Summer was my time off, and I actually had time to clean, read, walk or spend time with friends, my kids, and not grade papers or prepare lessons. My older son walked into the kitchen as I cleaned the kitchen counter.

I want to talk to you, Mom."

"Oh, sure, " I answered.  "Let me just put the pasta in, and finish cleaning off this counter."  I wondered what was up.  He didn't usually ask to speak to me or to formally tell me he wanted to talk.  I sensed something different in his voice, more urgent and dramatic.  I found myself deliberately avoiding the intensity of his voice or what he might say, and sprayed more Kitchen Lysol on the counter and used a paper towel to clean off the grime and cat hairs. As I cleaned, I observed him out of the corner of my eye.  He was wearing one of his usual T-shirts, a navy blue single color, loose baggy pants, and I still could not believe how adult he had become.  His face was so much more pronounced than when he was a child and his features almost sculpted.  His nose, which had once been hardly noticeable and button like was long and sharp and dominated his

I had a feeling this ordinary moment in the kitchen was somehow critical but I didn't know why.   When my mother died, I decided not to go straight to her hospital room as I always did when I got there, but instead went to the cafeteria to eat breakfast.  I stalled for time, trying to buy life as I knew it, almost as if I sensed that once I got to her room, she already lay dead, having passed away earlier that night.  Yet, there I was,

eating a box of Frosted Flakes in that sterile hospital cafeteria. I had also craved chocolate pudding that week she was ill, trying to return to a safe time in my childhood and hold on to my mother.  Now, here I was cleaning the kitchen counter putting off this talk with my son in a moment of routine.

"O.K., sweetie, I'm ready, what''s up?" I sat down at our kitchen table and he sat across from me.

            "Mom, there's a reason I'm not attracted to girls," he said.  It took me a few seconds to comprehend.  Not attracted to girls?  I knew he wasn't dating, and he always seemed shy and reserved.  I though his lack of dating or a girlfriend was due to his intellectual sensibility.  He worked hard at school to maintain his 4:0 average and often seemed consumed by academics.  We sat there at our wooden kitchen table facing each other, when he said, “Mom, I’m gay.”

"Are you sure?"  Was that a standard question?  Yet he appeared so confident, so clear, and so unambivalent.

"Yes, I'm sure.  I am not bisexual and I am not experimenting.  Girls are simply not part of my my sexual or romantic life and they won't be."

"But, how do you know?"

I was trying to process this and I couldn’t help but feel that I was hit in the stomach, and that nothing would be the same again. 

He smiled.  "How did you know, Mom?  How does anyone know?"

I realized he was right.  We know what we feel and we know when we feel it.

"How long have you known?"

"Since seventh grade, and I told my friends two years ago.  I know this is a lot of information for you.  I have had time, and this is all new for you.  I have books for you to read, and support groups for parents to attend, if you want, for support."

Certain things do not change.  He was always a caretaker, and now, too, he was trying to make it easier for me, for us.  I marveled at his ability to be so mature, loving, and aware.

.  I was terrified for him; he already had asthma and other health conditions such as migraine headaches: would this be something else he would suffer from?  Though there was nothing that indicated suffering, on the contrary, he had never appeared more confident or clear.  What about AIDS?  Now he was in a higher risk category.  Images of his childhood paraded before me: we had always told him he would be a great father and wonderful husband.  Would he still?  I didn't want him to be different. I didn't want him exposed to homophobia or prejudice though I realized that he probably had been without my knowledge.

            I tried not to show my anxiety, my sense of the world falling out from beneath me.  I wanted us just to be mother and son sitting at a kitchen table on a summer afternoon discussing plans for the summer.  I knew that this moment in the kitchen would be etched in my memory and I would flashback to it many times.  I would see myself cleaning the counter, thinking about dinner and summer, and see him walk into the kitchen, ask to talk to me, me put it off by a few minutes, and then sit down as I tried to forestall the inevitable and rework his statement of not being attracted to girls.

            "How do you think Dad will take it?  Do you think he'll be really upset? 

            "I don't know.”.  I had no idea how my husband would react.  Would it shock or alienate him?  

