A Mother’s Perspective: Letting Go of Envisioned Futures

By Jay Stracke

The sun started to fall below the rooftops of the houses that lined against our own. Crockpots and slow cookers stood together like a row of soldiers atop the kitchen counter, working patiently toward the evening’s meal. I felt my hands trembling as I mustered the courage to speak. The sentence was caught in my throat. My mother was halfway out the back door when it happened.

“Mom, I’m gay.”

The words almost spoke themselves. Time stopped. Each anxious heartbeat shook my entire body. I was met with silence, and we were both met with tears. Standing there, my mother was consumed with loss, mourning the death of the life she had imagined for me.

Living and speaking one’s truth is not always easy. Oftentimes, it can be the most difficult thing we as people have to do. For queer people especially, opening up and communicating about our identities can be an experience filled with a great deal of unease and worry; and when we choose to tell the people we love the most, these feelings of fear often grow stronger.

I was no exception to this. My anxieties surrounding coming out to my mom were born from the smaller moments: The little hesitations she expressed whenever I’d ask her how she felt about LGBTQ identity. The discomfort I’d see on her face any time a queer portrayal would be featured on the latest primetime show.

But I understood why she was hesitant. Born in Orange, Texas, my mother was raised by two loving parents alongside her younger sister. She attended the neighborhood church where her own mother worked as a Sunday School teacher, played with the neighbor’s children outside until the sun set, and rode her bike to and from school every day. It was a traditional 1960s picture-perfect southern setting. No conversations about queer identities existed; it was never discussed.

Now, five years later, I sit with my mother under a café awning, as her cappuccino releases steam into the air. We reflect on the day I first spoke my truth aloud, and together, we are able to have an honest discussion.

For my mother, the discomfort around my sexuality began to wane as the reality of my identity slowly sank in. “I had to get over my fear to get comfortable,” she says. “It took me some time.”

As time passed, my mom realized that, in order to move forward as a mother to a queer person, she needed to relinquish her preexisting visions of my future. “I never thought about it before then,” she says. “I just didn’t see my son being gay as a possibility. I always envisioned you’d get married to a woman, have a wedding, have kids, and that I’d be grandma. I realized, once you came out, that your life would be so much more different than what I envisioned.”

“I needed to not insert anything about what I wanted, because really that’s not what it’s about,” she continues. “I think it’s a natural thing for parents to envision their children’s lives. I think a lot of parents say they just want their children to be happy. But that’s a bunch of bunk, because parents have all kinds of ideas of what they think ought to happen. To be a parent to a gay child, you have to give up the future you’ve envisioned so that they may live the future they’re meant to have.”

“I remember at work one day, somebody was asking about my son,” she recalls. “They asked if he had a girlfriend or anything. And I said, ‘No, he’s gay.’ And I remember it rolling off of my tongue so easily. Immediately I thought, ‘Okay, I’m there.’”

My mother and I are now lucky enough to exist in a warm and safe space where conversations about my queer identity come easily and support comes naturally. I’ve even experienced the joy of seeing my phone light up and opening it to find a photo of my mother and her friends at a march in Austin, holding a sign that read “Love is love is love is love” proudly painted in every shade and hue.

“A lot of judgment dies hard. It takes a long time, and we’re in the South,” my mother says. “We just need to love each other, and then the rest will work itself out.”