Whatever...Love Is Love (2 page)

I had rarely spoken to Jack about my romantic life. That part of me I kept secret from my son. I had never introduced him to the people I had fallen in love with, or was obsessed with. It was a risk I didn't want to take. I wanted to protect him from getting attached to someone that I would probably not end up staying with.

But Clare had been with us almost daily for the last two years and I suppose he had felt our connection. She became a key part of our family in a very short time. After a week of her staying with us in LA, Jackson asked if she would be his godmother. It was no wonder that he was asking me this question now.

How and when should I tell him? When I explained the situation to my therapist, she smiled and said, “Your son may say a lot of things about you when he's older, but he will never say his mother was boring.”

Her advice was to wait until my son asked. And now here he was, asking.

About a year before this conversation, I was sitting in my garden in California, looking through photos and the old journals I have kept since childhood. From the green tattered notebook with hearts drawn on the cover, to the one I started in Haiti in January 2010 after the earthquake, these journals told many stories. Yet they all seemed woven together by a similar theme.

I read about the handful of men and the one woman I had been in romantic relationships with, passages rife with pain and angst. It seemed whenever I was physically attracted to someone, I would rush to put them in the box of being my “soul mate,” and then be crushed when things didn't turn out as I had hoped.

I read about the two men I fell for while working on films. I was certain each was “the one,” a belief fueled by sexual attraction that told me I was in love. Only once the filming ended, so did the relationships. I read about the man who asked me to marry him over the phone, before we had even kissed. Three months later we were in his kitchen throwing steaks at each other's heads in anger.

As I continued to look through my writing and photos, I came across a black-and-white print of a photo of my best friend and me, taken on the previous New Year's Eve. We looked so happy and I couldn't help but smile. I remembered how we had met two years before; she was sitting in a bar wearing a fedora and speaking in her Zimbabwean accent.

We had an immediate connection but neither of us thought of it as romantic or sexual. She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant, and funny people I had ever met, but it didn't occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could choose to love each other romantically.

What had I been waiting for all of these years? My friend is the person I like being with the most, the one with whom I am most myself.

The next time I saw her, in New York, I shared my confusing feelings. We began the long, painful, wonderful process of trying to figure out what our relationship was supposed to be.

First, I wondered how the relationship would affect my son. He trusted Clare. He loved her, even. Second, I worried how the relationship might affect my career. I have never defined myself by who I slept with, but I know others have and would. Such is the nature of Hollywood, in some pockets anyway.

It's hard for me even to define the term
partner
in my life, but others would try.

For five years I considered the closest thing I had to a partner to be a dear friend who just happened to be in his seventies. He was a former producer and studio head named John Calley, and I spoke to him daily until he died. We both loved books and, being seekers in life, always worked to understand ourselves and the world more. He was the one who picked me up each time I had a breakdown about another failed romance. Because we were platonic, did that make him any less of a partner to me?

I have never understood the distinction of a “primary” partner. Does that imply we have secondary and tertiary partners, too? To me, a partner is someone you rely on in your life—for help, companionship, mutual respect, and support. Can my primary partner be my sister or child or best friend, or does it have to be someone I am having sex with? I have two friends who are sisters, have lived together for 15 years, and raised a daughter together. Are they not partners? And many married couples I know haven't had sex for years. And yet, everyone thinks of them as partners.

As Clare and I grew closer, my desire for her grew stronger, and hers for me. Eventually, I decided to share the truth of our relationship with my large, “traditional” Italian-Polish Philadelphia family.

My father's response came between puffs of his cigar while we sat on the roof of a casino in Atlantic City. “She's a good girl, good for you,” he said. My mother and siblings echoed his sentiments. Maybe they weren't so traditional after all?

My feelings about attachment and partnership have always been unconventional. Jack's father, Dan, will always be my partner because we share Jack. Just because our relationship is nonsexual doesn't make him any less of a partner to me. We share the same core values, including putting our son first.

At one point during my illness that summer, I thought I might not survive. But the people who were at my bedside every day at the hospital were all my life partners: my mother, Jackson, Dan, my brother Chris, and Clare.

Clare rarely left my side and called every doctor she knew to help figure out what was wrong with me. It was Dan who brought our son to see me every day, and kept him feeling safe during such a scary situation.

It was Chris's arms I fell into when I couldn't get up. It was my mother who stroked my head for hours at a time. And it was Jackson who walked me through the halls with my IV and made me breathe.

So back to Jackson's question. Was I romantic with anyone right now?

I exhaled and finally said it: “Clare.”

He looked at me for what seemed like an eternity. Then, he broke into a huge, warm smile. “Mom, whether you are lesbian, gay, bi, or transgender, shout it out to the world. Whatever, love is love,” he said, with wisdom beyond his years.

I loved him so much for saying those words. “But, Jack, I'm a little scared,” I said. “When I was younger, people judged you if you were in a romantic relationship with a person of the same sex, and some still do. So I'm not sure how to deal with this. But we'll figure it out together.”

And we have figured it out together: Jack, Clare, Dan, and I. It's a rare weekend when we aren't all piled in the same car, driving to one of Jack's soccer tournaments. Dan makes fun of Clare for getting lost and she makes sure he always has the umbrellas, sunscreen, water, snacks, and whatever else we might need in case of a nuclear disaster.

Mostly, the four of us laugh a lot. Jackson has gotten us hooked on
Modern Family,
and in each episode he tries to figure out if Dan is Phil or Jay and if Clare is Gloria or Mitchell. (He has no doubt about which character I am: Claire.)

A woman came to my trailer on a movie set a few days after my first article appeared and thanked me for my story. She said that her ex of 10 years ago lived in her guesthouse and that her best friend lived in the room next to her, and that they all helped to raise her children.

