If marriage can isolate a couple from its queer kin,

the act of marrying can also draw

them closer to their biological families.

When Gay People Get Married:  What Happens When Societies Legalize Same Sex Marriage

By M. V. Lee Badgett and reviewed by Emily Douglas

In The Women’s Review of Books

Every morning I head out into the bright sunlit air of the New Mexico Juniper Savannah outside of Santa Fe.  Since there are more than 282 sunny days in New Mexico, I walk with my shadow most days.  If I walk west, my shadow stretches before me on the brown gravel road and if I walk east, my shadow is behind me but there on the tarmac of the bike path.  Walking south or north, my shadow is at my side, and should I venture out near noon, my shadow is under my feet.  No matter where I go, my shadow is with me.  I am fascinated by the disappearance of my shadow on cloudy days or at night when the moon is pale and far away.  My shadow requires light to be seen, moonlight or sunlight, my shadow doesn’t care but it is always there ready to spring out long and skinny or fat and flat as a circle. My shadow will die when I do.

This is the story of my shadow, my eternal companion.  My silent dark shadow which raised its voice more than 20 years ago in a novel only to be suppressed once again by my failure to communicate with my family of origin.  I had never planned to write about them again but all that changed on a spring day in Portland, Oregon.   I had a new journal about the size of my palm with a hard cover of red and an elaborate golden border.  I loved the thick whitepaper and a red ribbon to mark my place.  The paper was smooth and silky.  I sat in seat 43C drinking coffee as the plane rose above the cloud cover below Ohio and the woman next to me was sleeping.  I wrote about how things have changed since we were the Mercy Sisters.  Our parents had too little hope and trust in the world.  War and depression taught them a view of life based on despair.  First you are born, then you suffer, then you die.  Just having any kind of a job was a gift and if it went away, that’s just the way it was.  We looked on with envy and awe of those with wall to wall carpeting or at our aunt’s red plush everything but that went away too because she failed to pay her taxes.  She ended up drunk and alone on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota in a trailer park.  I see winter all around her and the family prediction of life coming true, the suffering.  Most of my father’s siblings drank themselves to death and my mother fled her own middle class life with my poorly educated father.  She would tell me that she had had a better childhood than I did while she fingered a linen table cloth, still heavy and sleek embroidered white on white along the edges.  It had been her mother’s, on her mother’s table with crystal and silver and good china.  My mother is long gone and my father finally perished at the Veteran Administration Hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota after a long life of famous drunks.  I did not attend either funereal.

On our search for wall to wall carpeting, and work beyond jobs that come and go, my sisters and I had succeeded.  We were no longer part of the Mercy Sisters.  We had the lives of good teeth and college educations.  I was nearing retirement and Betsy was already living in her retirement home on the edge of a golf course.  She made quilts for her children and grandchildren and even one for me.  I hung it on the wall of my office at the Center for Women at the University of Toledo.

Portland was fresh with spring blossoms, even at the hotel near the airport and I waited for my sister in the hotel restaurant.  She had changed!  Her red hair was now white and she had lost a great deal of weight.  Eyebrows raised, I expressed my surprise and she responded.  “Yes, for my daughter whose weight is out of control.  I wanted to show her it could be done”.   I shivered at her tone. There was something grim and maternal about her, the matriarch.  My research in quality of life issues had uncovered the three Bs to ensure a good quality of life.  They are being, belonging, and becoming.  I was stuck with my being.  I had the becoming part down, but what defeated me was the belonging piece and here it was in front of me.  She was gracious and insisted on picking up the tab for lunch.  MY first mistake was to ask about the others and she frostily informed me that she was not the information both for the family, meaning our family of origin.  My self –doubt seized me by the throat and asked all those questions:  Have I been the beggar at the feast?  Have I been humiliating myself all these years trying to part of family where it appears I have created no family of my own?  Have my expectations been unrealistic, perhaps even parasitic?  After all, a therapist once told me that you can order pizza in a Chinese restaurant, but you won’t get any.  Was I doing that again?  Was I to be the maiden aunt always to be pitied and endured as in the film, Home for the Holidays?  (Poor thing played by Geraldine Chaplin as the frustrated spinster who gets drunk and lusts after her brother in law.)  I tell myself, “Self, you need to stop sucking that mythical tit and give yourself and everyone else a break.”

