Two Gifts

TWO GIFTS

By Jason Lambert-Lee

“WHAT is happening?” I somewhat softly and characteristically exclaimed as I woke to my cell ringing. After flipping my body over to grab it, I could see two important things on the tiny preview screen on the top portion of my flip-phone. First, it was 3AM. “Ugh.” Second, it was Aunt Louise. “Oh, no.” I knew this wasn’t a surprising emergency for which I was randomly chosen to receive bad news. We don’t do that in my family. We try to avoid conversations that would draw criticism, and we DO NOT like to ask for help if avoidable. So, I did not answer. With no second call, I felt safe in my assumption of what it was about. There was a voicemail. I went back to sleep.

My Great-Aunt Louise was my Grandmother’s sister. My Grandmother, or Grandma, took the place of my forever absent father. So, the dynamic between her parents and siblings seemed a generation closer than they would have been otherwise. So, it was truly Aunt Louise. Aunt Louise often likened herself to Grandma. No one really understood that as they were noticeably different, both in upbringing and in life experience.

Grandma was a strange mixture of hard, tender, pious, and charismatic. You would not have guessed that she was rebellious against her Pentecostal upbringing, given her deep faith and eventual work as a 15th generation minister. She did not graduate High School because she was taken out early to pick cotton, bringing in much needed funds for the family during WWII. She survived an exceptionally abusive first marriage and was widowed young by her second and final husband—my Grandfather. With all of this, she still managed to work her way up to become an Executive at one of the world’s largest companies, General Electric. When she retired her next step in life was to minister to prisoners, sponsor a few that got out, and to feed the homeless.

Aunt Louise, however, seemed to be stuck in the 1960’s. Her parents were in a much different financial situation when she graduated High School. She had a beautiful new dress and a strand of pearls for the occasion. She married a fighter pilot and was a stay-at-home mother to one. Most of the work she did was for her son when he eventually opened his own business. However, life turned out more different than she expected. Her marriage had some hiccups. That shattered her expectation of a picture-perfect American life, even if they resolved everything and truly had a death-do-us-part. She was loving when I was a child, bitter by the time I became an adult.

I came out to my mother three weeks prior to Aunt Louise’s call. I was resolved to finally accept my sexuality, over 1,300 miles away, and mostly hopped up on pain medication following a minor surgery. My mother took it well, already knowing—as most mothers do—and more irritated that I kept it a secret between the ages of nine and twenty-one. I was not worried about her generation of the family, nor mine. I expected we would not tell my 99-year-old Great-Grandfather. We had to be strategic about when to tell him about Grandma’s death, when it happened. He made it through dozens of heart-attacks in his 90’s. They did not want to risk another one turning fatal. It was Grandma’s generation of primarily Evangelical siblings and cousins that were not going to be happy. Many of them were ministers, yet very loving and attentive to me—a fatherless child. I did not feel a need to tell them, mainly because I knew everyone else would.

So, the call came. I listed to the voicemail the following day during a break at work. I worked for a credit bureau, so they had a quiet room for people needing to de-stress from calls with angry consumers. That seemed like the perfect place to listen to the voicemail. It was, as I expected, dramatic and dogmatic. “Jason, I woke up from a dream of you burning in hellfire,” was where it began. “You have to turn back and repent your ways,” a phrase I expected to hear. I do not recall the remaining content of the message. At the time, it really hurt. I had a minor anxiety attack and went back to work when I caught my breath. This was the anticipated point where I thought everything was changing for the worse. The calls that followed in the next two months changed my mind.

I did not return the handful of calls Aunt Louise made in the following two weeks. So, she started calling my mother. My mother, still irritated at me for not announcing my sexuality earlier, and now irritated by the conversation she had with her aunt, called me to ask that I answer Aunt Louise’s calls. I responded, “No.”

“She’s your aunt, you have to talk to her,” my mother directed.

“No, I don’t. Her voicemail was unacceptable, and she’s welcome to send a card apologizing for her behavior.”

“Ugh! Good Lord.”

“Well, I didn’t tell her. Do you know who did?” I asked in a humorous jab.

“I didn’t tell her. But, I did tell your Aunt Lynn. Maybe she told her. Did you tell your Sissy?” Aunt Lynn was my mother’s sister, an on-and-off recovering alcoholic. Sissy was her daughter, fourteen years older than myself.

“Yes, she was the first person I told.” Well, that was a bad idea.

“Oooookay, Jason. Well, you do what’s best for you. Also, I just wanted to let you know that, the weekend before you told me, your brother took a bat to a friend of his that called you a ‘faggot’ at some party they were at.”

