thinking about middle aged gay love is like. we have a future and we have time
my mother divorced my father when i was 7. it wasn’t because she was gay, though she did discover this later (another reminder that it’s okay to find out who you are at 40, at 50, etc, and also for who you are to change) but because she had thought he was the great love of her life and he turned out to be a shitty person.
my mother married my ma when i was 11. i think they do have a great love. i think they love each other the way you can when you’re middle aged – having seen the world, being able to see each other’s flaws, knowing themselves. they see each other in full, and they love each other and the world for it.
they dance on the street to buskers (very embarrassing when you’re twelve; very cute when you look back on it as an adult). i shit you not – they pass me their purses and dance on the sidewalk, laughing. i thought was something that only happened in movies.
my ma makes my mother eggs every morning because my mother can’t cook for shit. my mother presses my ma’s work blazers for her because my ma still can’t figure out how to work the new iron.
when it was warm, high-school me would wake up on the weekends and wander downstairs to find them sitting in the backyard in the sun, drinking coffee together and splitting the newspaper in a surgical, exact process since they’d worked out who wanted which sections years ago.
my mother is happier than she’s ever been. my ma, too. there is a future out there for every gay person who’s always known they’re gay, like my ma, and for everyone who figures it out later, like my mother. there’s time.
they’re growing old together. i cannot express to you how much they are leading happy lives, loving each other, with a huge family surrounding them. i cannot express to you how much they have this beautiful future that they are living and will live.
i want you to know, if you don’t have any older gays in your life: they’re out there. and they’re living these full, happy lives.
sometimes i look to my moms and i think, i want a life like yours. and looking at them makes me believe i will get it.
I’ve been working through Thich Nhat Hanh’s amazing book, Peace Is Every Step. This particular quote resonated with me so strongly that I decided to make it into an image, so I can put it on my fridge as a reminder. And then I decided to share it with y’all. You can download it as a PDF to print here.
Transcript of image:
We really have to understand the person we want to love.
If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.
From time to time, sit close to the one you love, hold his or her hand, and ask, “Darling, do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please tell me so that I can learn to love you properly. I don’t want to make you suffer, and if I do so because of my ignorance, please tell me so that I can love you better, so that you can be happy.”
If you say this in a voice that communicates your real openness to understand, the other person may cry. That is a good sign, because it means the door of understanding is opening and everything will be possible again.
We need courage to ask these questions, but if we don’t ask, the more we love, the more we may destroy the people we are trying to love. True love needs understanding. With understanding, the one we love will certainly flower.
“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter
ALT
