Rebels in White Gloves (49 page)

“Peter turned out in those early months to be my greatest ally. Andrew went through a time of confusion. At one point he asked me, ‘What am I supposed to think?’ I said, ‘We’re trying to work something out you wouldn’t understand, but Susan is here to stay and you had better get used to it.’ The first year of his life, he had bonded tremendously with my mother. Now she tried to win him away, to lever me back into the family, or maybe just to legitimize her anger by getting him to join
her in it. He was in misery about that much more than the divorce. Both kids understood the divorce, because they knew me so well. They think a lot of their father, but saw he was going one way and I another. Both wrote their college entrance essays about lesbians; Peter’s was about having a lesbian mom.

“I regret they were hurt by the transition, but it’s not always possible to prevent that. Once I knew the truth, I couldn’t turn away from it. That would have been a bad example for my children. My most important value to transmit was honesty. All their lives, I could hear almost anything about what they did. Sometimes I didn’t like it, but I don’t think they ever told me a lie. I wasn’t rebelling against anything, but trying to chart a course according to my own inner compass. I’ve been the same throughout my life, following my conscience. The kids suffered, but it has ultimately been for them a much richer experience to have a mother who acted on her deepest desires rather than denying herself.

“Thomas decided he would work out the financial split, without lawyers. Because I was feeling so vulnerable, cut off from my parents, I just signed off on it. He assured me it was fair, and I still believed he had my best interests at heart. I lost my share of his retirement: For eight years I was raising our kids and earning no income; we were working as a team and were both entitled to the fruits of that. As it is, I’m in terrible shape for retirement; I have to work twenty years before I get anything. He didn’t account at all for my inheritance from my grandparents, which should have been mine right off the top. To give you an idea of our relative financial positions immediately after the divorce: I was on full financial aid at law school, while Thomas was able to pay Andrew’s tuition, room, and board at Columbia out of pocket. He now of course wants me to pay half that back. I developed great sympathy for women who feel powerless in divorce. I had two graduate degrees, was in law school and a feminist, and still I didn’t assert myself. I really didn’t want to hurt anyone—not my mother, not Thomas. I didn’t expect him to want to hurt me.”

The sequel to “marrying up,” Nancy discovered, is “divorcing down.” She now lives frugally: Out to dinner one night in Portland, she hesitated before ordering eighty cents’ worth of coleslaw. After a year clerking for a Maine Supreme Court justice, she worked briefly for the state’s highest-paying law firm, but didn’t stay. “It was just too much against
my grain, very establishment, patriarchal and formal. It was like my marriage—secure, but not a good fit. I had to wear a suit, even though I never saw clients. And there was little recognition of the reality of women’s lives. They assumed all lawyers were young and single or had full-time wives and could be there six days a week and wouldn’t want to be home with their partner or kids. I made it a point not to work Saturdays, which was not viewed favorably. I was advised to come in just to schmooze with the other attorneys. One partner said to me, ‘The day will come when you have no work, it’s a beautiful afternoon, and you want to see your son play soccer. But you’re going to remember that would not be professional.’ The same attorney wanted to have a conference call with me in Andrew’s dorm room over Thanksgiving. When you’re twenty-five, maybe you put up with that stuff as the ropes. I don’t have that many years. Part of me felt I should stay and try to make partner and change the rules, but it was so dispiriting; the only women who seemed to be thriving were more like men than the men. And what mattered most to me, as always, was the freedom to be exactly who I am.”

Taking a pay cut from $55,000 to $34,000 a year, Nancy went to work for the Maine Health Care Finance Commission, an office of mostly women lawyers. “It was worth every penny. The work wasn’t fascinating, but because of all the women it was a collaborative environment. I could use all my counseling skills and often get to a compromise before litigation; in a big firm they’d just want you to roll out the heavy guns.” Nancy has been co-chair of the Maine Bar Committee on the Status of Women Attorneys, helped create the Commission on Gender Justice in the Courts, addressing such matters as the legal system’s treatment of battered women, child support, and conditions of incarceration for women, and served as president of the Maine Women’s Fund, raising money for projects on women’s health, aging, and economic independence.

