Even as I write this, I can see the room so clearly and I see my mother ironing while she answers me. Some things just stick in your head, don’t they.
I’m 12 years old and I’ve come home from school with a burning question for my mother: “Mummy, what’s a thespian?” She barely lifts her head from the ironing as she replies “A thespian is an old-fashioned word for someone who works in the theatre, usually an actor. How did you hear that word?” She looks up at me and adds “it’s not bad word, it’s just not used all that much”.
I stand with my school bag on the other side of the ironing board. I’ve been at my new school for 3 months now and already I know that my life outside of my parent’s home is another world and usually I don’t mix the two together. I don’t talk about home at school, and I don’t talk about school at home. Instinctively, I know that like oil and water, there’s no way that they should be mixed and get a good effect. But today my need to know is stronger than my need to protect my mother from the outside world I inhabit now that I’m at big school.
“This girl called me a thespian”. My mother continues ironing and says, “Can you put that into a context for me please” and I reply, “She said – you’re a thespian” (I miss out the adjective which came before thespian as I know my mother’s rules on swearing all too well). My mother gives a very small sigh as she reaches for the next shirt “And how did that make you feel?”
I replied that I wasn’t at all upset because I didn’t understand what it meant, and I also didn’t think the girl did either. As it didn’t sound like it was necessarily a bad thing…. I added, “I mean, I do love the theatre and I’d love to be an actress when I grow up”.
There’s a silence in which I inhale the comforting senses of my mother’s ironing. The lingering warmth of the pile of crisp shirts, the faint scent of lavender in the water she deftly flicks across each shirt, all so very reassuring, all smells, sights and sounds which say “Home” to me. Home means safe.
And then my mother says “I think the word she meant to say was lesbian. Do you know what a lesbian is?” This is a new word to me and so I say no. My mother rests the iron on its stand and looks at me for the first time. “A lesbian is a woman who loves other women. It’s quite a normal thing, lots of women are lesbians and there’s nothing wrong with that. No one is in charge of who they love, it’s just something that you’re born with. Some women love men, and some women love other women. You must never be nasty about someone who is a lesbian, you must never be cruel or call people names to make yourself feel bigger or better than them. Do you understand me?”
I suddenly feel very small and feel as if my two worlds, my strange scary new big school world, and my safe warm home world, might be about to collide and I can’t stop them. I simply reply “Yes, I understand”. But I don’t. All I know is that my mother, my touchstone of all that is right and wrong in the world has just told me that it’s fine for women to love other women and it’s not fine to use the word lesbian as a way of being nasty.
So, I say “I do love you. Does that mean I’m a lesbian?” and my mother properly laughs out loud, something she doesn’t do often enough for me, and she says, as she returns to her ironing “No, you’re meant to love your mother, but this is a different kind of love, and you’ll understand it more when you get older”.
I accept her words as the truth, and I nod. She didn’t mention at the time that there are also men who love other men, but perhaps she thought it best to leave that conversation for another day. Perhaps she thought that sorting out the difference between thespians and lesbians was enough for one wet Wednesday afternoon.