Sonia Came Out!

Our "couple logic" went something like this. Holiday season 2016, I let Sonia know that I didn't want to spend another holiday season attending separate holiday gatherings hosted by our separate families. I didn't want to face my own family without her. I thought I might go crazy if they tried to ignore her existence again. It was harder to do that when she was present.

Sonia planned her coming out by counting backward from Thanksgiving, the indisputable beginning of holiday season 2017. She decided to tell her parents two weeks before Thanksgiving. That meant telling her older brother and sister-in-law two weeks before that.

First, some background. Sonia's mother and father immigrated to the States from Korea in the late 70s. They worked a tourist stand, hawking American flag t-shirts and Eagles tossle caps until they could afford a store of their own. They've been working six days a week at their corner store in North Philadelphia for at least 20 years now.

The store is their livelihood: what put food on the table in the early years & eventually what bought them the down payment on a four-bedroom home in a gated community an hour away. Turned out the American Dream house was too much of a commute; Sonia's brother moved in and her parents still live in the row house where they raised their children.

Sonia is the baby of the family, and the darling. So much so that, when she came out to her brother over the phone four weeks before Thanksgiving, her brother insisted that everything would be "fine and dandy," so loved and admired was she by her parents.

Sonia wasn't so sure, but I dared to hope. Within a week, I met Sonia's older brother and sister-in-law, a nurse from Korea whose academic papers (for her B.S. in nursing) I'd been helping to edit for months.

They were kind. Conversation moved naturally from education to jobs to her brother's new car. I floated through the meal, only slightly more demure than I am in my daily life. When I went to the bathroom, Sonia's brother told her she should be nicer to me and make me eat more dessert.

The night Sonia came out to her parents, her brother and sister-in-law were at dinner, but it was harder than they'd expected. Her brother didn't expect the overwrought emotion from her mother, and ended up crying himself. Her sister-in-law struggled to support her and also maintain her role of accommodating daughter-in-law. I sat at home twisted in knots.

I met Sonia at the door when she came home. "It did not go well," she said.

We played Thanksgiving much as we had in previous years -- Sonia drove about an hour with me to my family's dinner, then I sipped wine at home while she visited her own family. Her parents pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

It didn't feel like other years. Something had shifted.