Gaywatch Nguyen Family--blah, blah, blah
It started with nerdery.
A few Wednesdays ago, I found myself sitting with Bruce outside of Piper Down, an Irish Pub in SLC (when I post pictures of me at Piper Down on Facebook, I always go out of my way to say that I don’t drink, as though I am worried about the judgings and murmurings-but for the record, I don’t drink). We were getting ready to go to Geeks Who Drink (again, I don’t drink), which is a weekly trivia game show thing. And just to be ready, I pulled out my driver’s license in preparation to show it to the bouncer guy and much to my shock as I looked at the expiration date-it was expired. And not like by a few weeks or something, mind you, it had been expired since my birthday…in DECEMBER!
A quick perusal of the Interwebs brought me to the attention of recent HB 81which UT legislatures passed in fear of their whiteness being jeopardized (another topic for another time). In short, HB 81 makes it harder to obtain things like a driver’s license without proper documentation. Well, this shouldn’t affect you, Mike, you’re an American, clamor my readership and friends. Well, according to UT, though that might be the case, I don’t happen to have any of those documentations on me-namely, my birth certificate.
Well, there is one person that might have my birth certificate-my mother.
I haven’t talked to her in over a year. The last time we had any contact was when I sent “The Letter”-you know, the gay one. Not wanting to open a can of worms that resembled anything like speaking with my mother, I printed off the documents I would need to request a copy of my birth certificate from the State of California. Needing to get it notarized, I took the paperwork to my nearest bank only to be rebuffed by the notary public: I needed an unexpired proof of ID before they can notarize anything.
Trying to be helpful, the notary public asked, “Do you have your passport?”
“Well, you see...it’s expired,” I replied.
There was only one thing left to do.
Later that night, I called my mother. Surprisingly, she didn’t start the conversation with guilt, which she liked to do when there were long spaces of time between contacts between us. Maybe, I fathomed, maybe time had mellowed her out. Well, I eat my words soon after as the subject turned to my eventual graduation. She used a pretty verb in Vietnamese to describe my schooling process that literally translates to “pull long,” meaning that I have stretched my education for a long time. Still, it could have been worse, but secretly, I wished she would have been more excited at the prospect of me actually finishing versus focusing on the length of time but beggars can’t be choosers.
The subject then drifted to my need of birth certificate. I remember now that she seemed suspicious that I would need such a document-as though I was slowly and secretly collecting all of my important life documents to erase my existence out of her life-as though these papers held me legally hers, something I’m sure she might have taken comfort in.
She offered to mail them back to me.
And the conversation drifted back to college but this time it was about my brother’s graduation this coming June.
“Your brother is graduating,” she explained. “It is an important family event. You should visit.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I countered. I mean, I wanted to visit, for my brother if anything else but I didn’t know if I wanted to deal with my parents. “I will have to talk to Bruce and see what I want to do.”
Silence.
Guilty-I’m guilty of throwing out Bruce’s name just to see what reaction I was going to get and I was fishing for some kind of response but silence wasn’t exactly it.
“Well, it is a family thing and you need to decide whether or not you want to come,” my mom explained as though the concepts and precepts were unfamiliar to me.
“It’s not just that,” I stammered. “We don’t have the money.”
“If you need money, I will pay for the plane ticket. You just need to decide if you want to come,” offered my mother.
“Well…”
“Just make a decision.”
The decision my mom was referring to was the one where I would once again decide to submit.
Submit.
Submit to her will, to be exact.
She started to explain that it had been too long since I last visited. That you know of, I said to myself, as I was just recently down there in November of last year to help my sister and her family move back to Idaho.
“Whatever happens and whatever decisions you make, it doesn’t change the fact that we are your parents and you are our child. It has been fate,” she rationalized, as though I was unaware of these facts.
“I know, Mom. It just has been hard,” I reasoned. “Things have been hard. I’ve hurt a lot over all of this.
There.
I was alluding to my secret gay life and the coming out and to the gayness-to all of it.
“You think you’ve hurt over this? I’ve hurt more than you. I’ve cried,” replied my mom.
True to my mom’s nature, she has been internalizing everything-still. It is very much, much like her to consider the things her children do as an affront to her and as punishment that she must endure because of her lot in life. Not knowing how to respond to her claims to one-upping me over who has hurt more over my homosexuality, I let her continue.
“We are okay with you coming home to visit. And only you,” she stated. “Well, I can’t speak for your father, but I don’t ever want to see him. If you come home, you can only come home by yourself.”
I mentally made a note about my mother’s reference to her failing marriage.
“Well, I don’t see how that’s possible because you need to get more comfortable about the idea of Bruce in your life because we’re getting married and he’s going to be your son-in-law whether you like it or not!”
Sorry, I didn’t say that last paragraph. Though, I wish I did.
“It’s just that-,” my mom started.
“Good night, mom.”
“Good night.”
And I hung up the phone.
I wonder if it will ever stop being about power and who controls who. If my parents, I mean my mother (I can’t speak for my father either), will ever be okay with accepting their children for exactly who they are and love them unconditionally.
I don’t think that’s too much to be asking for.
It’s funny to hear some of my friends’ advice on the situation which ranges from having utmost sympathy for me to having me adopt a If-They-Don’t-Accept-You-Then-They-Need-To-F*-Off attitude.
At the end of the day though, I have to be okay with the fact that I might never gain their acceptance and that being exactly who I am comes at a price that I must be willing to pay. It just hurts and there is no getting away from that. To be comfortable with who I am and the life I live, I must protect my heart from my parents. I have to be able to ignore the petty comments and the unspoken words. I have to be able to live my life without so much as a care to their opinions. Though I continue to respect them, I cannot respect their opinions. In a way, my memories of a tight nit family, which has never existed, has to give way to reality-no matter how much I long for something that feels like it should be there-a kind of phantom-limb thing but a phantom-family.
It is like the only way to survive is to leave the memories of the dead behind.
If I am honest with myself, they have been dead to me for a long time and I just haven’t realized it. I have just been trying to live with ghosts.
But it is time to move on without them.