Girlish Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Lara Lillibridge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other kind, without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lillibridge, Lara, author.

  Title: Girlish: growing up in a lesbian home / Lara Lillibridge.

  Description: New York: Skyhorse Publishing, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017050453 (print) | LCCN 2017053705 (ebook) | ISBN 9781510723924 (e-book) | ISBN 9781510723917 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lillibridge, Lara. | Children of gay parents—United States—Biography. | Lesbian mothers—United States—Biography. | Families—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC HQ777.8 (ebook) | LCC HQ777.8 .L55 2018 (print) | DDC 306.874086/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050453

  Cover photograph: Lara Lillibridge

  Front cover design: Jenny Zemanek

  Jacket design: Mona Lin

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2391-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2392-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  Author’s Note

  “I Used to Believe, Now I Know” was previously published on TheFeministWire.com on September 17, 2013.

  A version of “Being Raised by Lesbians” was previously published on Brain, Child magazine’s Brain, Mother blog on November 14, 2013, and reprinted on Australia’s iVillage website under the title “How Having Two Mums Scarred Me.”

  “Cicadas” was previously published online on TheDrunkenLlama.com on December 30, 2016.

  For Paul,

  without whom this book would have taken a lot longer to write and

  would have been a lot more difficult for the reader to follow.

  contents

  acknowledgments

  introduction: a childhood crossword puzzle

  notes from the fourth wall: this is how it feels to write about lesbian parents

  the early years

  elementary school

  middle school

  junior high

  high school

  college and beyond

  acknowledgments

  I am incredibly lucky to have the support of my family behind me. My mother, stepmother, brother, and half-sister have all given me their blessings, even without knowing what was on the page. There is no greater gift they could have given me.

  I am beyond fortunate to have the support of my significant other and my two grade-school-aged children, who understand that Mama’s writing is just as important as a job outside of the home. I’m also grateful that my children accept that this is a grown-up book and not appropriate for them just yet. I promise I’ll write a book they can read someday.

  Thanks, too, to my writing friends, who were willing to read early drafts, give encouraging words, and discuss at length the same sentences over and over again: Sandy Roffey, Sherry Dove, Andrea Fekete, Arlie Matera, and all my friends and advisors at West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program. I’m grateful, too, for my online writing community of Binders on Facebook, and the generosity of the many already published writers who took the time to answer questions from all of us newbies.

  I will always be grateful to my editor, Chamois Holschuh, for her patience with my thousands of emails, and to Skyhorse Publishing for believing in me and helping bring my memoir to life.

  Many names have been changed, and I attempted to leave people out as much as possible in an effort to protect their privacy. My focus was on my immediate familial relationships, and I included other people only when their story overlapped ours. The absence of friends or family members is not meant to deny their importance in my life, but an attempt to tell a complicated story as simply as possible.

  introduction

  a childhood crossword puzzle

  1. A description of my mother, starting with the letter “L.” Not lesbian, that’s too easy. Liberal is also good, but I’m looking for a physical description. Give up? Librarian. Yes, I know, she has never been employed at a library, but if you ask anyone at all to describe my mother, they all choose “librarian” as their first word. She is well-read and loves philosophic and political discussions. However, she is deceptively sweet—few people would guess how fiendish she is at Cards Against Humanity. A game that relies on shock value and twisted humor to win, my mother always wins.

  2. My best friend, confidant, fellow rabble-rouser, and occasional arch-nemesis. Also, my only full-blooded sibling. Matthew, with two Ts. Want to know something funny? I didn’t know about that second T in Matthew until I was in fifth grade. I’m not entirely sure he did either. No one paid much attention to Matt back then, unless he was in trouble. I always sort of figured that’s why he ended up six foot nine inches tall. He grew and grew until the world couldn’t ignore him anymore.

  3. What is wrong with my mother’s partner, Pat, herewith referred to as my stepmother. But what about my father’s wives, you ask? Aren’t they also my stepmothers? Well, yes, but he was always switching them out for new ones. I think of them more as … numbers. Wife #4, Wife #5, Wife #5½, etc. The word “stepmother” in this book refers to my mother’s one true love. She’s been around the longest, anyway—from when I was three until the present. Now that we have that straightened out, let’s get back to the crossword. What exactly is wrong with my stepmother? I guess it depends on who you ask. At first it was clinical depression, but that changed to manic depression. Yes, I know it’s called “bipolar disorder” now, but that’s not the word our family uses. We’ve always had our own preferred words for things, just like we said “gay” instead of “lesbian” when I was growing up. Yes, I do see how other diagnoses might fit her better, but I’m not a doctor, so I am not allowed an opinion, no matter how many online “diagnose yourself” quizzes I have taken on her behalf. Just write down “mental illness”; we’ll sort it out later.

