"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

Want more Queer as Faith?  Visit our QAF archive.

Week 19:
Family...suh

About three and a half years ago, my family experienced what could be considered its worst meltdown ever. It was in my short visit to the United States between jaunts in Ireland and Italy, and in a time when I’d convinced my parents that my sexual orientation was the work of their hands. Needless to say, our relationship was strained. It didn’t help when my friend Tish and I sprung it on our families at the last minute that we were driving from Dallas to North Carolina and that we’d be leaving the next day.

The situation was my fault, granted, but my parents’ reaction was, shall we say, a bit… over the top. My dad had come to visit me before I flew off for another four months in Europe, and he calmly scolded me while my mother yelled, screamed, and made accusations along the lines of “You don’t give a damn about me,” and other minor curses.

It was neither the first time nor the last that I shook an angry fist at God for sticking me with these people until we were all dead. They’re not at all who I’d have picked out at the Macy’s Family Boutique. The whole conflict sparked a vicious argument between my mom and dad which spilled over into the next morning, when I was set to drive to Dallas. It was the first and only time I’ve ever seen my dad cry, and it was eerie and unsettling. Mom, my brother John, and I drove the three hours to Dallas in near-silence, all of us thinking about how it was the last time we’d be together for four months. By the time we reached the place where Tish and I were meeting, we’d begun talking again, making light banter and trying to reach some point of reconciliation. It only sort of semi-happened.

Five hours later, driving through eastern Texas, Tish and I decided that we’d better pray, as we’d both had horrible family experiences in the past 24 hours. She kept driving and I bowed my head. She began to speak.

“God…” (Tish was and still is prone to long pauses when she prays. It’s one of my favorite things about her). “God, I pray for our family….suh.”

Her accidental omission of the plural was one of those much-needed moments of levity that makes the present a little bit roomier when life seems to be crushing in from all sides. We began to laugh so hard it seemed we might have to pull over to the side of the road. The laughter passed, the prayer was completed and we blasted Caedmon’s Call in the car as we drove. The world, it seemed, was not actually coming to an end.

I thought of that moment this summer when I took a vacation with my parents and my brother to the Sawatch Range in Colorado. For nine days the four of us camped, hiked, fished, and spent time like we’ve rarely done in the thirteen years my parents have been divorced. There was no drama, no fighting, no tension. The relationships were free and easygoing and everyone sort of seemed to let go of old resentments long enough to take in some fresh mountain air and actually enjoy themselves.

That trip defied my expectations and gave me hope in a way I hadn’t been sure was possible. I was so certain that we’d get halfway there and I’d have to pull the car over in the middle of New Mexico to beg a doctor for some Xanax or Valium. “Do you see the people I’m stuck with here? Give a guy something!” Turned out, the trip went very well and I came back with a sense of hope that maybe we weren’t as dysfunctional as I’d thought.

Call it a mountaintop experience – literally – and we all know about mountaintop experiences: no matter how long they last, it’s never long enough. And of course we all came back home and things got broken again like they always do, and it seemed that this year things got even more broken than usual.

My mom was fired from her job, a job she’s held and excelled at for over ten years, and for a moment I thought it might send what I’d consider her frail psyche right over the edge. See, at the same time her father was diagnosed with cancer in his kidneys, and her sister with a rare, untreatable, and potentially fatal immune disease. My mom is a great mom, she raised two relatively healthy and normal kids, but she’s not always known for being able to hold her own mind together, especially when things go wrong. And even as I looked for a way to help her through her grief, I found myself reeling with the familiar anguish that this woman was my mother.

I read about and know folks – gay folks especially – who have much worse family problems than I do. But you play the hand you’re dealt, and more than once I’ve felt like folding, cashing in my chips, and faking my own death so I wouldn’t have to deal with my own particular family anymore. I’d go somewhere else, find a new family of people who believe fiercely in themselves and in me. I’d find a surrogate mommy – even at the age of 23 – who didn’t give a flying flip what the world thought of me or her and who didn’t lose the will to live at every tiny setback.