And then she said, “You need to make amends to your sisters, many amends.”   As they say, she threw me under the bus but despite this assault, I noted the contradiction here.  If she was not the information booth, she was certainly a messenger.  “Wow,” I replied.  “You won’t tell me about them but you talk to them about me?”

“I do not!”  I just looked at her.  She relented.  “Well, I do have an email and your littlest sister is devastated by what you wrote about her in your novel.  She is so vulnerable.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said as I adjusted my posture to an upright position in the booth.  “All of you are angry with me about a book I wrote and published more than 20 years ago?  About a book that I vetted with all of you before it was published?  She nodded grimly.

Here is the list of my additional sins (remember that I am a collapsed Catholic and so I know about sins):

1.  “You don’t live a lesbian life because you don’t have a partner”.  (God damn it!  I cannot even escape the marriage plot as a lesbian.  This is what gay marriage has done for me.  No luck in being even a fake heterosexual.)
2. “You didn’t want to see me.  You came to Portland only for your student”.  (Holy shit!  This student bores the hell out of me and this was the only way I could pay to come here but she always forgets that I don’t have the money she does.)
3. “I am the only person in the family (of origin) who will speak to you anymore”.  (True.)
4. “We are all getting older and you will die alone and you have no family”.  (Thereby wiping out the existence of my daughter and my friends and companions of decades).

I stumbled out of the restaurant, abandoning my half-eaten salmon filet with dill sauce.  My sister rose from the padded leather booth and ran after me.  I had to hold onto the walls as I made my way to the revolving glass door of my hotel.  I pushed as hard as I could but the doors moved at their own slow and maddening pace.  My red haired sister, now with white hair and the power of a true matriarch, shouted after me, “I love you!”  And I mumbled back, “I love you too.”  And unfortunately for me, it was true.  Helpless as an imprinted duckling, there was nothing I could do about it.  I learned that on the day my lover left me and on a day long ago and another stumbling across State Street in Santa Betsy where the piercing blue dome of the Greek Orthodox Church against the milk glass sky of the California coast taught me a lesson.   I was outraged.  “You mean you love everything!  Even that color blue? That’s who you are?” I screamed to myself, knowing it was true.  And as for them, my siblings, it was also true.  I loved them all but I had spent most of my life trying to get away from them and now it was over.  My heart was cracked open once again and I lay on my hotel room king sized bed writing in my little gold edged journal.  Even now it is too painful to open and read.

The worst part of it all was that I could not seem to stop lying when I wanted to be present, to speak truth, to be gentle, to be open but instead I fell into our script where we said the same things to each other that we had said before so many times or perhaps it was just my script because she had some new lines.  She had come, loaded for bear, as my male friends would say.  Not with guns and red hunting jackets but with money and an expensive turquoise sweat suit and her diamond rings and a few photographs of her children and grandchildren, grudgingly revealed.  “Oh,” I told myself, “I’m not allowed to see the family.  This is all I get.”

Since Betsy is the leader of the Cult of Heterosexuality in my family of origin, it is fair to say

