Ch 15: Duck! Duck!
Sometimes laughter snatches the cloth off of the truth and leaves only threads behind.
After her firing, Anne never tried to find a job in academia again (see Ch 14 Straightening Up). She knew she couldn’t handle a third strike—a third assault on her professionalism, her integrity, and the career she loved. Instead, she spent her first year in Michigan collecting unemployment from her Massachusetts disaster. She sat for hours staring out the window at the snow blowing across the cornfields behind the house we rented, something she referred to as “living in the tundra”—a far cry from her beloved New England.
We picked this house because it was as far away as possible from the non-profit where I worked while still meeting my board’s requirement of living in the county. We didn’t want to run into board members or clients at the grocery store and have to explain why we were together. Living in the middle of nowhere lowered that risk.
Through the help of a friend of mine, Anne eventually got a job as an alcoholism educator/counselor in a nearby town. The job suited her. She was a good teacher and a caring clinician. But going back to work terrified her. Even though the woman who hired her was a lesbian, she never felt safe. Would they find out? Would she get fired again? Her fears kept her from falling in love with her job— there or anywhere. She had loved working with college students. Treating adults with alcoholism is not the same as inspiring young women to prepare for their future.
When I was offered a management job with a large healthcare system in Detroit, we agreed to move once more, this time to the Detroit suburbs. Living just a few miles from Plymouth, where Mom met Norm (the man who would become my father) offered a constant reminder of the questions I had about my family, but I was too consumed with my current life to spend much time thinking about the past.
Anne commuted to her job for a while, and then another closeted lesbian friend who served the hospital as my co-director offered her a job as a chemical dependency therapist, essentially the same work she was doing but for higher pay at a more prestigious treatment center closer to home. Anne snapped it up.
“Should we drive to work together?” Anne asked as she focused her attention on ironing a white Oxford shirt for her first day.
I rubbed the corner of a magazine between my thumb and index finger as the smell of the hot iron wafted in my direction. I’d been avoiding this conversation but knew we had to have it. “It sure would save on gas,” I suggested, even though I knew the answer to her question was no.
“But probably not, eh?” She paused as the steam rose from her shirt. “We don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”
I laid the magazine down. “Well, you know, I go to meetings at different places around Detroit most days anyway, and I never know when I’ll need my car.”
She hung the freshly pressed shirt on a hanger and stared at it for a minute. I couldn’t tell if she was admiring her work or avoiding looking at me. “Yeah, makes sense.”
“We can follow each other though,” I offered. I didn’t mean it to sound like a consolation prize. I turned to look out the window. The fall air hung heavy. I could see trees stripped of their leaves standing naked against the cloudy sky. “It’s just probably better if we don’t walk in together.”
I stood up from the bed and reached out to hug her. She hugged me back. I wasn’t sure if she would. I knew she wasn’t angry with me, but still.
“You’re gonna do great,” I said, trying to sound reassuring but knowing my words fell flat.
“I hope so,” she replied as she pulled away and positioned a wrinkled pair of blue slacks on the ironing board and sprayed steam on them.
We never told anyone at work we were in a relationship or even that we lived together. We were friends, and that’s all we let anyone know. What our co-workers thought, what they suspected, what they knew, we didn’t confirm or deny. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” didn’t become military policy until 1994, but Anne and I lived it every day at work. When we weren’t working, we occasionally socialized with other lesbians but spent most of our time with each other.
“Let’s take a drive,” I suggested one Saturday morning. We loved exploring the back roads and hidden-away places in Southeastern Michigan. It was our favorite way to spend a weekend. We got in the car and drove. Long before the days of GPS, we didn’t care if we got lost or if we traveled the same road a hundred times. The fun was in the adventure itself, the hunt for something that surprised us. Maybe it was a field of sunflowers in bloom, newborn calves searching for their mothers’ teats, a restaurant we hadn’t eaten at before, or a trail we hadn’t hiked. This had been one of those days. Life in limbo was good again.
As we headed home after a full day, I looked over at the car traveling next to us on the expressway, and, to my dismay, noticed one of our co-workers sitting in the passenger seat. It was a woman neither of us liked very much, someone for whom a rumor was like one of those plastic sea monsters you put in water and watched it grow to 600% its original size. As soon as I saw her, my protective instincts kicked in, and I shouted to Anne, “Duck! Duck!”
