Parents: An Out There! Collaboration

17 March 2001

Education has made the difference

OUT THERE! COLLABORATION TOPIC FOR March 2001:
This month, explore the relationships between you and your parents. (In the interests of modern times, feel free to incorporate all meanings of the concept of “parents” as you see fit.) What kind of relationship do you have with them? What kind of relationships do you wish you had with them, and with whom are you closer? What events have shaped how you view your parents, and how you relate to them? Do you find that you grow closer or more estranged from the folks as time goes by? What, if anything, would you change? How has the way these people raised you affected how you view life? What have you learned?

Unlike a lot of gay men, I actually have a very good relationship with my parents. We get along very well, we communicate daily via email, and both they and I are free to call the other(s) for whatever we need (like free legal advice *grin*). It's taken a while to get to this stage, but it's been worth the wait.

When I first came out to my parents, accidentally, our relationship entered an extremely rocky state. We had gotten alone pretty well before that, or at least as well as an 18 year old can get along with his parents. When they found out I was gay in November of my freshman year at college, we quickly grew apart. They wanted me to see a psychologist about it (I did, twice, at their insistence), I quickly found a job that they'd accept and which would take me as far away from them as possible for the following summer.

I went off to camp in Maine (the experience from which comes my love of all things moose), and from then on, with the exception of the summer I returned from Taiwan, I did not live with them again for more than a week at a time. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in this case it was very true. They gradually came around, though it took years, to accepting who I am and even to welcoming my partners into their home and acknowledging the role said partners have in my life. At times they'll ask questions ("Is it appropriate to get a card or something for Doug?"), which shows that they're thinking about it, but then again I expect they ask the same questions of my brother about his girlfriends. A good sign.

Two changes came over my parents in the eleven years since I came out which I think have really made the difference in our relationship (for the better). For one, they finally woke up and realized that the Republicans had absolutely nothing to give to people in their income bracket. The second was that both of them went back to school to get graduate degrees. An MA in education for my mother (she's a middle school librarian), and an MPA, an MA, and now soon a Ph.D. for my father (he's working on his dissertation now - the second masters was part of the Ph.D. program). For Dad the education has so expanded his view of the world and how he interacts with it.

The graduate program is in Urban Studies (or Urban Planning - I always get them confused), and he's so much more engaged in the world since he started this program. He's become a very, very neat person to talk to when we call each other or are visiting. There is something very heartening about looking forward to talking to your parents not only because you love them but because you know you're going to leave the conversation knowing something new, or looking at something in a new way. Intellectual stimulation from my parents - who'd have thought it! I certainly didn't when I was growing up.

That stimulation is probably one of the main reasons we get along so well now - we can talk to each other as intellectual equals. We've each got our own focus areas in which we're more knowledgeable, but the areas are ones that are of shared interest, thus enabling us to talk about those things that are our passions without boring the other.

So, we get along. Rather well, even. For which I am very, very thankful.

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