“Um, well…that was stupid.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I imagined, especially in consideration of his friends, that me being a faggot was a bad thing. As in, my brother was defending me from the accusation of being a homosexual. It was not a defense against the usage of the slur.

“Well, maybe you’d like to call and tell him.”

“Okay. I’ll do that after this.” The call had become tense enough, and she hung up just as I began my farewell. To be clear, my mother has never been upset about my sexuality. However, she was never happy with the secret.

My mother wanted to have close relationships with her children. That didn’t exist at this point in time. After Grandma’s death, a loss exceptionally hard on the family, my brother and I coped in different ways. He, 14, decided to turn to drugs. It was primarily marijuana, though would escalate to heavier drugs in time. He never needed treatment. It was generally recreational, even if some of it was an escape. His relationship with my mother was intense. Many evenings were full of listening to her yelling at him, and his yelling back. Though, there were dozens of occasions where he decided to break something or punch a hole in the wall. I, 16, turned inward. I started to rescind from socializing with my peers. My relationship with my mother was passive aggressive. If we did have it out, there was more calm judgement of each other than there was the fiery yelling between herself and my brother. To be clear, we are a family of yellers. Our yelling is another person’s screaming. My calm may be another person’s boundary.

I did call my brother to tell him that I am gay. I do not clearly recall, but I believe I did it in a dramatic tone that indicated that I knew this would not be a shock. He took it perfectly well. Of course, dropping acid with barely adult idiots—with a bat around—seemed like a bad idea in retrospect. We had barely talked since our teenage years. I became just as judgmental towards him as every other adult in our lives. I was always around the elders of the family, so this was natural for me. For this call, it was nice to have a more intimate conversation with him.

As for Aunt Louise, she was about to run a number on us. See seemed to find an opportunity when she received a notice from a life insurance company. It was for a policy that I had forgotten about. Grandma opened life insurance policies for my brother and I. The plan was a sort of savings account that we could use for college later on, or extend into a larger life insurance policy. It turns out, Aunt Louise was the contact in charge of the account after Grandma’s death. So, after numerous failed back-and-forth’s between Aunt Louise and my mother, she had something more enticing—so she thought. She called my mother to inform her of the notice. My mother, in turn, told me.

“Did you give her my address?” I asked.

“Can’t you just call her?” my mother irritably asked.

“She still hasn’t apologized.”

“You know she won’t apologize. I’m sure she feels just fine with what she said.”

“I know that. It’s why I’m not taking her calls or calling her.”

“It has to be tens of thousands of dollars. You can’t call her for that?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, you little shit. I’ll give her your address,” my mother concluded. At this point, the tense language was more in humor between the two of us We’re a good pair, when we’re not fighting each other. Though, she was still irritated to be a go between. Of course, I wasn’t the one asking. And, tens of thousands of dollars is not enough to make most of our stubborn family back down. For the family members that are not addicts, that is.

Sure enough, Aunt Louise refused to mail the notice to me without a call. It happened to be close to her birthday. So, I got a birthday card with a cat on it. She hates cats. I wrote the nicest note possible, with all of God’s blessings. I enclosed a pre-stamped envelope. Aunt Louise responded, though not using my envelope. She mailed the notice with one of Grandma’s black journals. When Grandma died, we split them among each other. I hadn’t read the ones I took.

I set the journal aside, for a while. I proceeded with claiming the life insurance balance rather than contribute more for a future beneficiary. I was eligible for $25,000. I received just about $20,000 after fees and a minimum tax. That was a treat, and I still got to be stubborn—on that.

Shortly after, on the fifth anniversary of Grandma’s death, I grabbed the journal. I was worried about whether Grandma saw a damned future for me, a feeling likely to be shared by others. There was no mention of my sexuality. I already knew her to think more positively of gay people. Her brother-in-law turned on one of his son’s that came out, two kids into his marriage. My Great Uncle joined his daughter-in-law’s case for sole custody of the children. His son was cut off. Grandma was appalled. It took a lot of convincing, but she was successful in getting him to mend their relationship. Grandma’s black journal was as I expected. Full of religious devotions, scripture study, and prayers for those wayward and left behind.

Reading those journals was the beginning of an evolution for me regarding faith. Much of my upbringing was surrounded and influenced by ministry. By the time I reached my teens, Evangelical ministers were being outed for corruption and affairs—one after the other. The children of the most dogmatic were largely addicts, like my family. The faith became an abusive relationship. Not just us, the country. The strongest woman I knew, a barrier breaker, died abused—the dogma on her mind.

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