A Guide for Small-talking to Parents

I've had what I thought was a healthy disdain for small talk since puberty. I raged against people contentedly chatting about grocery deals or potted plants while there was so much terror and suffering in the world.

Around this time, I also began to have a double consciousness -- making out with girls and telling myself that I was just experimenting for boys, that it didn't mean anything greater about me or my life.

By scoffing at small talk and simultaneously not wanting to talk about anything of substance with family members, I was left with nothing to say to many people I'd known growing up: aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. And of course, parents.

My family silences contrasted with the quickly intimate confidences I created throughout my late teens and twenties. The party always ended at my dorm room or apartment, with a few friends whispering about what kept them up at night and what kept them going. I sought intimacies with anyone on the margins, where I was: restaurant workers, struggling writers, anyone queer or sexually experimental.

I learned a lot, but I am in touch with almost no one from that time of my life. We were bright-burning candles that quickly extinguished, friends of a season.

For the first time in my life, I'm spending time with my elders and thinking about the next decades of our relationships and how I can make them stronger. Against all my natural resistance, it seems to come down to a question of small talk.

It all started when Sonia and I began reviewing "acceptable topics of conversation," when driving to visit to her parents or mine. We had long ago lost the ability to talk naturally with our own parents about our real lives, and this seemed the best way back in. By listing out conversation topics for one another, we gained confidence and security that we could get through the night without too many awkward silences.

Acceptable Topics: The Korean Side

• How to make Korean food (this is actually several, since you could talk about each dish in great depth)
• How to make kimchi (merits its own bullet point)
• Early days in America (their tourist stand, how they chose Philly)
• Korean traditions around marriage, 100 days (for new babies), Lunar New Year
• Business at the store
• The new micro-loan at the store, what they got with it, the sketchy contractor
• Retirement (although I learned that this quickly leads to the "when are you having a baby" conversation)
• The house in the suburbs where Sonia's brother & sister-in-law now live
• Her brother's job & sister-in-law's progress in nursing school
• Us in 2018: getting healthier, plans for the house, trips

Acceptable Topics: The White American Side

• How to make Slovack pastries
• The grandmothers (I'm still lucky enough to have two)
• Other family members (the cousin headed off to college, the cousin's child with health problems, the aunts and uncles moving south)
• House renovations and improvements, recent and planned
• Yard improvements and changes, recent and planned
• Dad's substitute teaching gigs
• Mom's halfway house project for women coming out of prison
• Upcoming trips
• My brother's work on his house & his girlfriends' parents' health
• Us in 2018: getting healthier, plans for the house, trips

Gay children with difficult family relationships have so much stacked against them. For years, we practice the art of hiding ourselves from our parents. By the time we come out, we've lost the ability to talk about even the most everyday aspects of our lives.

When we come out, we want to launch right into the big questions: the meaning of life, our dreams for the future. Yet we struggle to talk about the most everyday happenings: a movie we saw, a night out with friends. 

Even though it's still uncomfortable, Sonia and I are making plans and showing up. We are being patient with ourselves and with our parents. We are starting with the little things, and learning how to talk to them again. 

A Script for Clearing the Air

Mom and Dad, I'm calling today because Sonia came out to her parents about two and a half months ago. They had a hard time with it at first (her mother threatening suicide, her father insisting she can still get back on "the right path" and not ruin her life).

But just over two months later, I've had two dinners with them and her mother is dropping hints about babies and asking to meet you while we make kim bop.

What a natural parental instinct -- to want to meet the person that your child has chosen, then to want to meet their family.

It made me remember a tipsy phone call we had about a year after Sonia and I started dating. I was the only tipsy one, to my knowledge. I called your house needing a bit of honesty. I remember talking about my admiration for Sonia and her parents from a half a dozen different angles, trying to help you see why this relationship was the best one of my life.

That would have been a good and appropriate time for you to say you wanted to meet them. But you didn't. I did most of the talking.

Instead, Sonia and I are approaching our four-year anniversary and it seriously shocked me when her parents said they wanted to meet you. When I realized that this "meet the parents" moment was probably going to happen, my stomach sank.

Would you be willing to do it? Furthermore, do I even want you to meet them without knowing if you would support our marriage? What about kids?

I haven't put my life on hold, but I don't look forward to milestones because of the weight of navigating them with shaky parental support.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've built my own life. But the desire for parental acceptance is strong. I've held onto a candle of hope that the two of you would come around, but the flame is fanned by an absence of conversations, an avoidance of the big topics.

I won't let our marriage and any children we're lucky enough to have be tainted by your shaky support or overt judgement.

Sonia and I would like your support during these upcoming milestones, but if there is some point your religion won't let you pass, we need to know now. So we can get on with it, with all of the information.

