MORE THAN ALL THE STARS
A GAY FATHER’S JOURNEY TO SELF

This aint no story, but the way circumstances actually unraveled and laid themselves out under my stammering feet.

This aint no story, I wouldn’t even know how to fictionalize this if my life depended on it. Maybe if I turned my life over to a real writer, someone more capable at creating beauty from pain, manufacturing hope from despair, they would make me brave, strong and noble, rather than the hiding and crying man I showed myself to be. From someone else’s pen I’d be tall and manly not the scared little boy playing house in a house of cards that I was that Sunday.
"What’s out that window that you keep looking at, you looking for somebody?" I stood in my mama’s living, the family home, staring out the big window to the street. Mama stood beside me, all five foot nothing of her petite frame resting to my right against the window frame. I could smell the perfume that she wore, it was sweet, sticky, heady and the same scent that she wore every Sunday for family day. The scent made me wish for the days when I was younger and would look up at her as she stood and stared out the window; at what I never knew.
"Yeah, Leigh is bringing Corinne over; they should have been here by now. She told me when I left the house she would be right behind me."
"OOH,” she squealed in her unfettered girlish way, pleased to be seeing her grandbaby. A smile touched my lips in response to her obvious joy at seeing Corinne, her baby boy’s first and only child.
Alone again, I continued staring, continued thinking on the day to come, about all the things I didn’t or hadn’t yet told her. I didn’t have the words, or the spine, yet to tell her.
How could she know though that her baby boy, her second and youngest son, the one who just a few years earlier had surprisingly fallen in love and gotten married and who even more shockingly followed that with a child soon after. How could she know that this same son, the one she was smiling with and staring to the streets with, was gay.
I couldn’t tell her, not today, not anytime soon. She didn’t know that my then wife and I, although still living in the same house, were virtual strangers and rarely talked.
How could mama know that today when my wife finally did show up, with grandchild in tow, she was going to give her, and the rest of the gathered clan, her new address, her new phone number; she was going to take from me the one thing in life I had done right- my daughter. She was moving out, leaving me alone taking from my mother the possibility of seeing her newest grandchild weekly, but taking from me my heart and soul and up to that moment my true reason for being.
Even though she was just moving across town, it felt like she was moving to the moon, or back home to my wife’s familial home in Philadelphia. I felt the drama of the moment as I stood, stared and waited for them to drive up. I felt the preeminent mood of my inner moments, and knew I was about to lose the one thing that kept the knots of my life from fraying, untying and cascading down in a storm of a hundred useless pieces of string.
So we all gathered, laughed, smiled and ate like black folks do on a Sunday, when the vibes are good, the spirit high and we gather to fellowship. I listened to my family talking, laughing, telling tales on each other and said nothing. I wandered from room to room, only peripherally engaging anyone, my daughter hanging to my hip; an extension, a new growth of bone.
Later, I went home to an empty apartment for the first time in years, and said nothing- my tears would speak volumes, but I refused them license to share my soul with others. But I cried and cried to myself, while listening to old records, the kind best listened to in the dark and while sitting on the hard floor pondering the weave of carpet patterns.
When my daughter was born, she recreated me, made me change, grow and see sides of me I never knew I had. She made me see and loving in a whole different light. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE now became real and manifest to me; the principles of agape versus familial or erotic loves all became clear and I flourished under such a spirit of love and blessings that a child brings.
Feeling, full of myself, and in a moment of hubris and parental bliss, one day I told a lesbian colleague “You can’t know what true and unconditional love is until you have a child.”
Now I know I was wrong, I should have said- “you can’t know what true and unconditional love is until you have a child that now lives three thousand miles away from you.”
Yeah, yeah, I know this is still an arrogant and insensitive thing to say, but it is the way I felt at the time, and sometimes still, do, and I really do hate always having to be PC every time I speak.
When I married, I also was recreated. Not because of my sexuality and being gay; no, I think I loved women too, maybe more at the time, but because I never thought that I would marry, had rarely had a girlfriend and was shocked to now find myself at this point.
Fatherhood brought on another stage of movement and growth. When my child was delivered, she remade the shallow life I had lived heretofore into a full blown, blossoming entity that I knew would never close.
Now, with the separation and my daughter and her mother moving across town to their own place, and not across the country or to another continent, as my emotions would have had someone believe, and my new-found, newly expressed sexuality, I found myself having to re-invent myself again; to find new places for me to inhabit and new languages to learn how to speak. I now found myself reestablishing old family ties, and creating and fostering new extended family networks.
Now, I was moving; moving into my own space literally and figuratively, moving into a new and unexplored self with new desires that although never active, had always lingered in the background causing my head to turn when he, whomever the he was, walked by, but had never been more than a ghost of a desire and never pressing or important. My male to male urges were now taking hold and center stage in my psycho-social leanings. I was moving into a self that was lonely and now in need of connections, and these male to male desires, now set free, sprung up in fiery waves, burning me, rising me out of the ashes of an old, outdated me.
One stage of my life was over, and another just beginning.
Slowly, I made my way into black gay life. I recognized instantly that I could not refer to my being gay as a “lifestyle”, a word which denotes choice and the ability to stop being who I was, but simply as my life. I began to meet men, men that were not ashamed of emotion, bereft of care and tactile sensibilities that spoke of love and joy. I slowly created a new family that I saw would be there for me, if no one else was. But I still had to build a bridge between my two worlds- the ex-husband and father, son, brother- straight male, over to single gay black man, over thirty and now trying to make his way into a new life and still holding onto to the old.
And now my daughter is three thousand miles away, and I am a gay man trying to raise a daughter in absentia. I am a father that now has to teach his child about his sexuality; about the politics of sexuality, societal norms and looking beyond and always keeping sight of the father she loves and who loves her dearly, regardless of the gender of the person on my arm.
At five she was already grounded in society’s male to female dynamics and way of thinking. She saw the world as black and white already- women had long hair, men’s were short. Women dressed in dresses and kissed a lot and girl dolls had teas. Whereas males were rough and careless and fun to play with in tangled ways that sometimes bumped shins and sent you skyward only to be caught again on the downward dip. She saw fathers and mothers, not dads and dads and moms and moms.
Good thing for me, from the moment of the separation, my ex-wife, Corinne’s day to day guardian, had been telling our daughter that-
“Corinne, sometimes a man can love a man, and a woman can love a woman in the same way a woman and a man love each other.” She was sincere in her attempt to indoctrinate our child into the world where one parent is same gender loving. But, and there is always a “but” in life, Corinne is now twelve and still lives over three thousand miles away and the topic of my sexuality rarely if ever comes up. I am no longer sure what she knows about me, or if she really cares. I leave it alone until it comes up, and when it does, she hears me, and moves on quickly. And I just smile at my child. I smile as she meets my friends and invites them into her world.
So we talk on the phone, converse through emails and IM’s. At the end of each encounter I tell her I love her more than the moon, we started this when she was just 5 and just moved away from me. She tells me she loves me more than all the stars, and I picture the immense expanse of her love enfolding me, and hang up the phone smiling safe and secure in her love.