This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
The moon can't help it. It's only an object. The moon doesn't mean to set things sloshing—in every ocean's basin, in every female's uterus, in every poet's jar of ink, in every madman's drool.
Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
The center of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth is not at the center of the Earth itself. Rather, the barycenter is about 1,100 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, about a quarter of the radius of the planet. If you were to look down on the two bodies from above, they would appear more to be swinging around each other, or maybe dancing, rather than the Moon just going around the Earth.
About two years ago I told my mother I was seeing a therapist and that I had taken antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds for years.
I shared how I had struggled with depression and anxiety for a long time, how I had a hard time setting boundaries due to insecurity and a desire to be wanted, leading myself to overwork and become overwhelmed.
There was a pause and then she said haltingly that she was glad I was getting help and that she was sorry she hadn’t done more to help me.
Years ago, I was driving back to my newspaper’s office from interviewing a source when she called and the first thing she said was, “now, I want you to know I’m fine.”
She then proceeded to tell me that a week prior a copperhead bit her foot when she went to get something out of her car late at night. She was calling me from the hospital where she’d been receiving treatment.
“Why didn’t you tell me before now?!”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Well, I’m worrying now!”
Of course, sometimes we thought we were keeping secrets from each other that were not so secret. Like when she first visited me after I moved West and called me as I was on my way to pick her up.
“I’m sorry, I need to ask you, could you please get me a pack of Marlboro reds on your way here?”
My siblings and I had known she smoked since we were in grade school, despite her efforts to hurriedly put out her cigarettes whenever we stumbled upon her sneaking one.
I waited until the last night she and my dad visited the first house I’d bought, standing outside with them in the dark as they each had a smoke, and told them that my then-girlfriend—and now-wife—was moving in with me.
Did you know you can actually see a little more than half of the Moon’s surface from Earth?
Called libration, it is the nuances in its orbit that allow you to briefly see shadows retreat slightly at the edges of the light side of the Moon’s surface, briefly illuminating craters and plains not always in view.
But the remainder perpetually faces away from the planet, staring out into the void.
My mother became my family’s primary breadwinner after my father’s business went under and we lost everything, including the house she designed herself. I still remember hearing her wail one night in the weeks before we had to move and I hurriedly began trying to clean up the family room because it was a mess and I knew it bothered her how messy it was and my father came in and just said softly, “that’s not why Mom is upset.”
In high school, I got my first job working at a grocery store. And sometimes my mother would ask me for some money to help pay a bill or if I could cover the cost of some groceries and I obliged without question or resentment.
She took on most of the responsibilities managing my grandmother’s affairs after my grandfather died, taking her to appointments, making sure bills were paid, navigating the increasing level of care needed as her memories slipped further and further away.
When my youngest sister was preparing to marry in a simple ceremony, my mother asked me to be the photographer. When she asked me to speak at my grandmother’s memorial so at least one of the grandchildren were among those making remarks, I acquiesced.
She paid for my oldest to go to Disney World with her cousins in the days after our youngest was born so we could have bonding time. She fronted money to help cover financial crises such as a car breaking down. She’s ensured my kids have ample presents from Santa when I could not.
No one is 100 percent sure how the Moon came to orbit the Earth, but the prevailing theory is that it resulted from violence, the result of an oblique collision with another smaller object.
Pieces of that smaller object along with material ripped from the planet formed an accretion disc around the Earth and, over millions of years, coalesced into the object we see today.
And though much smaller than the planet that birthed it, it is likely part of why Earth is the way it is today, as the tidal forces it generates on the planet’s surface not only send waves sloshing in the oceans but stir the Earth’s liquid metal core, keeping it alive.
I do not fear rejection from my mother for my sexual identity. One of her siblings is gay and she’s never been hateful about queer folk in front of me. She voted for Trump the first time he ran for election but has been so mortified since that she’s voted Democrat in the last two presidential elections and voted against any state and federal lawmakers that have allied with him. Thus, I suspect her response would be a far cry from this situation.
There are aspects of how I am exploring my queerness that she would disapprove of, but I am not the first person to deviate from the cultural mores of their parents.
There have been opportunities to tell her, such as that phone call when I told her of my mental health struggles, which was in the midst of my being forced out from my last job but also just months after I began accepting my queerness. There was the walk I went on with her while I was back to help spread her mother’s ashes, the air was thick with humidity, and she ranted about how she didn’t understand why my father has embraced ideas and views of the rightwing fringe.
But, really, does she need to know? I do not anticipate her facing a situation as this mother did with her closeted bisexual son. I am becoming more comfortable in who I am with each day. As much as I owe my mother, I do not owe her everything about the details of my life.
We danced to Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On For One More Day” at my and my wife’s wedding.
I heard her listen to it growing up, enough that I knew the words. And while we were moving across the parquet dancefloor as the pop trio’s 1990 debut single filled the banquet hall, she asked me why I thought she picked this song. I said I did not know.
“Because this is all you ever need to do, to just hold on for one more day.”
The dance will end one day.
The Moon’s orbit with the Earth is slowly weakening, the distance between them growing with each rotation. Not withstanding other stellar events, eventually the Moon will drift off.
And through it all, the Moon will likely always show the same face to its mother. It doesn’t know how not to.
Beautiful. This is the complicated Mother’s Day post I needed — I wish I read it earlier!