            "I think it will be fine," I added and had enough faith in their relationship to know that he would not show his shock if it was there.  When he told his father a half hour later, I watched my husband's face change to surprise as he tried to absorb it, and back to composure and he  told  our son how much he loved him, that he would always be loved, and that nothing changed that. 

            "You are the same boy you have always been, the same son you were before you told me," he said. 

            I was glad that he could say it and mean it.  My husband and I had wondered where he had been all summer since we hardly saw him anymore, and now we realized that he had spent much of his time attending workshops and conferences sponsored by a gay and lesbian youth resource center in the city.  They had gone camping, had regular discussion groups, workshops, and conferences.  He told us what it had been like the first time he went to a conference and in a sense came "out" to himself.  He described the lavender door at the conference and how symbolic it was for him to walk through that door. 

"It was kind of scary walking through the lavender door.  I looked at it and knew what it meant to walk to the other side.  But I brought my two best friends with me (who were not gay) and they really helped me walk through, they really supported me, and we walked through together."

What great friends he had. in life.  How many of us had friends to walk with us in those difficult times, how many of us had lavender doors that we had to walk through by ourselves, with no sense of purpose, achievement or pride?

At the same time I had the image of the three of them, I had other images: of Matthew Shepard beaten and left to die because he was gay, of all the dangers that lurked out there, of what it must have felt like to be gay in a small town public high school.  I remembered all the times I had heard my students say "fag or "faggot or call each other gay in derogatory terms.   I spoke to them about tolerance, about acceptance, but it was in more abstract terms.  I had no idea how personal it would become.

Even at birth heterosexual dreams are in place. When he was born, he was the only male infant in the hospital nursery surrounded by girls and I planned on teasing him later about how popular he was with the girls when he was just born!   I had tried to prepare myself for the girlfriends I assumed would follow and hoped I would not be too much of the possessive Jewish mother.   I thought of our mornings when he lay in bed with me snug and loved and warm and soft despite my fatigue and sleep deprivation; life seemed special and I had no other need but lie in bed with my infant or toddler son.

I walked on the beach the next day and watched the waves and the dogs playing on the beach, the joggers, the children, and all I could do was cry.  I was scared and anxious and could not get images of Matthew Shepard out of my mind.  Now my son was Jewish and gay and had more chances of being exposed to the cruelty and homophobia that I always hated and feared.  But, still, when I read about it in the newspapers, it was about other people, other parents' sons, not mine.   Usually, the ocean soothed me; it was sensual and calming and whenever I have faced crisis, it has helped.    Today, I could not be soothed.  I could not stop crying. I wasn't just mourning the child I thought I knew but the adult he had become, the child who could no longer remain one, and in some ways, had grown up quicker than I realized, harboring his own secrets, his own pain, and also his own wonderment and exploration.  In that way, I was happy for him.

When he was two and in nursery school, the class had gone on a fieldtrip to the zoo by bus.  I could not imagine him on a bus without me, this little guy who clung to me and ran to me whenever he saw me.  We had never been apart, and I was used to him strapped to his carseat where I could watch him in the mirror, and I knew where he was.  I would lose control of that when he got on a bus, and wasn't he too small to sit by himself?  How would he do it?  I sat in the car and watched him hold the hand of his teacher and climb onto that bus. I thought of the moment in the kitchen at 17 telling me he was gay, and getting on the bus by himself at two was the same: both were imprinted and linked.    I realized then at two that he was his own person, no matter what, and that our life together was a series of learning how to let go.  

Now, on this July afternoon, my handsome teenager was approaching adulthood in a declaration of his authentic self.  The toddler and the teenager were the same person, and that the young overwhelmed mother and the older, calmer mother facing menopause and her own renaissance, was the same.  We were on this path together.  I loved him but I could not stop crying that day for all the lost moments, for the suffering, for the world that was not kind, for everything.  Yet, I was also so proud of him for telling us, so proud of him for allowing himself to be who he was and is, and I loved him in the kitchen as I loved him in the car watching him board a bus, and would always love him.