You and No Other

by Jane Weiss

  Erin and I were both angry and tearful throughout this session. I didn’t know how she would react, and what kind of distance she would put between us going forward. I only knew that Jane and I had to live authentically, and I hoped Erin would become a part of that as soon as she was able.

  I heard nothing from her for nearly two weeks. When she finally called, she was chatty and relayed that in a two-hour tearful conversation with her roommate, Becky, they discussed the truth about Jane and me.

  “How’d that go?” I ventured.

  “Mom, it was so-o-o good. We had a great talk, and I told her all the worries I’d had about growing up with a gay mom. Becky was really understanding and said it didn’t make any difference to her at all.”

  Over the next few weeks, Erin “outed” Jane and me to all her college friends. And her news was met with the same understanding—and sometimes even with “ho-hum.” Then one Saturday afternoon, she called to say she and her friends didn’t have anything to do, and asked if they could come by the house for a while. St. Ben’s was a little over an hour’s drive away, so they could come spend a few hours and drive back the same evening. Jane and I thought that would be fun, but we couldn’t have guessed how the evening would unfold.

  The young women, five of them, arrived in Erin’s car and entered the house ’midst laughter and frivolity. After soft drinks, chips, and popcorn were provided, Jane and I moved into the living room and settled into adjacent red swivel chairs with our books. We fully expected that Erin and friends would retire to the lower level and watch a video or just enjoy girl talk. But one by one they straggled into the living room and joined us, sitting in a semicircle around us on the floor. Jane and I glanced at each other with curiosity that gave way to delight when we realized these bright spirits intended to include us in their conversation.

  Then the questions began. Erin opened by saying she had told these friends about Jane’s and my relationship, and they wondered if we’d be willing to talk more about it with them. We sort of shrugged to each other and gave affirmative nods to the group, wondering what was about to transpire.

  The “Q and A” must have gone on for two hours. They questioned whether we had ever had a prior intimate female relationship, how we knew we were “in love” with each other, how our living relationship differed from that with our husbands, how we were treated in our jobs and neighborhood, whether we talked with any others about our relationship, who our friends were, and so on, and so on. There was a naïve curiosity to their questions and an openness to explore a subject about which they knew little. Jane and I felt neither judged nor affirmed. In fact, the whole affair seemed more like a fact-finding mission for these young women who saw the opportunity to learn about a taboo topic from safe adults.

  After the group thanked us profusely for having the conversation with them and piled into Erin’s car for the trek back to school, Jane and I summed up the experience this way: We must have been the destination of a field trip, the objective of which was, “Go talk to some lesbians!” My, how things had changed from 1980, when gays and lesbians were an embarrassment, rather than a curiosity!

  From that evening forward, Erin’s fears and concerns were remarkably diminished. Over the Christmas holidays, she shared the same information about Jane and me with her high school friends, both male and female, who had been in and out of our house for years. Almost to a person, the response was, “Duh-h-h, you thought we didn’t know that?”

  While I was pleased and relieved by their reactions, I grieved all the years Erin had been terrorized by the thought of them finding out and publicly humiliating her. I wondered whether their college separation from home and parents had made them this mellow, and prompted such free thinking. It didn’t matter. Now, after all the painful years, Erin could also stop living the lie and get on with living her life.

  Work Revisited

  By 1992, I had been at Minneapolis Children’s Hospital five years. Two years previously, I had been promoted to vice-president of Quality Management, had written the hospital’s ten-year quality improvement plan and co-authored three quality-improvement manuals. One day, out of the blue, I was contacted by a headhunter doing a national search for an individual to lead the quality initiative for Fairview Health System. Nearly five months later, I was named executive director of Fairview’s Corporate Quality Resource Group, and our job was to facilitate Fairview’s quality initiative throughout the system.

  About six months into my tenure at Fairview, however, just as I was beginning to feel the quality initiative was making great strides, I was promoted to corporate vice-president of Quality and Planning, and about a year later, I was again promoted to corporate senior vice-president of Strategic Development. In this position, I had system responsibilities for human resources, marketing/public relations, and community health, in addition to quality, organization development, and strategic planning. I had finally become comfortable enough that I never hid from Fairview’s president/CEO that Jane was my partner. He simply couldn’t have cared less. My formal invitation to Fairview’s annual all-boards retreat was addressed to “Ms. Bonnie Zahn and Ms. Jane Weiss.”

  In the next three years, Fairview acquired three more healthcare organizations. My accountabilities, as head of most of Fairview’s infrastructure, grew exponentially with each new acquisition. Though I continued to love the challenges, I became worn out trying to keep up with the ever-increasing breadth of responsibilities I was determined to fulfill.

