For years, the story that I built around my childhood and my parents’ lives was like a fairy tale, almost cinematic in scope. I grew up in Europe in the ’60s and ’70s. My parents — American teachers overseas — were beautiful, hilarious, smart and affectionate with their children and each other. My mother was a painter; my father, a teacher.
One of my earliest memories is of my parents waking me from under a pile of coats at a party and asking me, at age 4, the question they had been arguing about until the early morning hours (you just know wine was involved): “Is man basically good or evil?”
My answer: “Which man?”
Family stories like this were burnished over the years by my brothers and me. There were darker stories too, which gave our history more texture. My father sometimes took trips by himself, went through weekslong periods of near-silence and drank heavily.
Today we would recognize these as signs of depression. Back then he was the standard issue husband/dad. By comparison, his own father, Julius, had been an abusive drunk who beat him and called my father a sissy until he fled to college and finally found my mother.
What I mean to say is that my brothers and I felt like we knew our family’s story. Certainly, more than a lot of kids did. In high school, one of my friends found out that his father had a whole other family. By comparison, our lack of secrets was almost parochial.
Decades later, when I was well into my 50s, my mother was teetering on the cliff of total dementia. The stories she and I told each other had calcified with frequent telling. The details, the same — even the phrasing. But one evening she shocked me with something new, a secret excavated from the rubble of her battered mind. A secret so complex, painful and gorgeous that I still think of it as her last, best gift.
One way that my extremely bright mother would mask her dementia was by starting a conversation with the suggestion that we had already been discussing the topic. This way, if she was repeating herself it would sound like she already knew that she was repeating herself. That is why, on this particular evening, my mother said, “And you already know, of course, that your father is gay.”
What? I most certainly did not know that. It never even occurred to me. What the hell was she talking about? Gay? She and my father held hands when they watched the news every night!
I voiced none of this. Because I have spent years mastering the art of losing my mind while presenting as unflappable. “No, Mom,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh,” she said, “Your father told me he was gay before we got married.”
What? At this point my husband walked into the living room, and I shot him a look that said, “I will cut you if you come one step closer.” He pivoted and walked out.
I returned to my mother who proceeded to tell me the bones of a story without any meat. Already, Alzheimer’s was rendering her incapable of nuance or style. My mother had been a great storyteller, often augmenting her tales with drawings on napkins, witty observations and digressions that were just as interesting as the core story. Not so, now.
This was what she told me: Back in their 20s, my mother gave my father the marry-me-or-lose-me ultimatum that was a standard of the day. But he told her he couldn’t because he was gay. She surprised him by saying that she wanted to marry him anyway. Her reason? Sketchy, because of the lack of nuance. But my guess is that she was already totally in love with him, because she was all her life.
I’m guessing that another contributing factor was that my mother came from a repressed, religious background (Dutch Reformed). Given that, she might have thought that the sex part of marriage wasn’t very important. She used to opine that my father liked to actually talk to her rather than “pouncing.” Now we know why.
So, they got married. My father wanted a family, and he liked my mother more than anyone he’d ever known. He didn’t really know what love was, he told her. And I’m guessing that’s about right, given what I had heard about his father, Julius.
There was another part of the deal. He asked for Friday nights to himself. She assumed he went to gay bars, and once, she said, she ran into a strange man in our living room on a Saturday morning. There was another time, she told me, that we were all staying in a hotel and a young man knocked on our door, crying and demanding to talk to my father.
And that was pretty much it. Except that she asked me not to say anything about it until he was dead. And I’m sorry/not sorry that I didn’t exactly comply with her request. Although I never said anything public or to anyone that he would care about until now, several years after both of their deaths. And I never said anything to him.
“Were you happy?” I asked my mother that night, looking into her watery eyes.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.” And I knew she was telling the truth. Because again, no nuance.
Not that I would have doubted it. It all made so much sense given my father’s long trips alone and Friday nights out. Despite his love of football and a rather masculine propensity for long silences, there was his flamboyant style in expression (he gesticulated wildly) and dress (huge dangling medallions), along with his love of opera and well-known gay hangouts (we thought he just liked the décor).
It appeared that our family story was not, in fact, cinematic in the fairy tale way I thought. It was less “box office holiday movie” and more “quirky underfunded indie.” It was, I have come to believe, a much deeper story about shame and sacrifice and loyalty and profound love.
Recently, my brothers and I have tried to reassemble the story of our family through this new lens. My version is that a young, queer boy, beaten by his father, shamed by the family’s religion and ignored by his mother learns to survive by stuffing down the parts of himself that leave him vulnerable to ridicule and violence.
And he’s lucky. He’s good looking, intellectually gifted and — thank God — very funny. And then he meets this knockout of a woman who’s just as smart as him (or smarter, he used to say), funny too, and she loves him. Even when he tells her what he thinks is the worst of it, she doesn’t shrink.
She says: OK. I can do that. I’ll stand by you and give you children and we will have adventures and you will be my biggest fan. Because of you, life will never be boring (she said this about my father often). I will travel the world, and my paintings will be exhibited in famous churches and colleges. And when we get old, we will watch the news every night and hold hands. We will sleep in the same bed, safe in our understanding of how much we love each other.
Years later, when he was close to death and my mother was all but lost to Alzheimer’s, I asked my father whether he wanted to try to prolong his life or let go.
He said quite clearly, “I have had a long and interesting life. I got more than I deserved out of the deal.” And he let go.
Family secrets are nothing new. In fact, before 23andme and the internet there were a lot more of them. But when I look at curated stories on social media, posed family photos and engagement announcements (“Look at my ring!”), I can’t help but think that these images often miss the better story.
Come on, it’s always better when there’s a big bad secret to overcome. Keep your wimpy stories about falling in love at first sight and how perfect it all went. First of all, probably not true. But second, where’s the triumph, the vindication, the B-plot and the poetic justice? After all, despite Julius’s efforts to beat the sissy out of him, my father did indeed have a long and interesting life. He lived it with his best friend.
These days, when I see them in my mind, they are almost always together — leaning into each other conspiratorially, as if guarding the precious and overlooked truth that love rarely looks like the stories we’ve been sold. It’s quiet, personal, hard and deep. Those lucky enough to know this love are mostly keeping it to themselves.
Brett Paesel, a writer in Hollywood, recently completed a novel based on this story.
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