She asked me how she could explain that to people. What could she say when strangers ask “Are you in a relationship?” or “Do you have a partner?” That she is not having sex with anyone but that she does, in fact, have partners and a family?

Since she had no label to define her or her family, I said to her, “I guess you're a whatever. And your family is a whatever, too, just like mine.” We shared a classic aha moment. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, she and I found ourselves beaming with pride, in tears about our amazing families.

I realized that this was a conversation that needed to be shared. I wanted my 12-year-old son to be proud of his family and not think that our story was something to be ashamed of or was so unusual. I wanted anyone who read the articles I wrote, and lived in a situation that was not traditional, to know they weren't alone.

The label of “partner” as only your sexual partner is outdated. An updated label of partner might be anyone who is significant to you in some fundamental way. The definition of the family is changing, too, and I hope it's working to bring people together with a new respect for different kinds of relationships.

So I would like to consider myself a whatever, as Jackson said. Whomever I love, however I love them, whether they sleep in my bed or not, or whether I do homework with them or share a child with them, “love is love.” And I love our modern family. They are the air that keeps me in flight, and I would be lost without them. Maybe, in the end, a modern family is just a more honest family.

So rethink that first question for a minute. Who is
your
partner?

2

AM I A CATHOLIC?

D
o you consider yourself religious? Or maybe not religious but spiritual? What do these terms actually mean to you?

When I was 18 and in my freshman year at Villanova University, I met Father Ray Jackson, a 62-year-old Augustinian priest who taught a class I was taking called “An Introduction to Peace and Justice Education.”

He was a former marine, six foot two, with bright blue eyes and a wicked smile. Not only did he give me my precious black rosary beads, he also introduced me to books that radically shifted the way I perceived myself and the world.

Father Ray was my “partner” all through my years at Villanova University.

He was the person I had lunch with every day in the school cafeteria, where my grandmother worked as a salad bar lady. He was the one I talked to every day about my pain, my love life, and my fears. He held me when it looked like my mother might die from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And he let me scream with rage when my dad went to rehab once again. He was the one I laughed with. He was the one I felt most comfortable with during those college years when I began questioning everyone and everything.

In his class he asked us to write about our heroes. While the other kids wrote about Lee Iacocca and Madonna, I wrote about Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Jesus Christ. You'd think the erotic themes of Millay would be off-limits to a guy dressed in black robes with a silver crucifix hanging around his neck, but not Father Ray. I got an A on that paper. (I'll never know if it was Millay or Jesus who swayed him.)

Although I had been raised Catholic, I never quite believed in the full Church doctrine. That would've been impossible given that I believed then and now that women also have a calling to the priesthood; that sex before marriage is actually a wise thing to do; that people should get divorced if they need to; and that women and men should be able to marry members of their own gender if they want to. And I didn't lend credence to the greatest divide of all . . . that if you weren't baptized, like my dear Jewish aunt and uncle, you would automatically go to hell. The parables and concepts contained in the teachings of Jesus Christ, about loving your neighbor as yourself, were the things I knew in my heart to be true.

Some of these ideas Father Ray agreed with and some he did not. He didn't believe in abortion unless it was to save the life of the woman, or in case of a child conceived by rape. I, on the other hand, marched in every pro-choice rally in the Philadelphia area. Yet our differences didn't deter him from being my friend. He never judged me or tried to convert me to his point of view. Father Ray was focused on caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, and making the world a better place. I think he would have liked our new pope very much.

However, not every priest I've met in my life was like Father Ray.

In my sophomore year of high school, the priest who was the head of our school met with us in the chapel every week to discuss “Christian values.” In one of the more memorable sessions, he handed all the girls yellow sheets of paper containing some provocative questions and answers:

“Have you ever thought about sex? Then you have sinned.”

“Have you ever had sex? Then you have sinned.”

“Have you ever let a man feel your breast? Then you have sinned.”

By the time I finally got to one that said, “Have you ever masturbated? Then you have sinned,” I was really upset. I raised my hand, stood up, and said, “Father, my mother is a nurse and she told us that masturbation is a normal part of sexual development.” I guess the sin of speaking up might have been worse than masturbation. He turned beet red and kicked me out of the chapel. My revenge? I didn't even feel guilty.

That story is why meeting Father Ray was such a revelation. He showed me that I could be Catholic
and
have my own point of view. Early on in his service as a priest, he raised the idea of how he believed women should be able to be members of the clergy, and was immediately “exiled” to a poor parish downtown. The revolutionary bad-boy Catholics and acolytes were his heroes. I wonder how we looked, sitting in the cafeteria together, a balding gray-haired man and an 18-year-old woman with long blond hair and black army boots. I wonder if anyone at school thought we were having an affair. We never talked about sex. I had only fooled around with one guy in my life up to that point, so it wasn't an important topic to me or him, given that he was pretty much sleeping with God.

Father Ray wore a white collar (sometimes) and said mass. In my eyes, those were the only things that made him a priest in the traditional sense. He was funny and compassionate and could see the good in everyone. Long before I went to Villanova, Father Ray had become close to my mother's father, PopPop Urban. PopPop was the sacristan of the church on the campus. For those not familiar with the term, the sacristan is the safekeeper of many sacred things within the church, especially the vessel that holds the “blood of Christ” (a.k.a. the holy wine) used at communion. This was the ideal job for PopPop, who couldn't resist a good draft beer, cheap whiskey, or free wine. But Father Ray loved PopPop for his good nature and sense of joy. Over beers at a local pub near Villanova while celebrating my graduation, Father Ray revealed that “After your PopPop left, our wine bills were cut in half!” Father Ray accepted my grandfather just as he was, despite his fondness for “the drink.”