  4. The city where I grew up. You don’t need the specific suburb, no one can spell Irondequoit, not even spell-check. You give up? You don’t like my game? Rochester. It’s in New York, on Lake Ontario. No, I’ve never been to New York City. It’s a six-hour drive and everyone I knew in college who went there got their luggage stolen. Toronto was only a three-hour drive, and everyone there knew how to use their turn signal. Rochester was the home of Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch + Lomb back then. My grandparents were given the chance to buy shares in Xerox before it was incorporated, but they felt it was too risky. Yeah, I know, pity.

  5. My nickname growing up. No, not Lezzie. Four letters. Not slut, either, though I heard that a lot, too. I mean the one my parents still call me. The one that makes me cringe. Lolly. Isn’t that sweet? It’s downright gack-worthy. Lolly is five letters? Okay, drop one of the Ls. That works, now, doesn’t it? It’s more important to be creative than accurate sometimes. At lea
st that is what my father tells me.

  6. One of my biggest childhood secrets. No, not the fact that my mother was a lesbian—that’s too obvious, and it has too many letters. Not my stepmother’s mental illness—they kept that secret even from me until I was older. I am looking for the answer to why my mother was in and out of the hospital and doctor’s offices for most of my childhood—why she wore tape over the left side of her glasses and had four corneal transplants. I wasn’t allowed to tell people my mother had herpes. They would think it was the sexual kind. It wasn’t; it was the oral kind that settled in her eye and eventually took her vision. There are drugs for that, you say? She was ten months too early. You don’t like the word herpes as an answer? Feels too gooey? Just write bad eye. That’s good enough. If you leave out the space in the middle it will fit.

  7. How I rebelled against my parents in high school. What, you didn’t know me then so it isn’t a fair question? Well, take a guess. Nope, not the time I shaved my head. That was accidental. Besides, how do you really piss off a lesbian? No, I mean piss them off more than just dating unemployed loser musicians. Teenaged sex, well, yes, but think bigger. Worse than smoking pot and skipping school. (Yes, of course I did that.) Give up yet? Rush Limbaugh. That’s right. I became a “ditto-head” praising Jesus and hating “feminazis.” Even voted for George Bush in my first presidential election. Take that, Mom! I’ll rebel and screw up the country at the same time! I know, I know, you’re thinking, but she looks so sweet. You have no idea how diabolical I can be.

  8. My father’s profession, in Latin. Okay, I can’t spell it either, so I’ll just copy and paste it for you. Pediatric Gastroenterologist—the digestive tracts of children. My father devoted his life to the study of burps, farts, shit, and vomit. He’s very good at removing quarters from children’s stomachs with a little tube called an endoscope. I’ve seen it done. I’ve also watched him stretch a child’s esophagus, which involved a lot of vomiting and crying. He swore the boy was given an amnesia-inducing agent so he wouldn’t remember any of it. I wish I had been given the drug as well, as I cannot forget it. Attachment disorder, he tells me, makes for a very good doctor. Dad could never be a vet; he could never hurt an animal, “even to save its life,” he told me. Children, on the other hand, were something different entirely.

  9. The city where my father moved when I was four years old. Hint: it’s the biggest city in the only state in America that doesn’t have counties. What, you don’t remember high school geography? Anchorage, Alaska. Four thousand, one hundred and seventy-one miles away from my mother. Of course he wanted to be involved with his children—he just wanted them to experience the joy of commercial travel a few times a year. What kid doesn’t like a twelve-hour trip without parents? Our mother gave us snacks for the plane. There were flight attendants to help us make connecting flights. Anchorage had mountains. It was beautiful. Don’t tell me New York has the Adirondacks. My father doesn’t believe in them. No, he told me so when I was a kid—New York has big hills, not mountains. He’s a doctor—remember? An educated man. He wouldn’t get that wrong.

  10. The number of times my father has been married. Here, I’ll help: Jackie, Sharon, Judy, Margaret, Jan, Theresa, Tricia. Seven. But it’s not entirely his fault, he tells me. Jackie didn’t really count. They had a marriage of convenience—he needed to move out of his mother’s house, and she wanted to get into medical school. Two through five were legitimate, but his second ex-wife, Sharon, died and sent him Theresa, wife number six, to be his “one true love and his second chance at being a father.” When that didn’t work according to plan, she sent him Tricia, wife number seven, to once again be his “soul mate and second-second chance at being a father.” It’s not Dad’s fault that Sharon’s ghost was a lousy matchmaker; he could have reduced the total by one if she had been more skilled. What, you’ll never be able to remember all those names in order? Fine. We’ll just call them #One, #Two, #Three, #Four, etc.

  11. The number of stepmothers I have had with my father. Hint: it’s one less than my half-sister Juli had. Here, I’ll help: four. No, Rose didn’t count. They were engaged for five years but never married. Okay, four and a half then. Don’t ask me how you’ll make it fit. You were the one who insisted on accuracy.

