My Mother and the Nun
A flash memoir by Skylar Lyralen Kaye of Queerly Enlightened
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Why am I always surprised when I read about the accommodations people once made to be close the ones they love, despite the disapproval of society? I suppose that was the point, once upon a time—the “love that dare not speak its name” in public might still whisper it quietly in private.
An open secret, a husband casting a blind eye, and still, a mother plucks at her daughters loose threads—Qstack is delighted to present this amusing and uneasy anecdote by
.
My Mother and the Nun
by
ofMy mother sat in the passenger seat of the station wagon on the move from Ohio to Pennsylvania, staring straight ahead, her lips pressed tight. Cars passed by so fast the sound of their tires whirred through the space. I lay with my bare feet against the rear window yelling out license plate numbers in a game I’d made up to distract my younger siblings.
For my mother, the move and my father’s bankruptcy meant humiliation, but for me it meant 8th grade at school number 4, where I had to worry again about the spitballs and signs hung on my back that had welcomed me to schools number 2 & 3.
All I wanted was to fit in at my new school.
Fat fucking chance.
I was way better at standing out. At having too many opinions, at laughing and talking too loudly, at having way too many emotions and being way too smart.
My demure, pretty mother, blonde, peaches and cream skin, nicknamed Straight Arrow in college—with whom I had so little in common that we rarely spoke except to argue—was definitely in favor of me fitting in. Though had she known that I’d bought a pack of cigarettes and gone to the woods, lying on a branch, looking up through leaves, blowing out smoke, coughing, trying again until I could look expert and inhale in front of the popular girls without coughing, she wouldn’t have approved of my strategies.
They worked, though. I smoked, I drank, I streaked, I cried when Jim Croce died. I did what I had to do. I was cool. Or the next thing to it.
And so, it’s June and I end up in the green canvas tent in our back yard, alone with my friend Debbie, whose dark eyes and olive skin make my body uncomfortably warm in specific places. The humidity presses in—there’s a rim of sweat under my hairline as I lean forward, trying to make myself cry so Debbie will hold me. I make the tears happen, she leans forward and wraps soft arms around me. And though I know it’s not the right hug, my body still goes into fourteen year old menopause, flashing hot, cold, hot, as she stoops to exit the tent and I follow. I walk toward the house. Open the screen door and cross through the kitchen, across the linoleum floor, to the living room. And there she is, my mother. Sitting on the couch. It’s a tableaux, really. My mother on the blue and white couch cushion, looking up at her boss—she’s just gotten hired at the Catholic grade school to be secretary to the principal. And this boss, Sister Nancy, gray haired, dark eyes, perches on the arm of the couch, looking down into my mother’s eyes, a soft smile on her face. Sister Therese, at the sideboard, still in her modern veil, is pouring herself a very big whiskey. And Sister Jean, Sister Nancy’s old “friend” stands upright at the window, just a tad too close to her new “friend” Sister Doris, staring daggers at my mother.
And I get it. This is my first introduction to dyke drama. With nuns.
My eyes keep going back to my mother’s face, so Americana, so Midwest pretty. And now vulnerable, open and so in love, I barely recognize her.
I think, “Oh my God, I’m gay. And so is my mother.”
So much for nothing in common.
I run out of the room.
For the next ten years, Nancy and my mother worked together every day and slept together in the king sized bed in my parents’ bedroom every weekend. My father slept in the den, ostensibly to keep from waking us all with his snoring. And the whole parish acted like Nancy and my mother were just friends.
As for my mother and I, our discussions of our shared gender preference were limited to two.
Discussion one: we’re fighting in her bedroom in front of the king bed where she sleeps with Nancy on the weekend, where I’ve walked in and caught them kissing. We fought so often about me coming home late, drinking, and this time I just lose it and scream, “At least I’m not a fucking lezzie!”
My mother’s face went pale as she looked at me. She opened her mouth, closed it…and then she left the room. Her turn to run.
Discussion two: It’s ten years after the night in the tent. My mother and Nancy have broken up. Home from Europe, where I let the hair grow on my legs I sit on the living room couch next to my mother, looking up at the stencilling she’s done near the ceiling. The hair on my legs is thick and dark over muscles from running and teaching aerobics in Spain as I stretch them out. My mother looks down. Leans over and starts pulling on the hairs.
“Ouch,” I say, moving away from her.
“You bisexual,” she says.
I pause. Stare. Wonder if she’s lost her mind.
“What about you?” I say. “What about Nancy.”
She pauses for a long moment, and then she says, “She was my soul mate. I’d never had a friend like that before.”
It was the most she had ever said, the most she ever would say.
As for me, I didn’t exactly follow in her footsteps. Out and proud is pretty much an understatement. And yet I know, as I’ve protested, as I’ve made phone calls, as I’ve fought and fund-raised, I fought for all of us.
Lyralen Kaye, fae/they, AEA, SAG-AFTRA, MFA in Theatre, Sarah Lawrence College, is a queer, neurodivergent, gender fluid multi-hyphenate writer and filmmaker. Lyralen was nominated for the 1997 Pushcart Prize in fiction and has published in literary journals such as Calyx, Persona, Phoebe, Girlfriends and Happy Magazine. In film, Lyralen’s web series, Assigned Female at Birth, received 12 Best Web awards internationally and earned Kaye the 2021 NE Film Star Award. Saint John the Divine in Iowa, their first screenplay, won them a place in the inaugural Meryl Streep Writers Lab, was a semi-finalist for the 2011 Pride Plays and Films Award and a finalist for the 2011 Roy W. Dean Award. Lyralen’s stage play, Ladders to God, won the 2002 Stanley and Eleanor Lipkin Prize in Playwriting and was a finalist in the 2005 Massachusetts Council of the Arts Awards. Lyralen is also a Moth Slam winning storyteller and won the 2018 San Francisco Best in Fringe for their show My Preferred Pronoun Is WE.
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Thanks again, Lyralen, for this amusing and tense reminiscence - the scene of walking into the living room with your mother and all those nuns arrayed is so stark and vivid - like an old-time tableau, frozen in time.
Lyralen, thanks for sharing your story. The words felt as if they were held in containers - the tent, the car, the room with the nuns, the bedroom where your Mom and Nancy slept. I'm not sure if this was your intention but it was effective at drawing me into the space to bear witness to what you were feeling. It's very well done.