that her words do represent the other two sisters in the cult, the three of them with their husbands and middle class homes and incomes and children and grandchildren and golf and bridge and family reunions where each family wears a tee shirt with the family name on it.  When I got my invitation, I didn’t know what to do.  Should I get a single tee shirt with my name on it or should I enlist all my lesbian friends to show up with me?  We could wear lavender shirts with “dyke” in day glow pink on front and back.  I enjoyed the fantasy but organizing such an explosive disruption of the Cult was beyond me.  Exhausted, I did not attend, but of course, disappointment streamed from the Cult on my email.   This situation was much like the death of my mother where my youngest sister who twirled around at the edges of the Cult like I did, but for different reasons, wanted to see the moment when our mother left her body.  Somehow it turned out to be not what she wanted.  Then there was my youngest brother, also on the edges of the Cult along with the other two brothers, who didn’t want our mother to be cremated for three days so that there was time enough for her soul to leave her body and she would not feel pain.  They all gathered for her demise and her funeral.  A pool table at the senior center was purchased and installed in her memory.  I learned all this when Betsy called me and gave me the entire story.  I could feel the seething, simmering undertone of anger in her voice when she delivered the news.  I said, “Were you all angry that I did not come?”  She said, “Yes.”  “Well then,” I replied, “Would you have been mad at me if I had come?”  She said, “Yes.”  And I responded, “Why would I do that to myself?”  There was a great silence and then she told me that the ashes would come to her and mother wanted her ashes thrown into the Columbia River.  I sent purple and lavender flowers to throw into the water along with the ashes.  Betsy told me afterward that the ashes floated above the flowers and the moving river but did not blow back into her face as she had feared but settled and she was gone at last into the flowing waters she loved toward the ocean she had lost when she married my father.  The Cult denies that there are any photographs of mother with her high school girl friends pretending to be pirates and hanging all over each other and walking the gangplank together but I remember those photographs but they are hidden from me by one of the members of the Cult.  She was my mother, my goddess.  I see her as though I’m looking over my shoulder as I am walking down the gravel of Herrada Road to see a surprise sunrise when in front of me are gray skies with boiling flat clouds over the Sandias and the Sangre De Cristo mountains.  I am stunned by the rising sun painting clouds a luminous pink and red against streaks of turquoise sky.  I used to see her like that all those years ago when I was a small child.  Around her was light, a golden light which streamed from her and bathed me in love and the innocence of the new day.  Everything was possible since she was my mother and from her hands came all that was good—carrots sticks before supper, chokecherry jam on newly baked bread, dresses for me from her treadle Singer sewing machine.  She sang in her alto voice, “You are my sunshine.”  She was my dawn light, my goddess, my morning sky.

So the script of the Cult of Heterosexuality goes something like this: 1) why do you have to talk about it?  It being my lesbian, queer self.   2)  Some of my best friends are gay.  Meaning that I am not homophobic and I don’t like the word “lesbian.”  3)  Are you still doing that?  How can you stand it?  Meaning why did you write those books and why are you still dealing with battered women, incest and rape survivors?  4)  You don’t share your life with us. My script then becomes:  What would you like me to talk about since you do not want to hear about:  1) My personal life?  2) My work life?  3)  My writing?

Afterward she sent me an email repeating that she never meant to hurt me and that she did want to maintain contact with me, even if we had a limited relationship.  And so, the final irony—me who despised my mother’s Hallmark card relationships is now reduced to them for holidays and some birthdays.  Forgiveness is important because it generally includes one’s self and so I learned to forgive my mother for she how she handled the painful, exquisite tenderness of the feelings she did not dare to express.  Me too.

I teach online classes in disability and women’s studies and in those classes, students tell me their horror stories.  Stories of being beaten as grade school children with bleeding lips and chipped teeth and going to school where classmates taunt them; stories of being raped just before the semester started and trying to figure out how to put that into a research paper without revealing themselves to the entire class; and stories of emotional abuse from a lover and the inability to escape the claws of the marriage plot as in some day my prince will come/the rose covered cottage/tea for two.  And so I stubbornly maintain my position even at the price of losing my entire family of origin.  It is a grief to me but other than having a head transplant, I don’t know what to do about it.  Women have come out of the rain with flooding the streets of Los Angeles to knock on my door to tell me their story of hurt and longing.  They call on me on my cell phone and I comfort them with my knowledge and a technique or two for recovery, but mostly I comfort them.  You are not crazy, I say.  Or that’s classic batterer behavior I point out.  In my Women and Art:  Contested Territory class, I find that young women have the same stories and the same responses and I wonder if the women’s movement has done any good at all but of course we have.  We can talk about all this now and we even have books about it all from every angle–art, music, poetry, sociology, anthropology, psychology, film.  We have created tools for our little sisters so I must not despair.  I must remember to leave more bread crumbs in this forest of pandemic abuse of girls and women.  After all I will pass on and no one will be able to call me or come to me out of a rainstorm.

