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My mother, survivor
She may be barely 5 feet tall, but she’s the strongest person I know, from weathering her husband’s desertion after 25 years of marriage to embracing her newly out gay son.
By Michael K. Feds
An Advocate.com exclusive posted May 7, 2003
While putting diesel fuel in our tractor this evening at our home in rural Clermont County, Ohio, as my recently divorced middle-age mother was preparing to mow six acres for the upcoming open house, we talked back and forth about the men we are dating. Among the verities of chirps from spring birds and the bark of the neighbor’s coon hound Shasta-Mae running around in the field, the value of life was again made clear to me.
I saved my mother from suicide last year, ripping the knife from her hands and holding her weeping soul, tight in my arms on the kitchen floor. It was the day my father ended a quarter-century of marriage and left her with a home, bills, land, and a broken heart. But that was a passing moment of weakness, because my mother is the strongest person I know. She stands barely 5 feet tall: I look at her and in my mind still see her standing by her Firebird hot rod in the 1970s photograph she doesn’t know I have pressed in my Bible. She still has her blond hair (although I think she might be getting “assistance” for that now), and she still turns heads when she puts on her church dresses (forgive me for the combination) and drives off to her Baptist church with the top down on her Mustang GT.
Well, she used to. He got the cars in the divorce, along with a slap on the wrist.
When I was a boy in this rural town, on these six rural acres of paradise, my mother was the flower that was always in bloom, even on our worst days. She was the only one who came into my room and dried my tears after awful days at school, particularly the day when Spanish class was halted for the students to vote on whether or not I was a fag; the teacher was with the majority. My mother was the one who said, on the day I graduated from high school—which I barely made it to—that she was proud of me, even though I was forth from last in the survivor lineup.
She was the one who hugged me when she found out I was gay just months later and listened to my story; so many other mothers would have done just the opposite.
When I was a young man in this rural town, on these six rural acres of paradise, my mother encountered a change in her life. As have so many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people, she found out what it is like to come out of her pain and find happiness. After seven years of suffering mental and emotional abuse from my father—during those same years that I was a boy in this rural town—she no longer accepted his victim-of-infidelity treatment. We cleaned out the closet and sent him packing and began…to not rebuild, but to build our much-deserved human right of happiness.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
Find out more about the author at http://www.MichaelFeds.com