143. Another Followup...

Well, I just had the follow up conversation with my mother – hung up the phone about 2 minutes ago. So this isn’t going to be a well thought out post, I’m just going to sort of summarize the conversation.

First of all, apparently my dad doesn’t think I’m “really” gay, he thinks I’ve somehow talked myself into it… which is an odd thing to say, honestly. I’m not entirely sure where that comes from, unless my dad thinks, like my mom, that I’ve somehow become gay due to never having been with a man. He also feels that his absence has something to do with it, which of course lines up with the freudian ‘psychology’ that many of the ex-gay therapists cling to. And actually, one of the reasons I didn’t want to tell dad was that I was afraid he would blame himself for it, and I’m oddly protective of him.

She went on to say that God is ‘shining His light on me for good, no matter what I choose’. Which was hopeful at first, but then at the end of the conversation she repeated the first part of that sentence as “God is shining his light on this and enough is enough.” So… yeah.

She thinks the underlying cause is a ‘wound’ or ‘rejection and shame’ which as to do partly with the abuse I suffered as a child (again, lining up with the ex-gay therapists on that one) and some wounding I encountered in the womb. I’m not making that up. Apparently she had a dream about me when she was pregnant with me in which she was running around town in Bermuda doing things and I began to cry because I was hungry and she said she was busy and so I said “that’s okay mommy, I will wait”. And that’s what I was like as a child… seriously, on all my report cards, the one comment that is always there is that I was incredibly patient. And she used to think that that was a good thing, but now she thinks it is a character flaw, that I internalized some sort of shame and feeling of unworthiness which is why I’ve always been willing to wait or put the needs of others first, and that this feeling of unworthiness stems from being conceived out of wedlock and her having to hide her pregnancy in order to keep her job… so she feels I need to deal with that core issue and that healing will progress from there. Apparantly she has spoken to people about me and they have offered to counsel me for free.

She is also definitely of the camp that believes that homosexuality revolves around sex… several times in the conversation she said “I know it isn’t all about sex, but so much of it is” and so she’s afraid of me pursuing a relationship with a woman because she doesn’t know what I’ll run into. She feels that much of homosexuality is ‘soul wounding’, but some of it is just ‘really nasty’. She then went on to talk about some people I knew growing up and their ‘struggles with this’ and well, that part was just weird for me because these were grownups I knew when I was a kid, so hearing about them in this was just… well, weird is the only word I can think of.

Oh, and she brought up that lovely counsellor we had who’s last words to her were about how concerned she was for me if I went into a ‘gay lifestyle’ because ‘those people’ will ‘chew you up and spit you out’… I knew that was going to come back. So frustrating.

She told me ‘people do get over this’, which was… not surprising to hear from her… I did not want to get into a conversation with her about the validity of ex-gay counselling and the claims they make. I knew that would only lead to an argument.

Out of the blue (to me at least) she brought up the prayer of Jabez (which was incredibly popular in Christian circles a few years ago) and told me she wants me to pray that over myself in the context of protecting me from harm in this area.

I didn’t say much in this conversation because I really didn’t know what to say, and did not want it to turn into an argument. She once again told me I was her ‘precious daughter’ and that she is proud of me because I’ve ‘worked so hard’…. I honestly don’t know what she was referring to there, but I didn’t ask because by that point I just wanted to be off of the phone.

It was pretty clear as the conversation went on that dad had told her I was dating… he did overstate it I think, because my mom seemed to think that I was sort of out there dating right now, which is so very not the case.

Anyway, the conversation is now over and I am hoping we don’t end up having those conversations all the time. But, it wasn’t horrible so, I guess I’m okay…