Wanting to avoid “forcing our relationship or their new siblings down our kids’ throats,” Nancy and Susan lived apart for two years. When they did move in together, they had a commitment ceremony attended by twelve women, including a Wellesley classmate and her companion, who “kind of rolled their eyes at the whole thing.” The gathered women read from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s
A Gift from the Sea
and collectively wound together a rainbow of embroidery threads; then Nancy and Susan exchanged rings.

They have made a cozy and peaceful home together, filled with country antiques and quilts and cut flowers and many books. A Wellesley sampler hangs on the wall and a Wellesley chair has pride of place in the living room. Pink curtains hang in the kitchen, and in the bathroom are matching H
ERS
and H
ERS
pink towels. The backyard is planted with a bountiful vegetable garden and abundant flowers. An array of pinks—hollyhocks, phlox, impatiens, peonies, coralbells, and begonias—grow in the shape of a Gay Liberation triangle; whites grow in a half-moon and bright yellow and orange blossoms burst the edges of a round sun. Both women wear L. L. Bean T-shirts, khakis, and Birkenstocks; Nancy’s hair is now very short and gray at the temples, and her blue eyes are framed by wire-rimmed glasses. They joke that they blend in well in Maine, where all the women look like lesbians. Nancy sings in a group called Women in Harmony. She and Susan both love the outdoors; they regularly go camping with their kids and tour with the Amelia Wheelheart Feminist Biking Club (which at one point explored patenting Susan’s invention, “the Bobbitt,” a toilet seat with a spring that requires a man to hold it up while he pees, then snaps back into place when he’s done).

In one sense, Nancy’s story is a classic romance: Through passionate love she found the self she had failed to realize in her marriage. But in another sense Nancy’s is a political story. Nancy released her true being not simply by yielding to her passions but by finding a new (shared) story that seemed to describe her better than did the old story that she and her mom and Thomas had once agreed upon. She achieved personal fulfillment by drawing strength and self-understanding from a collective movement: lesbian feminism.

Nancy and Susan’s kids have settled slowly into the new arrangement. Andrew would not see Susan for some months and refused to come to an early family gathering. Peter once asked them to turn off a song about a daughter and her mother who come out to each other. Susan’s thirteen-year-old son, Seth, “acted out” with Nancy, stealing her wallet. Only Susan’s daughter, Saren, thought from the outset that it was cool to have a lesbian mom. Now the kids, all heterosexual, are outspoken allies of their mothers. While in college, Peter performed as a gay man in
Torch Song Trilogy
and wore a pink triangle and went on an AIDS walk with Nancy. “I think everyone thought, What a nice mom, out there with her son.” Seth defended a gay rights ordinance before his hostile classmates in high school.

One morning while I was visiting, Peter arrived for a breakfast of fresh blueberry pancakes with warm hugs and kisses for both women. “When I was a kid, my friends were jealous of what seemed my perfect family. I thought it was perfect, too. I believed a relationship like that could never fail. I can’t remember a single fight. Now I realize how much unhealthier that is; all the stuff was kept under the surface.

“The year my mom went to law school was hard. I wanted her to be happy, but it’s not easy when you just have your dad. That year ruined things. Or, I suppose, it exposed what was always there. Then Susan was there all the time. At first it seemed like she was bringing them closer together, because they all did things together. Then my father saw it escalate between them. He gave his permission, but reluctantly.

“My parents tried to make it work, and to hide the worst from us; I remember they once locked themselves in the bathroom to fight. Andrew and I both tried to persuade them to stay together, and they did delay splitting up for us, I think. But over time I became confused. I didn’t know if I wanted them to stay together, but I knew I wanted them to stop fighting. The lesbianism didn’t bother me; I’ve always been taught to respect all relationships, though that doesn’t extend to extramarital ones. But when I was seven, I’d asked my mom to promise she’d never get divorced, and then she did. I felt betrayed by that. I also found myself having to defend my mom to my grandparents. I would say how much she loved Susan, that she’d always been the way they could now see. Grandma thought the marriage had been a perfect relationship and then Susan came in and
wham
. But I could grasp how my parents had become different. My father assumed Mom wanted just to be sure of everything. He wants contentment and security. But my mother wants fulfillment, to go forward and discover new things. She was changing. The whole thing with including Susan was my dad’s effort to be there with her during the changes. He wouldn’t tell her not to think what she was thinking. My father is not that direct, anyway—he implies things. That was hard on my mom, too, my father’s refusal to confront problems. Even now when he’s angry he doesn’t express it; he just becomes very rational.