Last week I brought the umbrellas out of the garage and set them up in their tables, ready for the spring sun.  I bought a flat of yellow pansies and potted them.  Lettuce varieties were already in their pots and I sprinkled California poppy seeds under the bare branches of the new trees, honey locust and popular and then it snowed and the temperature dropped to 21 degrees and the bird bath water froze.  With the snow comes a memory of my mother and her personal battle with winter.  She took winter as an assault on her and her life as though she could stop the rotation of the planet and arrange things to her satisfaction and warmth.  I can hear her cursing the cost of coal as it rushes down the coal chute and the shoveling of coal into the furnace and why couldn’t she get the car started?  It wasn’t winter of course.  It was my father, her ner-do- well husband.  Her rage and futility poisoned her life and she always looked backward to some paradise she had lost along the Columbia River.  I just hope she is at peace now flowing in the river to the ocean, dissolved in the forgiveness of salt water and kelp.  Her inner life was a secret and when we finally got access to her diaries, it was a disappointment because the dairies were only listings of “pick up dry cleaning” and “get car lubed and oiled.”  She had fits of creativity.  She was the president of the PTA at Swanville Consolidated Schools and she put together an entire play based on a song, The Wedding of the Painted Doll.  She made all the costumes, took the photographs, applied makeup to the cheeks and lips of my middle sister, the one considered the beauty of the girls with her white blonde hair and dark eyebrows.  I was not in the play being too old?  Too tall? Too grumpy?  After my double mastectomy, I decided that I must now be a very old girl.  After all I had no breasts and I did not bleed.  I sorted through old photographs looking for myself in that pre pubescent stage but there were almost no photos to be found except for my 6^th grade class portrait.  The only thing I learned was that I had and still have big ears.  This is a strange thing to find out in your 60s but the other thing I learned was how upset my mother must have been when I went into puberty.  She asked me what I wanted for my 12^th birthday and I asked for a dictionary.  I loved words.  She said, “Oh, I thought you might want lipstick and maybe perfume.”  My mother raised no fool.  The last she thing she wanted was to have me competing with her.  As it was, she told shoe salesmen that we were sisters and she simpered when men flirted with her and ignored me.  I winced every time this happened.  So I was erased in the family photographs at that age and even minimal documentation of myself at that flat-chested, no bleeding stage of life was lost to me.

Anne Sexton wrote, “A woman is her mother, that’s the main thing.”  I look at myself in the mirror and I see my mother’s thin lips.  The lips I wrote about in that first novel.  The novel my sisters now tell me hurt my littlest sister, my baby who does not remember how in love I was with her when our mother dropped her into my skinny ten year old arms.  Those thin lips pursed in anger, in disapproval, the thinness of her generosity, the withering of her creativity.  I am the daughter, the eldest one who remembers her when she was plump and juicy, when she sang “I’ll be down to get you in a taxi honey.  Don’t be late.  Half past eight.”  I remember her in a golden haze when I adored her.  There is a photograph of us together.  She is sitting on a lawn with her legs to one side and I sit with my back pressed against her side.  I am wearing a white pinafore and we are beautiful and young.  She is in her twenties and I am three or four years old.  The main thing is that it’s all about her what happens to all of us and how we shatter into shards of memories and lies, the fragile peace we made when we started telling the truth.  In my forties, I realized that I danced like her, sort of bouncy and jerky not really about the music.  Before that I was fluid, agile, myself and now I look at my hands and see her hands at the ends of my arms and I bounce around like a demented Jill in a box.  In Rome, I am furious with her face and I don’t want to look her because I see that she is old and that I will look like that someday, as though my face is sliding off the bones of my skull.  I do not want to be caught in the tragedy of her life, the misery she created for herself and us.  I know all the right stuff.  I know that she is one of those women born too soon, who should have had an outlet for her intellect and her ambition.  Instead, she had eight children and she carved her bitterness, loneliness, and alienation into each of us.  She never finished her education because of her pregnancy with me, a B.S. in nursing in 1940?  She should have been running a hospital or become a doctor.  Instead, she ran a group home for crazy veterans, well enough to leave the VA hospital.  And I got a doctorate because of her, of course, but she never forgave me for it.  She asked my sisters to have me throw her ashes into the Columbia River so I could “release my hate” along with her ashes, but my sisters did not permit this and the irony is that it was not hate that prompted me to write Searching for Spring, but love.  Maybe love is the worst thing of all because it shines a light on everything.  I remember everything and I know that I am my mother, the woman she wanted to be but she could not forgive me for realizing her dream of freedom.  I did not figure this out by myself but learned it only from a therapist who had met many women like me.  We used the emergence of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s as the impetus for growth, for what Susan Sontag described as the life of a feminist:  living the fullest, freest, most imaginative life possible, but then we did not understand the grief of leaving our mothers behind.