  In July 1999, I made the most difficult career decision of my life. I decided to leave Fairview—indeed, leave corporate healthcare—to regain the life balance I lost years before. I had given too much of myself to the organizations I’d been a part of—the cost of which was a thirty-pound weight gain, and a thirty-point increase in blood pressure over the last five years—and at fifty-seven, I was woefully out of shape. I knew I needed to take a year off at least, to meditate, exercise, and contemplate what my next phase of work would be. Fairview and Jane gave me a gift certificate for a new twenty-seven-speed cross-country bike I had been eyeing, and, with that, I was off to reclaim my whole self, and to ask, “Now what?”

  To Close For Comfort

  Jane and I were at long last in a peaceful space regarding most every aspect of our lives. We no longer felt the need to hide our relationship—nor did we wear it on our sleeves. American society was opening up ever so slightly to consideration of equal rights for homosexuals/bisexuals/transgendered individuals, but people’s emotional responses to the issue still ran deep. Hate crimes against gays were frequent. Church leaders still preached that same-sex relationships were abominations unto the Lord. Children and teens still regularly hurled the epithet “you’re so gay” as their worst insult. Teenagers dealing with sexual identity issues were two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than were other young people, and homosexuals/bisexuals/transgendered folks were still not afforded the same safety, respect, freedom, and opportunities that are given for the rest of society.

  Jane and I were thankful we had the strength, courage, and wisdom of middle age to face the overwhelming threats and obstacles of living in a committed, loving relationship with a person of the same gender. But one in my extended family was not so fortunate.

  My sister Brenda’s youngest son, Jamie, had by junior high school begun to withdraw from his family and retreat into himself. Though this was common for adolescents, somehow it seemed to come earlier, and was more pronounced with Jamie. Brenda talked at length with Penny, Jane, and me about what could be wrong, but, together, we hadn’t a clue. In time, he even backed away from Erin, his cousin, lifelong playmate, and best friend. When we made a weekend trek to Iowa, Jamie made plans that took him away from the house, and sometimes we didn’t see him the entire visit. His father had always been passionately involved in building stockcars, and by seventh grade, Jamie had become his right-hand assistant. Eventually, Jamie too spent every spare moment at the garage working on cars, or at the track
watching his older brother race the car with the engine he and his father built. He and Erin drifted farther and farther apart.

  One evening, shortly before I left Fairview, Brenda called, obviously struggling to maintain her composure. In short, Jamie, then nineteen, had just “come out” to her, saying he was gay. I was confused about the strength of her upset because, after all, she had become very supportive of my relationship with Jane. And upon learning some years ago that her thirty-eight-year-old sister-in-law also had a female partner, Brenda was the first to extend a warm family welcome to both of them. However, this was different. This was her son—her youngest child. And he was a teenager, not middle-aged. He was just starting his life, not changing course midway through. His being gay not only meant a mother’s loss of dreams, but also great fear for his health, his future, and his life.

  Not long after Brenda learned the difficult news about Jamie’s sexual orientation, he handed Brenda a letter as he was leaving for college and asked her to read it after he was gone. The letter described his journey from first acknowledging his gayness at age fourteen, to his unmanageable fears and self-loathing, his serious contemplation of suicide in the desperate need for comfort and solace, and at last to finding support to learn how to be a gay person in a straight world.

  Brenda cried as she read this painful saga of his last five years. Though Jamie knew how compassionate the broader family had been with Jane and me, society’s harshness around homosexuality had created enough fear and self-hatred, that he nearly ended his life attempting to find relief from his emotional pain and fears of rejection. He thought he couldn’t survive in a world where people hated who he was.

  The good news in all of this? Through all the pain, Jamie came to terms with his sexuality and his place in the world as a gay man. And finally, Jamie and Erin were once again able to share from the depths of their beings the experiences regarding the issue they now had in common—how unforgivably thoughtless the straight world could be in dealing with those in same-sex relationships.

  Chapter Eighteen - Joy and Celebration

  Jane and Bonnie

  By mid-November 1998, there had been many changes in my dear children’s lives: Michael and Kristina moved from Dallas to Los Angeles, hoping to leverage their theater experience into film. Lynn and Kenton relocated from Memphis to Minneapolis, and both were working in business-related graphics, while Lynn earnestly continued developing her art. Andrew had moved from New York City to San Francisco to parlay his traditional finance skills into the Internet securities business. Marie, after completing her advertising certificate program in Atlanta, moved to San Francisco for an ad art director position. In the nearly seventeen years since our separation, our lives had unfolded separately and together in our connection as family.

  As Bonnie and I were browsing one day in our favorite bookstore, I picked up a book on numerology, and randomly opened it to a definition of “sixes.” The author espoused that numbers have qualitative attributes, to which the unconscious mind responds, as well as quantitative function. Sixes bring balance, equilibrium, and coordination. As a sign of wholeness and the completion of efforts, sixes denote a willingness and the self-discipline necessary to accomplish whatever one sets out to do.

  At age fifty-nine, I was actually into my sixtieth year. I felt deep in my bones what the author was saying, and was grateful to read such a clear description of what I was sensing and mirroring in my life.