But instead, I went over to my mom’s house and held her as she cried, listened to her talk, and tried in vain to say the words that would make it all better. Of course they weren’t there, and I left her house feeling worse for ever having tried. I looked up at the sky, glared at God, and said, “Hey, why don’t you pick on someone your own size? Leave my mom alone!” I was just so desperate to help in any way; obviously, this represented a major financial setback for a woman with one kid still in college and a sizeable mortgage, and I was trying to figure out which organs I could live without should I decide to sell one or two. Also, I was thankful that I no longer lived in her house.

Mixed feelings about family – who doesn’t have them? Our parents get together and decide to have us, and we’re born. And from Moment One we all start screwing up. But we’re so desperate to take care of each other, in some – sometimes small – part of ourselves, but we’re so fallen and dumb that we even manage to turn care and love into objects of pain and suffering, and well, you get 23 years into your life and find that you just kind of want to start over, or stop, or accept things as they are and pretend nothing’s wrong.

Some people I know have had to distance themselves from their families for reasons of their own health, and I never call that a bad decision. I’m so lucky that I’ve never had to draw a firm boundary with any of my family, despite the times when I’ve thought of moving and not telling anyone.

But I did move recently, and it was the week after mom lost her job, and she was desperate for something to do. She offered to rent me a U-Haul, which I accepted despite my fears after my previous attempts at consolation. So my five-foot-tall mother drove a big U-Haul to my house and we began loading it. It was a slightly warm and cloudy November day, and we began by moving furniture.

We loaded the bedroom stuff fairly easily, but we found that my piano wouldn’t fit on the dolly, and that we were both too short and weak to pick it up. Apparently my workouts haven’t done me as much good as I’d hoped. We managed to roll it to the front door and part way onto the ramp up to the truck, but it was about there that we got stuck. It wouldn’t roll, we couldn’t pull it, lift it, or budge it.

Then it started to rain.

Nothing like rain to add an element of stress to any situation – except a drought. “Okay,” mom said to me, “get really angry and just put everything you’ve got into it.” So I got behind the piano, put my shoulder down, and called up every bit of aggression I had about this move, about mom’s job, about my inability to make anything better at all, and heck if we didn’t get that stupid sodding piano in the truck in one push.

As the piano rolled into the U-Haul, mom and I collapsed in fits of laughter on the ramp. The rain all of a sudden became a downpour, so I like to think that God sent a few of his biggest Teamster angels to give some help. We got everything moved and cleaned at the old house, then unloaded and arranged at the new apartment. At the end of the night, the rain had stopped, the old had passed away, the new had come. The sun came out.

And I was reminded of some of the best wisdom my dad ever gave me. He said, “It’s not being angry that’s bad; it’s what you do with your anger. You can put it into being destructive, or you can use it as a tool to change whatever it is that’s making you angry in the first place.”

Mom and I had sort of done both, which is how life usually goes. We’d both been so frustrated and unhappy, and by some miracle of grace we’d managed to transform something so potentially explosive and terrible into useful energy. Redemption by heavy lifting.

And a month later, mom got a new job and had a couple good financial breaks and didn’t end up having to sell her house or her body, both of which she’d considered unavoidable only weeks before (you see where I get it from?). We had a normal, happy holiday despite all my fears, complete with the presence of my brother, my dad, and my “adopted” siblings Bryon and Erica.

The world kept spinning, you see. It tends to do that. And we just keep dancing along, looking more often like a drunkard staggering to the front of a church than the ballerina we hope (and think) we are. But there it is; you find redemption and hope in the every day, and no matter how much you regret it on a weekly…daily….hourly basis, you’re stuck with these people whose horrible, dysfunctional, imperfect, demanding love for you somehow gets you through. And for most of us, it’s not a matter of biology but rather the people we’ve let in, who we keep letting in despite how often they let us down and hurt us. Because that’s a part of loving and being loved, is remaining open and vulnerable to all the bad so that when the good comes, we’re prepared and ready, and we’ve left the welcome mat out for it to come on in.

Comments? E-mail Nathan or discuss this column on our message boards.