Denial Is the First Stage of Grief

Sonia had two or three dinners with her parents during which they flatly ignored the fact that she had come out to them.

This didn't surprise me at all because my parents had gone through (and are possibly still in) a similar stage of denial. However, I was more than a little surprised when literally every gay person we talked to about this, responded with a knowing, "that sounds familiar." How common is denial?

Denial is the first stage of grief. As much as it breaks my heart that so many parents of gay children approach being gay as a loss, at least it's predictable.

The five stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It's still uncommon for parents of gay children to celebrate rather than mourn the chance to learn more wholly who their children are. But perhaps our response to this, as gay children, is to judge them by how quickly they move through these five stages, so that we can all at least get on with our lives.

For Sonia's parents, it was about seven weeks. Their quick turnaround, despite a horrible initial reaction, makes me wonder if my parents are even there yet.

Following those few dinners of denial, Sonia's mom came around with a light prod right after the New Year. Sonia asked if her parents would like to meet me, and before we knew it her mom was asking what I liked to eat and I was in the car driving with Sonia to Sunday dinner for the second time in the three and a half years since we've been dating.

(The first time, I'd met them as Sonia's friend after we'd been together only a few months. If they remembered that other meeting, they didn't let on.)

We entered Sonia's parent's home and balanced our flowers, coats and bags as we took our shoes off in the entryway. Her parents came into view in the living room. 

I said, Annyeonghaseyo, twice, smiling and bowing awkwardly, worried she hadn't heard the first one or that I'd said it from too far away. 

Sonia's mother brushed off my carefully practiced Korean "hello," and greeted me with a warmth my own mother had never shown Sonia, hugging me with my coat still on and patting my cheeks with her hand.

"So pretty," she said, as she pulled me into an awkward embrace.

Her father and brother asked me questions about my job as her mother and sister-in-law brought dish after dish to the table. They were somewhat incredulous that someone could make good money at a nonprofit, but Sonia reassured them.

During the meal, we talked mostly about the recent snowstorms and the food. A lot of the conversation was in Korean. The food was all familiar; Sonia's mother sends her home with at least two shopping bags of Korean food every two weeks, so I'd been getting familiar with all of it for years. I knew what I liked, and I even surprised myself by liking the soup with rice cakes, a texture I usually avoid.

After dinner, her mother brought out two bowls for each of us, although some family members declined one or the other. Unlike me, they knew what more was coming. One was a sugary liquid dessert with rice; the other tasted like a cold cinnamon tea with pine nuts. Then there was a fancy cake her brother had brought -- because it was an occasion, right?

As Sonia has taught me, no Korean meal is complete without fruit at the end. The orange slices came last. Count 'em: that's four desserts.

We went home with full bellies and a sense of whiplash. From Sonia's description of her coming out night only seven weeks prior, we didn't believe such a lovely night would be possible, maybe for years.

As we drove home, I explained the honky phrase, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Coalhouse Walker: Real Character?

Into this waiting-to-move period, I've injected an old favorite: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. Before I opened the book this time, I remembered loving the book but I did not remember the story. I got to fall in love all over again.

The book is a collage of the early-1900s. Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford and Emma Goldman make appearances. Two families, one upper-middle class and the other new immigrants, meet these giants of their time in likely, sometimes inconsequential scenarios.

Because there are so many "real" characters in the book, you imagine Doctorow researching and discovering all of the characters: Father, the executive at the fireworks factory, self-empowering Mother and the revolutionary Younger Brother. Tetah the artist who makes it big and his little girl. Their lives elevate to be as important to the course of history as all the names a reader in 2017 still recognizes.

When I last read the book, Emma Goldman was not familiar to me. Now that I know her as a historical figure, the book reads differently: as though any character, if you explore enough old newspaper articles, could come to life and be proclaimed as "real."

This brings me to the central character: Coalhouse Walker. In this reading, I was sure he was a historical figure. Following humiliation at the hands of the local all-white fire department, Coalhouse and his men (a ragtag team of 3-4 black youth and one middle-aged white man) barricade themselves with explosives inside the library and museum of J. P. Morgan. The metaphor is simply too perfect. I wanted to believe it.

From a NYTimes article written shortly after the book was published: "Asked if this angry black man were a real person Mr. Doctorow said, 'There are several hundreds of thousands of Coalhouse Walkers in this country.'" (Article here.)

But Coalhouse Walker entered the novel as a polite and proud black man determined to marry a young maid who was already the mother of his child. It was only through humiliation and his insistence on his own humanity and worthiness that he became indignant, and ultimately dead at the hands of his oppressors.

I believe in the reality of Coalhouse Walker, as unique or as aggregate, as both human and metaphor. I wonder if many black readers also believe in him.