November 29, 2013
When my 12-year-old son, Jackson, asked me if there was something I
wasn’t telling him, I replied, “There are a lot of things I don’t tell
you.”
“Like what?”
“Adult stuff.”
He persisted: “What kind of adult stuff?”
This was the moment I had been anticipating and dreading for months. “Like romantic stuff,” I said, fumbling for words.
“What kind of romantic stuff?”
“Well,” I said. “Like how sometimes you can be friends with someone, and
then it turns romantic, and then you’re friends again. Like with Dad
and me. Or romantic like Bryn and me were, and then he and I became
friends.”
“So are you romantic with anyone right now?” he asked.
I took a deep breath, knowing that my answer, and his response, would have an impact on our lives for a very long time.
He was right; I was with someone romantically and I hadn’t told him. I
had become involved with a woman who was my best friend, and, as it
happens, a person who is like a godmother to my son.
How and when should I tell him? When I explained the situation to a
therapist, she smiled and said, “Your son may say a lot of things about
you when he’s older, but he will never say his mother was boring.”
Her advice was to wait until he asked. And now here he was, asking.
About a year before this conversation, I had been sitting in my garden
in California, looking through photos and old journals I have kept since
childhood. From a green tattered notebook with ink hearts drawn on it
to the one I started in Haiti while helping after the earthquake there
in January 2010, the journals told stories that seemed woven together by
a similar theme.
I read about the handful of men and the one woman I had been in romantic
relationships with, passages rife with pain and angst. It seemed when I
was physically attracted to someone, I would put them in the box of
being my “soul mate” and then be crushed when things didn’t turn out as I
had hoped.
I read about the two men I fell for while working on films. I was sure
each was my soul mate, a belief fueled by sexual attraction that made me
certain I was in love, only to find that when the filming ended, so did
the relationship. And I read about the man who asked me to marry him
four years ago over the phone, before we had even kissed. Three months
later we were in his kitchen throwing steaks at each other’s heads in
anger.
As I continued to look through photos, I came across a black-and-white
one of my best friend and me taken on New Year’s Eve. We looked so
happy, I couldn’t help but smile. I remembered how we had met two years
before; she was sitting in a bar wearing a fedora and speaking in her
Zimbabwean accent.
We had an immediate connection but didn’t think of it as romantic or
sexual. She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant and funny
people I had ever met, but it didn’t occur to me, until that
soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love
each other romantically.
What had I been waiting for all of these years? She is the person I like
being with the most, the one with whom I am most myself.
The next time I saw her, in New York, I shared my confusing feelings,
and we began the long, painful, wonderful process of trying to figure
out what our relationship was supposed to be.
First, how would it affect my son? He trusted Clare. He loved her. He
had never met most of the men I had been in love with and had no idea I
had been with a woman as well. Second, how would it affect my career? I
have never defined myself by whom I slept with, but I know others have
and would.
It’s hard for me even to define the term “partner.” For five years I
considered my partner to be a friend then in his 70s, John Calley, with
whom I talked daily. He was the one who picked me up each time I had a
breakdown about another failed romance. Because we were platonic, did
that make him any less of a partner?
Leggi il resto della lettera qui.
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