Day 22: Letting Go

My memories of living in my mother's house are stored like home movies that I've replayed so many times, the people in them only superficially resemble my family. Scenes feel scripted, quotable, unchangeable, unreal. And I do not recognize myself.

Let me define the term "mother's house," which is different from what I call my "parents' house," even though both names refer to the same building in Roslindale. My parents' house is the house I lived in from 1982 to 2000, or my birth to my father's death; my mother's house is the house I lived in from 2000-2004, the year communication shut down between my immediate family and me.

There were two distinctly dark periods during the time I lived in my mother's house. The first was during my senior year of high school, after I gave my mom the list of colleges I wanted to apply to. The second was the summer after my sophomore year of college, when I came out to my family.

In October 2001, my mom asked me to write a list of schools that I wanted to apply to. I gave it to her, she looked at it and without missing a beat she said, "Not one of these schools is in Massachusetts." And thus began the silence.

The silence of 01-02. My mom and I didn't speak. That is to say, we didn't have a single conversation for almost four months. She was furious that I wasn't planning on staying in Boston after high school; I was furious that she was furious.

The day I turned nineteen--December 10, 2001--my mom gave me a gift. I told her that the only thing I wanted was money to pay for college application fees. She told me, "I'm not helping you apply to a single out-of-state school." So, on my birthday, my mom came into the house--pissed off as usual--and said, "Go get your birthday present. It's in the back of the car."

I went to the car, got a large cardboard box out of the trunk, and carried it into the house. My gift? A stackable CD tower with glass tubes on either side that filled with water and changed colors. I have never hated a gift more, especially since I kept all my CDs in a binder.

I never understood why my mom was so furious that I wanted to leave Boston. Now, with two years of work on my musical under my belt, I'm starting to get a better sense of where she was coming from. I've devoted so much of my life, my time, my soul to this project. And now that it's almost done, I'm feeling depressed. I don't know how not to be working on this musical. I don't know how to send it into the world, where I can't protect it, where I can't control it. And most importantly, it's not the show I thought it was going to be when I started working on it in earnest two years ago. It's so much different, so much better, so much darker, so much it's own thing.

I feel for my mom. Saying goodbye to me must've been very difficult for her. But she did it--kicking and screaming aside--and I wouldn't be here today had she acted differently.