Last night I went with my friends to a reading and discussion with the prize winning author, Jumpa Lahiri.  She read one of her short stories, “Heaven/Hell.”  In this story the isolated Bengali mother stranded in a barren apartment in Cambridge stands in her back yard as the sun is setting, trying to decide if she should light the match which will set her on fire.  She had drenched her clothing with kerosene.  She does not do it because a neighbor inadvertently saves her by remarking on the beauty of the sunset. Perhaps it was this almost tragic ending to Lahiri’s quiet story of a family migrating to the United States from India that prompted me to start a discussion of what sex is in marriages where the women have no economic power and no equality with their male partners.  I think it is rape.  Such an opinion was greeted with silence by my friend Judy who is a gentle soul and by challenge from my friend and heart sister, Jeanne.  Jeanne and I launched into a discussion of the terms “submission” and “rape.”  I brought up the issue of choice and explained that this would be how I would parse it.  I argued that Ada in the film, The Piano, was raped when she had to have sex with Baines in order to retrieve her voice, the piano.  I pointed out how limited Ada’s choices were during the Victorian era.  She was not allowed to own property and she had no way of making a living independently.  Judy’s only comment was: “I think it became something else.”  I think she meant love and marriage.  I grudgingly admitted that Ada’s affair with Baines could be seen as her resistance to the man she was sent to as a mail order bride.

Jeanne hammered on submission as distinct from rape and we argued about whether or not prostitution was rape.  “Yes,” I said.  All this nonsense about sex work is not valid until women have economic equality, then I am open to discussion of such a notion of having sex for money as work.   Jeanne then blurted out, “What about these women in Santa Fe who have these great houses and income because they married well and then got a divorce? Was that rape?”  I felt despair settling around me like a fog, but I did reply, “I know women who have had to pay their male partners in order to be free of the abuse.  They sign over property and savings and stocks and bonds.”  Class issues had suddenly raised their ugly heads.  I had a vivid memory of a Lebanese woman sitting on cardboard outside the entrance to a dirty tent in a dusty field in rural Lebanon surrounded by four or five small children.  “Well, was it rape for these Santa Fe women?”  I told her that I didn’t know.  I did not know the lives of these women.  Judy’s silence was filling the front of the car from the back seat.  Her discomfort unnerved me and so I scrambled for something to say and landed on, “Well, I know that women can be greedy.  We aren’t saints.”  Judy and Jeanne laughed and Jeanne said, “We know but we are Jews and we don’t have saints.”  “Well,” I’m a collapsed Catholic, “And we do.”

