Ch 16: Historical Markers

Sometimes connections come when you least expect them and for reasons you can't comprehend.

More than ten years after I left Anne, and three years after Mom died, I received a phone call that broke open the closely guarded book of secrets in my family. My secrets were already a thing of the past. My closet didn’t even have a door anymore. I’d flung it open so wide, it broke right off its hinges. When I interviewed for a new job in Northern Michigan in early 2001, I came out to my potential employer during the interview. I didn’t want any questions, any suspicions, any doubt. They would hire me knowing I was a lesbian, or I wouldn’t get the job. They hired me. So, I packed up my things and moved to Traverse City in Michigan’s Northern Lower Peninsula. There I began working as the Executive Director of Third Level Crisis Center, a job not unlike the position I’d held so many years before in Albion, when I confirmed to Mom that, as much as she hoped I’d grow out of it, I was a lesbian, although I used the word “homosexual” then (Ch 11: The Second Coming Out).

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my parents’ secrets over these intervening years. With Mom gone, and only one living relative of their generation left (an aunt who married my uncle after all this had happened, so didn’t know anything), I’d pretty much given up any hope of finding out the truth. Instead of letting it worry me, I just let it go and focused on my own life.

Or so I thought.