My Mother's Story Makes Mine: Reflections on How a Straight Woman Shaped My Lesbian Identity

Off Our Backs, May/Jun 2005 by Ryan, Maura

For mother's day last year my partner made a gift for her mother. It was a list of all the nice things her mother had done for her as a child and all the ways her mother had contributed to the outstanding woman she's become. Her mother cried. She read it over and over. They both think I should do the same thing for my mother this year. And I should.

But whenever I focus on the project of creating the letter, the same thing happens over and over. I sit down to write and I begin: Dear Mom, You've made me a lesbian. I realize that this is probably not what she wants to hear. Of course I don't mean what the general public would assume-that she did something wrong/that she failed in teaching me how to become a real woman/that I am placing blame on her for an identity I don't want to own. Really, it's quite the opposite.

She was the first woman I ever loved. I remember a commercial for father's day that ran a few years ago: the scene opened with an aging man reading a greeting card alone in his kitchen; the card apologetically stated that although his daughter was getting married, she would always remember the first man who stole her heart-her father. That idea (that the first love of a straight woman would be her father) is logical and sound in the minds of the public. What is illogical in our cultural imagination is positive first-love relationship with parents of the same sex. I've sat witness in women's studies classrooms when we discussed Cherrie Moraga talking about how her mother was her first love. No one likes it. It sparks ideas of incestuous dyke sex-fiends misinterpreting their heterosexual mother's innocent affections for explicit sexual encounters. That's not what I mean and I don't think it's what Cherrie Moraga means either. What I mean is that my mother taught me what love between women was like. She showed me how to depend on women, how to trust women, how women can create safe spaces for each other. Even if I explained it like this, it is probably not what she wants to hear.

My mother is the sweetest, most purely good person I can imagine, but she is not the radical feminist I am. She's not even all that liberal. Wanting to write her this letter and realizing the reasons I can't has made me think deeply about my relationship with her and the ways in which we fail to hear each other.

There's a rift between us caused by reasons larger than my lesbian identity: we grew up in different times that are attached to different family, class, and gender experiences. I've realized recently that to fully understand the woman I've become would mean sorting through my mother's life. Her body created mine and her life story exists in pockets of my body that are totally unseen to the people I encounter.

When I was growing up and kids my age asked me about my grandparents I would always tell them that my grandmother lived with us and that my grandfather had died before I was born. When they asked, what about your other grandparents? I had a prepared response my mother asked me to tell: that they died in a car accident when my mother was little. She designed this lie (which she told everyone except our family) to keep them from knowing that she was raised by the state because her parents decided they didn't want her. As an adult it's difficult to piece together the actual events. I think that the reasonable thing to believe is that her parents were too poor to raise her and that they believed she would have a better life if they let other people raise her. This isn't the way she tells it. She tells me that her sister still has the letters from her mother to her father that explain the whole thing. She says that the letters say that her mother hated her and that if her father "got rid of her and her sister she would come back to him. My mother was less than six months old; her sister was four.

My mother grew up in what she calls an orphanage where catholic nuns beat her and she had to get up at the crack of dawn to do chores before she went to church and then to school. She was fed poorly while the nuns ate extravagant meals. Once when she was about 10 years old she recited the rhyme, hay is for horses, moo is for cows, pigs like you aren't allowed to a nun who beat her with fists and the end of a broom stick. She can peel hundreds of potatoes in thirty minutes. She learned to protect the little girls who wet their beds by hiding their soiled sheets. She told me every year, when we would go to buy my Easter dress, that each year as a child she got to pick out a new dress for Easter-everything else was always secondhand. When she was too young to be cooking she had a terrible grease fire accident that left a tiny scar by her right eye and under her wrist.

She never hit me. She tells me that she has never loved anyone in her life except for my father and me. She tells me that she would do anything for me. I believe her.

Whenever she would tell me stories like this, my father would wince and say, Why do you tell her those things? She would quickly end the story, looking embarrassed that she shared part of her past with her daughter (whose life was so much better). I remember even from a very young age thinking that it was ludicrous that my dad thought her stories could hurt me. After all, my mother lived through those things, why should I be sheltered from hearing about them?