Story Time! (and heteronormativity)

By all accounts, my grandmother was the perfect housewife in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. She was a debutante and got a major in home economics at her college and married young. She had two kids, stayed at home, and cooked meals and sewed and supported the family.

And then somewhere in the eighties or nineties, she got a divorce and went back to college and became an accountant in Dallas and owned a ranch with horses. She had a successful financial planning business whose specialty was figuring out the budgets of professional athletes who would then do her a solid and help her move furniture when she moved from house to house. She ran what she called a home for wayward cowboys on her ranch, where she would say that a carton of cigarettes and a case of beer would get a hell of a lot done.

She and I were sort of pen pals where every now and again I’d send those precious crayon atrocities that four year olds make and she’d send back little letters and gifts . After she died her special friend Maureen picked up the habit for a few years. It took me a long while to figure out that Maureen was my grandmother’s girlfriend.

Tracking out her life is a little complicated because my family doesn’t exactly bring her up since she died when I was four. It’s taken longer than you’d expect for me to piece together even this much information about her, honestly, and in writing this I am in a way reminded of Middlesex and the winding scope of family sagas and family secrets. Because she died when I was young, no one is particularly inclined to talk about her, and since she had divorced my grandfather, he wasn’t interested in having that conversation either.

Her life sounds like a hell of  a good story, though, even though it’s not what is expected by any means. The end of this story could easily be her in a Florida retirement home, or teaching knitting to a community college, but instead she decided to live on a massive ranch with horses and her girlfriend. But we don’t talk about that, and my uncle still doesn’t accept that his mother could ever have been gay.

But for a long time she prescribed to what was expected of her and lived the life that she was supposed to, likely because she had limited options, based on the way she seems to have been funneled from high school to college to a respectable marriage.  And then eventually decided to say fuck it and did what she wanted and got a “real” education and to some extent got out of the closet and away from the required heterosexuality in her life and live how she wanted. Which was honestly in a way that’s pretty stereotypically “masculine.” She owned her own business and owned a ranch and too care of her own shit and decided what exactly she wanted to make out of her life, even if it 

took until she had college-age children.

Point is, live your life and be gay if you want to be.