“My parents’ divorce was the defining emotional moment in my life. It affected the next five years of my life. I’d come home and shout at the walls. I felt they were fighting for my loyalty, trying to one-up each
other. I had trouble making friends or relationships; I was afraid of being hurt. But it wouldn’t have been better for us if they’d stayed together. The damage was done. And they would be teaching us the wrong thing. If I ever had a romantic view of relationships, I don’t anymore, but that’s good. When something’s wrong, I don’t sit back and hope it will pass. I talk about it right away and don’t stop till it’s resolved. I learned to try to rectify things but to realize that when things are irreparably broken, it’s time to move on, to make decisions for myself and to not stay in relationships for anyone’s sake but my own.

“The relationship between my mother and Susan is the strongest I’ve ever seen. They are truly linked, like one person. I think my father has found happiness as well; he has left that part of his life behind. He’s stopped bad-mouthing my mother. My stepmother [whom Thomas married in 1992] has the same outlook on life as he. She wants stability, while my mom has found someone willing to go on adventures with her. I call myself a boy with three mommies.” I ask if he’s a feminist. “I don’t know how to use that word anymore. I believe that there is sexism in much of society, that boys are still taught to be aggressive and girls submissive. I’d like a job that allows me to be home a lot raising kids. Yeah, I guess that makes me a feminist.”

Peter is sweet and a bit guarded; Andrew, who followed close on his mother’s heels at the University of Maine Law School, is more blunt and less qualified in his feminism. “If [NOW president] Patricia Ireland and Bill Clinton agree on something, I’ll be there.” Like his brother, he is less distressed by the fact of the divorce than by the way it was carried out. “When my parents got married, I don’t think either realized who they were—not for another fifteen years down the road, when my dad went away for that year and my mom was forced to get more self-reliant. By the time the divorce happened, they were so different I don’t think it would have been possible for them to stay together. Anyway, I’m way past the point where I think putting things back together is always better than letting it go. What bothered me was that everybody wanted me on their side. For a while I was angry at Susan—not because of the nature of their relationship, but because I saw her as a divisive element; I thought she played a critical role. My senior year in high school, the three of them were spending a lot of time together. It didn’t seem natural. When I asked them about it, they told me it was their business. I think there
was a lot of confusion; neither of my parents really had control. Bad decisions were made all around. After the divorce, my grandmother, whose basic view was ‘He’s a good catch; why is she letting him go?’ invited my dad down to visit her in Pittsburgh. My grandma is great; I could see why my dad would want to keep a relationship with her for selfish reasons, but visiting your ex-in-laws is kind of odd, and it was really hard on my mom. I ended up being a go-between for Grandma and Mom. For a long time I don’t think either made a reasonable effort. My mom wasn’t trying hard enough and my grandma had to be more open-minded, accept the way it is. I don’t blame her for being jarred. In her day, people didn’t do that. And my grandfather clearly had a moral problem with the whole thing.

“Is life after the divorce better than it was during the collapse? Definitely. But is it better than twenty years ago, when I was a kid and my parents seemed okay? I don’t know. It’s different. But I certainly don’t see that anything my mother did was an abdication of her responsibility to us. It’s judgmental and old-fashioned to see it that way. Some relationships might be fixed. For my parents, it was being kept together as a front and nothing else. I’m just glad it’s over. Though it has made me a lot more cynical. I’m in no hurry to get married. You tie yourself into a family; if it doesn’t work out, you have to get out, without losing half your stuff. I hope my mom and dad each stay in their present relationships, but I’ll never be able to say anything definite again.”