  12. The number of stepbrothers and -sisters I have had, combined. Don’t count my half-sister Juli; we have the same biological father. Step is Latin for “not my family.” You didn’t know I took Latin? Well, maybe I didn’t. Take four from Margaret, five from Jan, two from Theresa, and the current four from Tricia. Fifteen. What about Stan and Tony? No, they don’t count, I don’t care what my father says. They are my half-sister’s half-brothers on her mother’s side. Juli and I have the same father, different mothers, so her half-brothers are not my blood. Their mother divorced my father before I was born, so they aren’t step-anything. No, there won’t be a quiz at the end. You can relax.

  13. How many times I’ve been divorced. Just twice: Samson and Mike. When your father’s been married seven times, you know that two trips around the carousel are all the rides you are allotted. I prefer to make my own embarrassing mistakes, not repeat his. No, three times is not a charm. Wedding rings have a habit of making husbands lose interest in me. I would never subject a good relationship to the court system—there is no part of me that wants to walk down that aisle again. Nope, no way. Except those wedding dresses are really pretty …

  Did you like my little puzzle? What do you mean, I was supposed to sort them by “across” and “down?” Someone should have told me sooner. My family has never been good at fitting into boxes or following the rules. I’m glad I was able to have it make sense at all.

  notes from the fourth wall

  this is how it feels to write about lesbian parents

  It feels like strong female hands pushing you forward, while their hope presses down on your face and shoulders. It is your face they want to put on a poster, your voice they expect to proclaim to the world how normal and beautiful it is to be raised by lesbians. You can’t breathe—the air is thickened with the expectation and hope of a generation of lesbian parents. You look back into their shining, happy eyes, these women who have been your extended family, who came to New Year’s Eve parties every year and tied your shoelaces for you when you were small. You know you can’t write the story they expect, these nice normal lesbians, because you don’t actually know what it feels like to be raised by nice normal lesbians. You only know what it was like to be raised with a mentally ill lesbian stepmother and a mother trying her hardest to keep the family together. Their sexuality was far less significant.

  You also know that if you write the truth, the anti-gay movement will put your face on their posters instead. It seems like there is no way to just write your story without becoming someone’s poster child. You are not just your own voice, your own history—rather, you carry the expectations of both extremes.

  The truth is that you don’t know many lesbian parents. Your parents didn’t have many friends with children. There was Marty, whose son Jim was a year older than your brother. There was Marilyn, who had a baby when you were eleven, but her child wasn’t even close to being your peer. That was the circle you had growing up.

  Once, in college, you met a girl your exact age who said, “It took me a long time to realize my mother wasn’t a bad parent because she was gay, she was a bad parent because she was an alcoholic.” Back when you were eighteen, this casual conversation in a parking lot gave voice to everything you had always felt but had not known how to say, except, of course, that neither of your lesbian parents were alcoholics. It was always murkier for you.

  the early years

  girl

  Picture a scrawny little girl, with shoulder blades that stick out like chicken wings, an outie belly button, and detached earlobes. She has big brown eyes and messy brown hair. When Stepmother combs Girl’s hair with a fine-toothed men’s comb, it bites into her scalp and makes her cry, so she avoids combing her hair as
much as possible. Her knees are stained brownish-green from playing outside, and her bathtub is filled with waterlogged Barbies—her favorite toys.

  Every night her family eats at the kitchen table—Girl in the seat up against the north wall, because she is the only one little enough to fit there; Brother to her right, pushed up against the western wall for the same reason; Mother across from Girl and closest to the fridge; and Stepmother, Mother’s “wusband” (woman-husband), at the head of the table next to the stove. The table is wood-grained Formica, the floor is green asbestos tile that wouldn’t take a shine, and the overhead light is a circular fluorescent tube light that makes a tttttts like an electronic insect when the switch is flipped on. Girl’s father lives far off in Alaska, the divorce so long ago that Girl can’t remember when he and Mother were married.

  Girl learned early on that she could tune out the world if she had a good book, but her room is always a mess and she always loses the ones from the library, or forgets how many she had to return, and the librarian sometimes makes her leave the library until she pays off her late fees, so she reads the books she already owns over and over. She tries to read at dinner to avoid talking to her family, but Stepmother says, “Put the book away. I’m afraid you will never develop social skills if you read all the time.” Sometimes Stepmother gets a little teary-eyed when she tells Girl, “I just want you to have friends and not have your nose stuck in a book.” This makes Girl want to fight and scream because she needs some way to stop her brain from thinking so hard: from replaying all the voices of the kids at school, or the sound of her Stepmother always criticizing, and mostly to drown out that small, sad conviction that she is not, and never will be, worth loving by anyone.