Those parking lots taught me about joy, laughter, and belonging. But they didn’t tell the whole story. Because when I left Sue’s and crossed back into my father’s world, I stepped into a very different life.
In Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, I painted a picture of the life I had with my mom and Sue, where tangible love, safety, security, peace, and happiness filled that little house in Jessup. Sue became a second mother to me. There was Sue’s family, including Cousin Tommy. There were the friends, the softball games, and the warm familiarity of a life where laughter came easily.
It was wonderful.
But that was only part of the story of those years, the happy part. And I’ve genuinely enjoyed sharing those memories. Yet there was another side I need to tell. It’s not as much fun to write, but necessary. The other part of my life included my father and my sister. To outsiders it looked “normal,” but to me it was the source of pain, discomfort, insecurity, and turmoil.
At Sue’s and At My Father’s
At Sue’s
Mornings began with the smell of coffee drifting in from the kitchen and the sound of dogs barking in the yard. The coal stove, Mr. Locke, named for the Locke Stove Company that made it, stood in the middle of the kitchen like a warm, dependable friend. There was always a kettle of water gently steaming on top.
On winter days, we’d gather around it after coming in from the cold, thawing our hands and cheeks. Sometimes dinner was cooked right there on the stove. When it was, it was breakfast for dinner, bacon, eggs, and pancakes, eaten with the kind of comfort that seeps into your bones. My shoulders would relax the moment I walked in that house. I could grab a piece of toast, hear my mom singing and humming in the next room, and know without question that the day would hold something good. It was home.
At My Father’s
Mornings began in a dim, quiet house where the air felt heavy and smelled old and musty, like a basement that hadn’t been opened in years. The furniture seemed tired. My father often worked nights at the restaurant, so evenings were spent with just my sister and me in that stillness.
No music playing. No easy conversation. Just the tick of the clock and the feeling that the walls were holding their breath.
Back then, society kept telling me that living in a house with two women was wrong. Unnatural. Harmful to a boy. But every time I left Sue’s to visit my father, I was reminded that what the world called “normal” could feel anything but safe.
The Old House
When my mom and I left, my sister stayed with my father. At first, he tried to keep the kennel going, but it didn’t last long. He kept working nights at the restaurant, so when I came for weekend visits, he was usually gone. That left just my sister and me until he got home.
I won’t dwell on it, but the abuse continued during that time.
My father was bitter and angry that my mother had left him. Angrier still that she had left to live with another woman, and he wasn’t shy about complaining to my sister and me, turning us into his unwilling audience.
Eventually, he lost his job at the restaurant and couldn’t afford to keep the house.
Life on the Move
At Sue’s
There was stability. The same front door I walked through every day. The same spot at the kitchen table. I knew where the glasses were, which cupboard held the cereal, and how the afternoon light would hit the living room just before dinner.
With My Father
There was transience. After losing the house, he bounced from one rented room to another. First a crowded home with eight boys, six of them foster kids, then an upstairs apartment in the house of a woman with severe diabetes who lived just down the road from Sue’s. Later, another upstairs room in yet another stranger’s home.
Visiting him meant perching on the edge of a couch that wasn’t his, feeling like an intruder in someone else’s life.
When My Sister Moved In
Sometime after my father lost the house, my sister came to live with us at Sue’s. She moved into the new room built off the back of the office addition.
I’d grown used to having the place to myself with my mom and Sue, and it was a hard adjustment. From my memory, she and Sue never really got along. My sister had a bad temper and loved a good confrontation. For her, the louder the argument, the better.
The sexual abuse had stopped by then, but she began lashing out physically. This wasn’t playful sibling roughhousing, it was real violence.
One night, I was in the living room watching TV. She walked in, changed the channel, and sat down. I told her I was watching something and got up to change it back. She stood up and started punching me on the side of the head. I was eleven or twelve, much smaller than her, and unable to defend myself. When things like this happened, the violence would only stop when someone interceded, or when she decided she’d had enough.
At Sue’s, my mom’s rules were clear, and boundaries held. But my sister wouldn’t respond to discipline, and the confrontations with Sue escalated. My mom eventually told her that if it didn’t stop, she would have to move out when she graduated high school.
And if there’s one thing about my mom, when she draws a line, it holds.
The day after my sister graduated high school, she moved out. Not by choice.
The “They”
By this time, I was getting older. Middle school was creeping along, and I was starting to understand things about life better. I was hearing things at school, at friends’ houses, and I was learning from my own eyes.
There was the gay world I lived in, the world with my mom and Sue. It was full of peace, joy, happiness, security, love, fun, friendship, chosen family, and the ability to simply be myself.
Then there was the world with my father and sister, full of pain, fear, confusion, and discomfort. A place where anger could fill a room before a word was even spoken.
And as I got older, the talk around me got louder and clearer, reaffirming what I’d already been told at home about being quiet and careful. One of my biggest challenges in making good friends, even back then, was how often I’d be disappointed. I’d meet someone new, think they were cool, maybe even see them as a potential close friend. And then, inevitably, they’d make a comment or a joke about gay people. In that instant, the possibility of friendship would vanish. I’d feel the floor drop out, realizing this person could never really know me or be close to me. Not if they could so casually insult the people I loved most.
It’s systemic. Unless you tell someone you’re gay or part of the LGBTQ+ community, they just assume you’re straight and that it’s okay to make jokes or, worse, spew insults. I heard kids my age say things like, “All gays should be sent to an island and killed.” Seriously, what the hell? Do you realize you just told me my mother should be shipped to an island and murdered? And for what exactly?
Other times it was an off-color comment or a lazy insult meant to demean. And here’s one of the saddest truths about ignorant straight men: if they see another man, they immediately assume he thinks just like they do. They have no empathy, no curiosity, no pause to consider that the person in front of them might not share their small, close-minded worldview.
The System
It would be easy to blame all this on parents and grandparents (and yes, that’s a huge part of it), but that’s not the whole story. In our society, especially in the 80s, the idea of “normal” was everywhere, unspoken, but constant. Every TV show, every movie, every commercial showed the same thing: a straight couple with kids. And if there was a gay character, they were there to be a punchline or a target.
If you were straight and from a straight family, you didn’t have to think twice. You just assumed everyone else was like you: a mom, a dad, two kids. Divorce or not, the picture never really changed.
That was the systemic part. There was no place in the public imagination for a family like mine. At least not as a valid, loving, normal family.
The Real Struggle
I never doubted my family was real. I never doubted it was special. I never doubted it was worth loving and holding onto.
The struggle was living in a world where every message, from classmates to TV shows, told me that the life I knew as safe, loving, and whole wasn’t normal.
I wasn’t confused about my family. I was confused about how the rest of the world could be so blind to what I could see so clearly.
The Irony
The house the world called broken was the one place I felt whole.
The one it called normal was where the cracks ran deepest.
At Sue’s, I knew love, safety, and belonging.
With my father and sister, I learned how to brace for the next outburst, how to read a room for danger, and how to keep parts of myself tucked away.
It was a contradiction I carried quietly. The place others condemned gave me peace, and the place they approved of was the one that hurt me most.
That contradiction would stay with me for years, quietly shaping how I saw the world and the people in it. But nothing could have prepared me for what came next. The night my mom sat me down at our kitchen table, just the two of us, and told me something that would change everything.
Up next: Chapter 7 – The Night She Told Me