Homotastic: Tales of a Teenage Fag Hag

PROLOGUE

         “You can’t do this to her, Kate. It’s not right!”

         “I’m too young to be saddled with a kid, damn it! I just can’t handle it anymore, okay!”

         I could hear my mother and uncle arguing through the bedroom door, but I tuned them out and focused on the scarf in front of me. Knit one, purl two, knit one, purl two. It became a mantra of sorts, the only order in the perpetual chaos of my life.

         “You never should have had kids if you weren’t ready for it. It’s a full time job for the rest of your life. What were you thinking? Our mother didn’t raise you like this!”

         “I wasn’t thinking! It was all Will’s doing. He was the one who wanted a family, not me. But I couldn’t tell him no. I could never say no to that man. I want bigger and better things than this life, Jay, things I can’t have with an eight year old underfoot. Don’t you understand that?”

         I can understand wanting more; we all want more, Kate. But abandoning your only child to get it, that’s just insane! First Will left, now you’re leaving her too? Sadie doesn’t deserve this. What kind of mother are you?”

         “The kind that wasn’t meant to be.”

         “Kate, you can’t just—“ SLAM.

         Knit one, purl two, knit one, purl two.

********************

         That very morning, I moved out of the one bedroom apartment my mother and I had been sharing for the last five years since my father had left us and into the cozy, three-bedroom cottage my uncle Jay shared with his lover Ethan. Four boxes and a backpack later, I was settled into the guest bedroom.

         I adjusted fairly well to my mother being gone. She hadn’t been around much since my dad left, so I was used to her absence. Adjusting to living with two very different gay men was a much harder task. Jay was tall, slim, and very anal retentive. He wanted things done now and to his exact specifications. He was prone to hissy fits when things didn’t go just how he wanted them to. Ethan was the more laid back of the two. He fit the jolly stereotype of a short, fat man, except he was tall and “voluptuous,” as he called it. He was also prone to hissy fits, but they were usually caused by crises such as a missing shoe or running out of his favorite shade of lipstick just before a show. My uncles’ opinions on how to raise me often clashed, so I constantly had to be on my toes.

         My family had always been a tad dysfunctional, what with a missing father and a free-spirited mother, but the dysfunction was magnified tenfold with my uncles. It wasn’t just Jay’s touch of OCD or the fact that Ethan liked to dress up in women’s clothing. It was more than that. I had been raised Jewish, as had Jay, which clashed with Ethan being a born-again Christian. The morals and values were essentially the same, but it was the little contradictions that we got caught up in: go to Catholic school but have a bat mitzvah, don’t eat pork but eat the body of Christ, turn the other cheek but don’t forget the side of guilt.

         The first few years went by rather uneventfully. My life settled into a comfortable, predictable routine: school each day, ballet on Tuesdays, Hebrew school on Wednesdays, soccer on Thursdays, temple on Saturdays, and church on Sundays. Despite everything I’d been through, I flourished. Every quarter, my name was at the top of the honor roll list. I devoured books on every subject I could think of. Jay took me to the library once a week after ballet practice, and I’d load up, checking out the maximum of ten books. By the next week, I’d be ready for ten more. By the time I was eight, I’d developed an interest in photography and poetry. It was a way to express all the conflicting thoughts and feelings that haunted me. It would have been difficult to single me out in a crowd of children as the one who’d lost everything she’d ever known. I was still mourning for the life I’d never have. My mother would never help me get ready for my first date. My father would never walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. As much as my uncles tried, they couldn’t take my parents’ place. But in time, they forged their own place in my life.