Unconditional. Telaina Eriksen
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nervous for him, but I wanted to talk to the other parents, or at least the other boy, if I could. I asked my son if he could ask his boyfriend to talk to his parents so that we could work out curfews and rules. I added, “Don’t pressure him. If he doesn’t want to come out, we’ll figure out what to do.” My son started texting away.
The other boy told his parents immediately, and my son gave me the mother’s phone number.
When he gave me her name, I realized that I did know the parents. I was even friends with the mom on Facebook. I relaxed a little and called her. I was still nervous, because we live in a small college town, where even well-meaning liberal people don’t quite understand the life of LGBTQ. I braced myself for weirdness.
But it wasn’t weird. She and I were both tickled by their attempt to be sneaky. We agreed a summer curfew of midnight was comfortable for each of us. And then she told me that even though she is married to a man, she is bisexual herself! I was the one who’d made assumptions based on appearances! So I came out to her as well. Even better, she has an older daughter. She offered parenting guidance about teen romance, and I resonated with her style. For her, these teen years are about modeling healthy relationships and setting boundaries, and otherwise allowing them to make choices on their way to becoming adults. My relief turned to gratitude, and happiness as I realized our kids are in a whole different world than the one I knew when I was 12, when I first started to realize I was not straight.
I checked with my son’s dad. He was all right with the curfew plan, but asked a common question that hetero adults ask about LGBTQ youth, “Do you think it’s just a phase?” I replied, “It doesn’t matter if it is a phase, we still need to treat him like his identity is real.” He agreed. He has always been accepting of my sexuality, but to see him commit to treating our son supportively was nothing short of beautiful.
Since then, the kids have been pretty good with the curfew. Their big thing is to make crazy flavors of homemade ice cream at his house, or wander around the neighborhood, or hang out with friends in our tiny downtown, getting slices of pizza or sitting by the river. The other boy has popped into my house for glasses of water, and we have awkwardly begun to get to know each other. My son says many of his friends are queer, or genderqueer, or some form of LGBTQ. I have talked to my own queer friends, some of whom are in their 20s, and even they say how lucky my son is compared to as recently as seven years ago. For now, he is in a nurturing environment in which to explore his sexuality with healthy boundaries, adult guidance, and peer support. Amazing.
Sadly, I know an ugly reality does exist. We are in a rural state. Hate is real. We are not always safe. There is a fine line between being careful while still not closeted. I have experienced discrimination at work, socially, and around our city. I have crossed streets with transgender friends while giant pickup trucks rev their engines like they want to mow us down. I have been scared to hold my partner’s hand when we don’t fit the expected gender combo and have held hands anyway. I have seen friends be discriminated against in stores because they weren’t as straight-passing as I am.
But I am glad for now that instead of contending with that ugly world, my son is experiencing puppy love, like all the straight kids get to do. I hope all the support helps him become strong in his identity, so that when the world pushes back, he is ready.
Resources
Gay & Lesbian History for Kids: The Century Long Struggle for LGBT Rights, with 21 Activities by Jerome Pohlen
The Right Side of History: 100 Years of LGBTQ Activism by Adrian Brooks and Jonathan Katz
For The Bible Tells Me So—a documentary that walks viewers through the historical context of many Biblical passages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSXJzybEeJM—a scene from the TV series The West Wing explaining all the ways we don’t follow Leviticus
Kidnapped for Christ Filmmaker Kate Logan, an evangelical Christian, set out to make a heartwarming film about Escuela Caribe, a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. She thought she would find troubled teens dealing with “their issues” through prayer, song, group therapy, etc. Instead, she encountered an infestation of mental, physical, and possibly even sexual abuse.
Surviving and Thriving in the Preteen and Teen Years
As I write this book, my children are 20 years old (Casandra) and 16 years old (Matthew). I distinctly remember one day when Casandra was four and Matthew was a little over one (they are technically three years and nine months apart in age). At the time, I was doing some public relations and marketing consulting work for an educational software company. I had a deadline, and Casandra and Matthew were busily tearing apart our tiny living room. (Our house at the time was a total of about 1,000 square feet.) Matthew loved to dump all of his giant Duplos out of their containers over and over again and say “uh-oh!” each time he did it. Casandra was going through a mermaid phase and had wrapped a blanket around her legs, immobilizing them, and she was trying to crawl everywhere with her “fin.” I looked at the chaos that surrounded me and thought to myself, “Wow, parents with kids in school just have it made.”
As with most things I’m wrong about, the passing of time makes it ever more clear (daily) that I quite underestimated what it took to get a child through 13 years of institutional education. If you are a parent of a teen, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re a parent of a preteen, you probably know what I’m talking about, but just as a warning, it’s going to get worse in high school.
Welcome to High School… Again
Adolescence is just a mess, both for parents and our kids. Then you add the pressure cooker of today’s average middle or high school and things can get even messier. Our local high school is just a few blocks from Michigan State University, a large Research I-designated, Big Ten University. This means that a lot of students who go to the high school have at least one parent who has a PhD, and possibly two who have a PhD. Then there are the parents who don’t have a PhD, but they may want their kid to be smarter than that other kid whose parents do have PhDs. Everyone wants to feel their child is advanced (I include myself in this. I am not free from sin on this topic). It can become a ludicrous contest—whose child can take the most AP classes, and who can get not only a 4.0 GPA but a 4.1 or higher, depending on how many AP classes they can stack their schedule with.
And then there are the sports! Student-athletes are now expected to train year-round in their sport or sports. Three full weeks before school starts in August, all the fall sports begin their two-a-day practices. Football, volleyball, water polo, swimming, tennis, and golf all practice for two hours in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon, sometimes with strength training/conditioning between.
Or maybe your child goes to a school with the opposite problem. Maybe no one is invested academically and there aren’t a lot of good role models for success in grades or sports. Maybe the school your teen attends had to cut extracurricular activities just to make ends meet, and your child is spending too much time indoors on social media and/or video games. Regardless, high school looks very different now than it did 30 years ago.
Whatever you and your child’s experiences have been with their schooling, this is a time of life when their bodies are changing (or not changing, which is also stressful), and our society wants to determine a large amount of their future using standardized tests; there’s homework, friend-drama, maybe even a peer they are interested in romantically; then there’s competition, parental expectations, perhaps learning to drive, maybe an after-school job, chores, and on top of all of this, they are LGBTQ.
Parents, if you drink, you