I expected her to lower her head so the woman wouldn’t see us together. Anne, however, interpreted my urgency in the spirit of the day we had spent. Not wanting to miss something important, she lifted her head, pressed her face against the window, and shouted back at me, “Where? Where?”
When I heard the wonder in Anne’s voice and realized what she must have thought I meant, I laughed so hard that I whipped the car across two lanes and onto the exit ramp so I could pull over. I was laughing too hard to drive. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation, I laughed at the beauty of Anne’s child-like curiosity, and I laughed at the absurdity of our attempts to hide our relationship.
“What? What’s the matter?” Anne asked. “What are you laughing about?” She smiled back at me but had no idea what had happened.
Before I could answer, I crossed that razor-thin line from laughter to tears. The old Smokey Robinson & The Miracles song, “Tears of a Clown” popped into my head. I felt like a clown covered up in make-up and smiles, playing a fool. My entire life was a sham, a farce put on to protect myself from being found out. An erasure of who I was.
When I finally spit out what had happened—that I hadn’t seen ducks but meant for her to duck—I said, “I can’t do this anymore, Anne. I can’t keep living this double life, hiding who I am – who we are. I love you and I want everyone to know it. We have to find a way.”
Sometimes it’s the mundane that turns on the closet light and illuminates the door handle. This incident, as silly as it was, had pointed out to me the outrageousness of living a bifurcated, fabricated life.
“I wish it could be different,” she said. I looked over at her, her head pressed against the window, looking so vulnerable and so loving. I could see her concern in her wrinkled brow and intense eyes, and I knew she meant it. Then she added, “But what would we do if we both got fired?”
At that moment, I recognized, for the first time, how living in limbo had wounded us differently. Her two terminations had humiliated her, preventing her from wanting to take any more risks. While I was living life in the shadows to keep Mom’s fantasy of who she wanted me to be alive and to protect Anne, neither of those reasons were enough for me to justify living a lie anymore.
As I pulled the car back onto the road, I knew we were finished talking. Anne put her seat back and pretended to take a nap. I drove on in silence recalling the vision I’d had sitting around that campfire at our friends’ wedding years earlier. If there was any possibility that world might one day become real, I knew I had to seize it. I didn’t want to be like Mom who, even in her later years, never shared her life, her pain, or her truth with anyone.
By the time we pulled into our driveway and Anne put her seat back up, I’d made a decision—I wasn’t going to be erased any longer. What I didn’t know is how to make that happen.
The route I took to finding my voice was unexpected, life-changing, and devastating. Ever since I’d left the Catholic Church in Albion years before, I’d had no religious home and hadn’t sought one out. Although I missed the community, the ritual, and the sense of belonging to something larger than myself, I held no illusions about ever returning to church. Churches had no place for me, so I had no use for them. That is until I discovered that the minister of a nearby Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church was a lesbian.
“She’s an out lesbian? Are you sure?” I asked incredulously when a friend told me about her. How could that be? I was used to a church where even being a woman meant you were relegated to second-class status. But a lesbian woman? Unbelievable. I shook my head and at the same time, felt a glimmer of hope for the world—for us. Maybe we should go there, I thought.
Pretty much everything I knew about Unitarian Universalism came from Anne’s dad. He was a Unitarian minister and Anne grew up as a PK (preacher’s kid). We spent weeks sailing the Maine coast with her folks, and Anne’s Dad told countless stories about his life in ministry and about his faith. His stories intrigued me, but he never told us we’d be welcome there, so I never imagined we would be. Despite being raised in the church, Anne hadn’t joined another congregation. I’d never thought to ask why.
“Anne, you’ll never guess what I just heard.” The words tumbled from my mouth so fast I wasn’t sure she understood me, but I couldn’t stop the news from spilling out. “The minister at the UU church is a lesbian. An out lesbian. Can you believe it?”
I contemplated sitting down on one of our barstools at the counter where she was chopping carrots, but quickly realized I was too excited to be that still.
“Hmmm. That’s interesting,” she said without looking up.
“Let’s go check it out,” I implored. “That would be so cool!”
She paused from her chopping but stared straight ahead—not at me—like she was trying to remember something. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think any other minister, lesbian or not, can live up to my father.”
I could hear the skepticism in her voice as she scraped the carrots into a storage container and grabbed a bag of celery. When she turned her back to wash the celery, I knew the conversation was over. At least for now.
