WHY ME . . . WHY DID THIS HAPPEN TO ME: “HE CAN’T BE; HE’S A CHRISTIAN
Posted on May 16, 2011 under Anti-Psychotics | Comments are off“We went back to the motel for the night, and while Bill slept, I wept, moaned, and groaned in a pillow. It felt as if a bull were goring me inside. About 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, which was Father’s Day, my husband finally woke up saying, “What’s the matter with you?”I gasped, “I think I’m having a heart attack. I don’t know what you call it, but I think I’m dying. I can’t breathe, and I’m choking. It feels as if I’ve got a rug in my throat and my teeth itch.”Bill said, “Well, I thought you were acting strange last night. I know something is wrong. What is it?”"Well, I’m glad you noticed! Last night I just found out that Larry is a hooomoooo …” I could hardly say the words . . . “a homosexual.”Bill was aghast. “He CAN’T be; he’s a Christian!”"Well, that’s what I thought. But he is. You should see what I have in my car trunk. Or maybe he’s a bi-sexual, that’s what he told me.”Hearing that Larry might be bi-sexual shocked Bill more than anything else. He bolted out of bed and started putting his clothes on. I said, “It’s 4:30 in the morning; where are you going?”"Why, I’m going HOME to fix him,” said Bill, and he was gone.So I lay there gasping and choking, wondering how I’d ever get through this. My husband was driving twenty-five miles back to our house to “fix his kid,” and I thought, Well, I’ll just be dead when he comes back. That’s all, I’ll just be dead; I just can’t live through this. I’ll be dead when he comes back.About then my sister, hearing the ruckus, knocked on our door, came in, and asked anxiously, “What’s wrong? Why did Bill leave?”All I could think of was, “He went home to shave.” What else was I going to say? We had checked into a motel, paid good money, and where would my husband go at 4:30 in the morning?”No, I know something is wrong. You had a fight with Bill, didn’t you?”If only she had been right—that would have been no problem at all! Instead, I had no choice, I would have to start Father’s Day at 4:30 in the morning telling my sister that my son is a homosexual.I stumbled out to my car and brought in a whole arm load of the homosexual magazines and threw them on the bed. Then I said, “Your nephew (I couldn’t say ‘my son’) is a homosexual.”She sputtered, “He CAN’T be; he’s a Christian.”There we stood, the daughters of a minister, both having led very sheltered lives while growing up. We stared at all the pictures of naked men and all the rest of that terrible stuff. We had never seen anything pornographic before. About as close as we had come to pornography was the men’s underwear section of the Montgomery Ward’s catalogue.And as we stood there, frozen in shock, poring over all that garbage, in walked my brother-in-law, a very proper, godly man. He questioned what was going on because he could hear me sobbing and crying, and he thought perhaps Janet and I were having some sort of fight. And then he saw the pictures on the bed. Janet explained, “This stuff belongs to Larry—he’s a homosexual.”And Mel’s instant response was, “Why, he CAN’T be; he’s a Christian!”When Bill came back, we were all still in the room, looking at the magazines in bewilderment with no idea what to say. All Bill offered was, “I talked to Larry. There’s nothing really wrong with him. You’re just too emotional about this. It’s just a phase. All kids go through a phase, and this is just a phase.”Oh, I wanted to believe that, but I knew Bill was wrong. He didn’t even know what a bi-sexual was, so how did he know what was really wrong with Larry? Later, we went to church and on to Father’s Day dinner at Knott’s Berry Farm. It is all a blur to me, but I finally got Mel and Janet to the plane, and they went back to Minneapolis, where I was sure nobody ever had homosexual problems.Tears blinded me as I drove home alone from the airport. Bill had taken his car and driven over to give Father’s Day presents to his dad, and when I got home I found Larry there. We stood in the living room toe to toe, and it quickly escalated into a full-scale confrontation. I was sobbing bitterly and spouting Bible verses. He began to cry, too, and our conversation went in vicious circles.I was so hysterical I could hardly make sense. Larry was exploding with anger because he had been exposed. (Later on he told me he never would have told us if I hadn’t found the stuff.) I begged him to sit down and tell me how all this could be! Instead, he said violent and vicious things to me in the heat of his anger and used words I had never heard before or since from him.I couldn’t bear his accusations and obscenities. Instantly my hand shot upward and I slapped Larry’s face hard. He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me full force against a grandfather clock. This was unbelievable! I was having a physical confrontation with this darling son who was the light of