  Every aspect of my being was now on a more even keel. The past two years of inner struggle and soul-searching had completed a cycle of deep inner change, a testing and letting go of naïve beliefs about myself, my world, and my God. A significant outcome from this process was that I felt I had achieved more equilibrium of body, mind, and spirit—the once-opposing forces within seemed to be working together, creating an inner peace, as well as outer productivity.

  In my work life, I realized I more consciously balanced knowledge with intuition, and the results were successful. Consulting contracts at Walker were presenting exciting opportunities to experiment with creative new management models and processes. I was taking more risks, especially compared to my previous style of work, and the payoff was positive for me and for my clients.

  By late November, circumstances were improving for Bonnie and me, as well. We had weathered a long period of wondering when and if I would find the level of work and compensation we would need for her to be able to take the same kind of hiatus I had. She was desperately in need of relief from the soul-draining milieu in her workplace. Walker’s new CEO offered me the opportunity to return to assist her and the senior team to make deep organizational changes.

  Although I was apprehensive about returning to a place that I had closed the door on for important reasons at the time, I recognized that I was in a new space, now. I could work differently. My lifelong pattern of overworking to please others had been exposed, and I was now aware of choice points to change my responses and boundaries in order to protect myself. Knowing I had the willingness, and sensing I had the self-discipline to complete the job I was being asked to do, I accepted the offer. Bonnie resigned from Fairview just six months later. I was pleased to be able to return the loving gift of support she had given me.

  During this year of being influenced by sixes, my older children and I entered into a period of unprecedented conversations and deeper understandings about what had occurred in our lives—together and apart. Lynn, as part of her therapy with Kenton around bridging their disparate need for children, approached me to dialogue about two questions her therapist suggested she explore: Why had I left her father, and what were my beliefs about motherhood? Was it overwhelming to me? I was able to recount with rationale the journey I took as I understood it, and to hopefully discount the notion that I had left her father because the family overwhelmed me. It was helpful to listen to Lynn’s perspective. And during a visit from Kristina and Michael, Bonnie and I sat with them in our den until the wee hours of the morning, talking. I was amazed that after the great pain and separation we endured, we could reunite on new ground.

  Finally, culminating that year of sixes (for as soon as you actually turn sixty, you’re entering your sixty-first year, which according to numerology, is six plus one, or seven—the number of initiation, ordeals, and obstacles. Ugh!)—I received one of the greatest gifts I had ever experienced in my lifetime—outside of birthing my children and finding Bonnie—a surprise sixtieth birthday party, with nearly everyone who had been part of my life for the past twenty years in attendance!

  Bonnie

  It was early November 1999, and my children were all in good places. David had finally returned from China in 1993, and to my great relief, set up permanent residence in Minneapolis. In the intervening years, he became a licensed realtor, and established his own successful realty business. In 1997, he married Suzanne, a Korean woman who grew up in an adoptive family in a north Minneapolis suburb. Jane and I were eagerly anticipating the birth of their first child—our first grandchild—only a month after Jane’s birthday.

  Edward found his niche working for a local car dealer in a managerial capacity. He was dating Marianne, an elementary education graduate of the College of St. Benedict—soon to be Erin’s alma mater. We hoped Edward and Marianne’s relationship would develop into a serious one and that Marianne would soon become part of our family.

  Moria married Jerod, a marine recruiter, in 1993, and they lived in Indianapolis. Jerod and his brother had been adopted when they were preschoolers by a couple in a north Minneapolis suburb, not far from where Moria spent her high school years. After six years of marriage, I had never known Moria to be happier and more settled, and her choice of Jerod as a life partner could not have been better made.

  Erin was in her senior year at the College of St. Benedict, majoring in Elementary Education. Though she had been in a serious long-distance relationship for two years with a cadet at West Point, she ended that romance the previous spring. So she would soon laun
ch her career and her adult life as a single young woman, eager to take her place in the world.

  Jane’s sixtieth birthday was rapidly approaching—November 22, 1999. This time, she wasn’t going to talk me out of celebrating it, as she had done ten years ago. Jane—the one who worked with and celebrated seniors and who regularly provided “lecturettes” when I complained the least little bit about aging—had not wanted any type of birthday celebration when she entered her decade of the fifties. I razzed her that I thought she was saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Nonetheless, I honored her request, and we had celebrated her fiftieth birthday with friends Rachel and Darci at a quiet dinner out. Not this time, though. Jane wasn’t going to get by with that again.

  But what to do? I wanted to throw a big party—which was quite unlike me, actually. I wanted to gather together all the people who were important in our lives and celebrate! There was so much to celebrate. In addition to honoring Jane at her sixtieth birthday, we were thrilled to be living in our dream home on the little lake and decorated with Jane’s elegant touch. We hadn’t yet commemorated my resignation from corporate healthcare three months earlier, with plans to take a year off for reflection and renewal. We were elated that we were no longer living our lives in secret, and that our children were all at various stages of acceptance of us, rather than in anger or denial.