A few weeks later, I learned that this same church was hosting a coffee house on a Saturday night. Anne loved music, so I suggested we go. She said yes, even though I was sure she suspected what I was up to.
Her suspicions were well-founded and before long we were regularly attending church on Sunday mornings. Seeing a lesbian process through the sanctuary and up to the pulpit made my heart leap. Every time! And not only did this congregation have a lesbian minister, but they openly accepted us as a couple. We could be out! And of all places, at church!
I think Anne liked this part, too. Holding hands while we sat together in a pew, sharing our lives with straight and gay couples in the fellowship hall, and celebrating other lesbian and gay people in the congregation made us feel normal—a rarity in our life together.
What Anne didn’t like was my growing involvement with the church. I volunteered for the membership committee, the worship team, and eventually, the board. I started spending most of my free time at the church in one capacity or another. Anne didn’t complain, but I could tell that she’d rather I stayed home with her. The final straw came when I told her I was considering enrolling in seminary to become a UU minister.
Her eyes grew big, her eyebrows raised, and she shrieked at me, “I will NOT become my mother!” I hadn’t seen her scream like this since those horrible days after she’d been fired. It took me aback. “I will NOT be a minister’s wife!” And with that, she retreated down the hallway and slammed the door to the bedroom.
I had no idea of the intensity of her feelings about this, so it caught me completely off guard. I shook my head as if I’d just been slammed to the ground with a knock-out punch. “You’ll still have your own career,” I countered, shouting through the closed door. “You won’t be like your mother! You’ll never be like your mother!”
In some ways that I can’t explain even today, her reaction strengthened my resolve to enter seminary. The world needed out lesbian ministers, and I needed to hold on to a faith community that would affirm me and my love of a woman.
I proceeded with the application process, despite Anne’s objections. I even asked Anne’s father, who had once served as president of this UU seminary, Meadville Lombard Theological School, for a recommendation, which he graciously provided.
To do what I needed to do, to claim who I was as a lesbian and stand up publicly for the things I believed in, ultimately meant I had to hurt Anne. The “Duck! Duck!” incident was the beginning of the end for us. My plan to enter seminary was the breaking point.
It took two years from that first coffee house at the church, but, finally, I told her that our relationship was over. I was leaving. The more involved I became in the church and in lesbian and gay activist circles, the further apart Anne and I grew. She wasn’t ready to be out, and I could no longer stay in. We’d been together for thirteen years and loved each other deeply. Neither of us ever dreamed we wouldn’t always be together and neither of us ever fully recovered from the breakup.
Maybe if I’d been more confident in myself, I would have been able to help her through her fears, but I couldn’t. Given the secrecy I’d seen modeled in my childhood, and my own internal battles, I had enough trouble managing my own fears. I knew myself well enough to know that I would find a way to keep Anne in my life, but it would be at a distance so as to not cause her more pain than I already had.
When I told Mom that Anne and I had broken up, she was genuinely sad. She never asked what happened or how I was, but I knew she liked Anne and would miss spending time with her. One day after Anne and I had taken Mom to Toronto for a vacation, she said to me, “I don’t understand how I can like Anne so much more than your brother’s wife. That’s a little strange, don’t you think?” I didn’t. But that defined Mom’s struggle, better than anything. A pull from somewhere deep inside her said what I was engaged in was wrong, so she shouldn’t affirm it in any way, and yet, she couldn’t help loving Anne.
I didn’t last in seminary. I stayed for only one semester. I was too restless at that point in my life and couldn’t imagine spending the next four years in school, followed by clinical pastoral education, a year of internship, and then a review by a committee that might decide I wasn’t ready to receive fellowship into the UU ministry. The mere thought of the journey overwhelmed me. I was ready to get on with my life, and for reasons I still don’t understand, pursuing ministry felt like putting it on pause. I deeply admire the many people who stay committed to this course, but I couldn’t do it.
So, ironically, one of the primary things that caused our relationship to fall apart, my plan to become a minister, didn’t happen. And even more ironically, Anne was so distraught by my leaving that she came out to her parents. I don’t know how that went, but she stayed in relationship with them until their deaths, so I can only hope they came to accept her.
We were both finally out, but for that to happen, we had to break up—and now we each had to find our own ways to live life out in the open.
Read the first chapter in Part 3, Chapter 16: Historical Markers
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The heartbreaking choices we all have made! This was a difficult chapter to read, and even more to write I'm sure! 💙
Oh so heartbreaking, Annette. What a journey!