our home for twenty years! After shoving me against the clock, he fled to his room and slammed the door.I heard him sobbing in his room, but my anger, denial, and guilt all kept me from going in to comfort him. COMFORT HIM? When HE was destroying our family?In my desperate effort to make him respond, I had uttered threats and unloving things like, “I would rather have you be DEAD than be a homosexual!” At that moment I loved Larry, but I hated that part of him. I wanted to hug him, but I wanted to kill him—I was a kaleidoscope of emotional shock. It would be later that I learned that parents say all kinds of unreal things to their kids when they learn they are homosexual. In my own emotional frenzy, all I could do was quote Bible verses about homosexuality. And all the while I was also denying that this could really be happening to us.Other parents have told me the same thing. When they learn of their child’s homosexuality, they want to take them out of their will, take away the car, or do whatever they can do to control them. But that doesn’t work. You just can’t do it that way. This is something I had to learn. And it wasn’t easy.Devastating despair overwhelmed me, and I flung myself on my bed and sobbed for hours. Larry didn’t come out of his room the rest of the day … no supper was fixed … I didn’t answer the phone. I just lay there on my bed, hoping and praying that tomorrow I could find some answers. I would go to the Hot Line in Anaheim. Surely THEY would tell me how to fix this kid!On Monday morning I went to a Hot Line organization that was supposed to offer help to homosexuals, but first I needed some help for me—someone to tell me I would get through this alive. I went in and blurted out, “I just found out that my son is a homosexual, and I want to talk to a mother who can help me.”And they said, “Well, we don’t have any mothers, but we have two ex-homosexuals you can talk to.”Exasperated, I sputtered, “Forget it! I have one of those— that’s why I’m here!”I just turned around, stomped out and slammed the door. I didn’t want to talk to any kind of homosexual, ex- or otherwise. I wanted to talk to a mother who had been through what I was going through and who could tell me I wasn’t going to die. As I got in the car, I thought, Lord, if I ever get through this—if I don’t die or end up in a home for the bewildered—I promise that I’ll start some kind of group to help parents who have this kind of terrible thing happen to them. (We promise a lot when we think we’re going to die anyway.)
And Then, a Final ZingerWhen I got back home, one more shock awaited me. Larry’s room was totally empty. I had been gone only an hour and a half, but in that time he had cleaned out everything and left. Out in the hall two little plaques hung side by side. One said, “TO THE MOST WONDERFUL FATHER OF THE YEAR.” Larry had given that to Bill just the day before. The other one said, “TO THE MOST WONDERFUL MOTHER OF THE YEAR,” and he’d given that to me just a month before on Mother’s Day. Now he was gone, and all we had were the two plaques telling us how wonderful we were.I called Bill at work and told him Larry was gone and that he’d taken the little Volkswagen that was registered to me because the insurance was in my name. Bill said he was sure Larry would be back, but I wondered where he would go.I didn’t know what to do. Should I go down to the DMV and tell them that my kid had taken off with a Volkswagen registered to me? Should I cancel the insurance on the car? I just didn’t know what to tell people, and I wasn’t sure I would survive.How I did survive is recorded in a daily log that I included in Where Does a Mother Go to Resign? During the next few months, I stayed home, languishing in my bedroom, counting the roses on the wallpaper. I couldn’t stand seeing anyone, and even going to the grocery store brought waves of panic. If I saw cartons of milk labeled “HOMOGENIZED,” I would immediately think that even the milk had something homosexual in it.As hard as losing Steve and then Tim was, at least I could count them as deposits in heaven. But now my third son had disappeared into the gay lifestyle, and I had no idea where he was or if I’d ever see him again.And I couldn’t tell, any of my Christian friends what had happened. I felt too guilty, and besides, how could most Christians understand something as unreal as this?So I just hid away in my bedroom, not wanting to see anyone, doing no cooking or cleaning, and very little eating. Bill put up some get-well cards on the mantel, so if anyone did come by, they might say, “Poor Barbara is still recovering from the loss of her two sons” and tend to ignore the disarray and clutter.Bill just ate popcorn for most of that first year after Larry left. Fortunately, Barney, our younger son, worked at Taco Bell, so at least he had something to eat. Taco Bell wrappers started piling up all over the house along with the popcorn, which got spilled in strange places.*13\316\2*