When I got home and while I was fumbling for my door keys, I felt the old loneliness icing around my heart but, at the same time, I acknowledge that I was a hard-ass, hard to be around, hard to listen to my rants about the status of women, about violence against women.  As my sister Doris once said to me, “You’re talking like a goddamned victim!”  Well, yeah.  But then both she and I are goddamned victims.  How else would we talk?  Or how else would I talk?  Am I to give up my empathy and understanding of the experience of abused women and girls just because I’ve had my therapy, just because I have been on my path to recovery through writing and speaking and advocating?  Do I now take up golf and bridge and put it all behind me?  My little story is no longer very interesting to me.  After all, I have written about it repeatedly.  It’s all documented.  I don’t need to keep it circulating in my brain and body anymore but it is a central truth of my life and a central aspect of my life’s work.  I know that Jeanne and Judy will forgive me and respect me and not stand in my way of doing my work and so I am not afraid and I go to sleep peacefully.

The last time I saw my mother was in Casper, Wyoming at my sister Martha’s home.  I had just finished my doctoral dissertation or project demonstrating excellence when I left Lake Tahoe for Reno.  I had stopped in to see my sister and suddenly I was face to face with my mother after not seeing or communicating with her for years.  “Hello,” I said, “How are you?”  She responded with the usual pleasantries and I left the house to take a walk.  When I got back she was gone.  The entire interaction took less than 30 seconds.  A week later I got a letter from my youngest brother accusing me of “being cruel to our mother.”  “Who put a quarter in him?” I asked myself.  I knew of course that my mother had.  She called him and wound him up like a toy with a slot in his back for the quarter.  Poor boy.  He had never had a chance for normalcy and like the other brothers in my incest therapy group, he was one of the walking wounded.  At least he did not climb trees naked and scream at passersby below like some did.  Instead, he was numb and secretive, telling me one sunny afternoon in Santa Barbara, California that I would never know him.  “Why?”  I asked.  “Because I keep to myself,” he said his face calm and shuttered.  “Why am I talking to you then?  Why would I want to be with you?”  He shrugged and that was the end of our relationship except, of course, for our blood ties.  After getting no satisfaction from me about our mother, he called my sister Martha, the innocent victim in this manufactured drama, and screamed at her about her cruelty.  It seemed that he had her confused with me and so she got the brunt of his verbal abuse.  She reported that he had told her she knew nothing about love and she fired back that he was the ignorant one because unlike him she had children and a spouse and she had been practicing love all these years and needed no lessons from him.  Indeed, his only marriage had failed after a few months because he could not endure that his wife had had other men before him.  And that was the end of the fracas except for me.  I understood finally and completely that my mother would use me to hurt my siblings if she could and I could never permit her to do that again.  I feel only a weary sadness when I write this and I remember one of the first things I learned in feminist theory that denying intelligent, creative, and energetic woman access to a canvass large enough for an expression of her talents leads to the creation of a distorted, power hungry, and bitter woman.  And so at the end of it all, my mother was like one of those plants left in the cloakroom during the summer break, all pale and leggy with leaves and stems creeping and grasping for air and light.  She was gnarled with arthritis and starving for love but settled for martyrdom, demanding pity and consideration.  I never saw her again.

So all this then, is the shadow and the grief of my life– the loss of my family of origin.

The purpose of this memoir to is to celebrate the astonishing changes in American culture and society in the past decades and the contested spaces, places, and realms opened to women during that time.  By focusing on my own life, I provide the reader with a lens through which these revolutions in sexuality, work, money, education, and gender relations can be explored.

My fear is that the work and pleasures of my generation are lost to the upcoming generations of young women and men.  Must we fight the same battles over and over again?  But, of course, this is the nature of the history of women.  We emerge and then sink back into the ever-renewing patriarchal world culture.  This is particularly true during times of war and indeed it seems that my country has been at war since I’ve been alive.

My task then is to leave the breadcrumbs in the forest for you to follow and my breadcrumbs are just that—fragile and vulnerable to being eaten, covered, lost, and discounted.  Nevertheless, I give you my memoir:  Walking with My Shadow:  Fifty Years of a Feminist Life.

Look for the first chapter:  The Shadow to be published soon.

Patricia A. Murphy

I highly recommend you visit Judy Chicago website.