...
By Nick Dothée
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
“I’m OK, Mom.”
I’d said it twice on the call.
I was driving through the San Fernando Valley on the 101, on my way to work in Hollywood. A few hundred miles north, my mom was hiking near Santa Rosa with her husband, Fred.
Read More on My Turn
My Husband Tried To Tough It Out. Then Came a Devastating Diagnosis10 min read
Doctor Said I Just Needed a Laxative, Then One Test Changed Everything9 min read
I Dropped My Son Off at Daycare—Hours Later, He Was Dead10 min read
A few minutes earlier, “Mom calling…” popped up on my CarPlay. I knew I had to answer. I’d been putting off this conversation.
“There you are!” she said. “Did you get my text?”
The text was her flight information for Burbank. She had postponed a visit just after Christmas; now she was coming in February and planned to sleep in our guest room.
Except the guest room was now my room.
Walker had asked for a divorce on Christmas Eve 2025. By the time my mom texted her arrival details, I had been sleeping down the hall from my husband for weeks.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “Walker and I are getting divorced.”
For a moment, all I could hear was the road. She waited for me to say more. I didn’t.
“Oh, Nick,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m OK.”
I told her Walker and I were still living together. He would stay in the house; I was looking for a condo.
“If you still come, we can make it work,” I said. “It’s only a few nights.”
“Let me think about what I should do,” she said.
Then I said it again.
“I’m OK, Mom. I’m fine.”
Just before the call disconnected, I heard her turn toward Fred.
“Oh, Fred,” she said quietly. “It’s not good—”
Then she was gone.
She called back that evening.
“Why don’t I wait until you move out?” she said. “I can even come help you.”
Once she offered, I had my marching orders. I would find a condo in a good area. The furniture would be in place before she arrived. The internet would work. The guest bed would be made. She would walk in and see that I had built a life that worked without him.
A couple of days before she came, I read Matthew Vines’s New York Times essay “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” which argued that gay acceptance had depended in part on showing Americans that being gay wasn’t a rebellion against ordinary life. I understood why it made people angry. But I had watched what an ordinary gay life did for my mother: It made her less afraid. She had been trying to keep me safe long before marriage was part of the picture.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in fourth grade and put on medication. My Catholic school went from kindergarten through eighth grade; my sister, Katie, five years older, was in eighth grade that year. I was always in detention for talking out of turn and mocked for being feminine. Our uniform included bright-red V-neck sweaters. Older boys pulled them over their heads like updos and belted Madonna’s “Vogue” in high-pitched voices when I walked by. I’d look around, hoping Katie hadn’t seen.
I never told my mom what was happening at school. I didn’t want Katie telling her either.
My mom had spent years looking for somewhere my ADHD energy could go. Theater was the first thing that fit. Onstage, the same qualities that got me punished or mocked at school could earn applause. It became the part of my life my mom and I shared most easily. She drove me to rehearsals in her maroon minivan, the Les Misérables cast recording playing on cassette, and we sang along.
...
By the time I was 15, I understood I was gay, and I assumed that if anyone already knew, it was her.
One afternoon in July 1997, my best friend Lily and I were upstairs in my bedroom with the door closed. My mom came up the stairs and flung it open.
“Lily, I think it’s time for you to go home,” she said.
After Lily left, she turned to me.
“You’re grounded.”
She had never grounded me before. My mom was my buddy.
Lily knew I was gay. Her mother knew. Most of my friends did. To my mom, a girl sitting cross-legged on my bed behind a closed door meant one thing.
That night, the summer theater program I was in was holding a showcase of short plays we’d written in class. Mine was one of them.
“What about the show?”
“You’ll perform and come straight home after.”
“What about the cast party?”
“That’s too bad.”
I wanted to go to the party, of course. But more than that, I wanted her to understand there had been nothing to worry about with Lily.
Later that afternoon, while she graded papers at the dining room table, I put my script in front of her. On the page, a brother and sister argued after school; the sister told him she had to defend him when her friends called him a faggot. Until then I had planned to let my family discover I was gay from their seats in the audience. I thought this was subtle.
My mom kept staring at the script, as though another scene might be hidden underneath it.
“Nick, what is this?” she said. “You aren’t gay. Are you?”
Marriage between two men wasn’t a future either of us knew how to picture. Even the hopeful version stopped short of it: A boyfriend might become a partner, maybe even a life partner.
What my mother could picture was a son she might not be able to protect.
“It’s such a difficult life you’re choosing,” she said. “I’m scared for you.”
Once she said, “Maybe if I had stayed with your father…”
Even at 15, I knew their divorce hadn’t made me gay. She was searching backward through my childhood for something she might have done differently.
That Labor Day weekend, Vitaly Poliakov, a gay man, was bludgeoned to death in our county. Soon newspaper stories started appearing outside my bedroom door or folded open on my bed: AIDS deaths, gay bashings, men whose lives she was leaving as warnings about mine.
She didn’t throw me out or stop loving me. She still drove me to rehearsal, and we still sang in the car. But after I came out, the ways she tried to protect me changed. The clippings kept coming, even as grounding me stopped being practical.
By high school, I was going to school and doing theater in San Francisco; she couldn’t keep the same tabs on me. By 16, I was using drugs, staying out all night, and dating a DJ in his mid-20s. My mom knew I was getting harder to reach, but she didn’t know most of what I was doing.
Then theater took me east for college and, after that, to New York, where I stayed almost a decade. For years, I kept enough of the life I had gone there to build intact that my family across the country didn’t know how badly I was unraveling. By the end, drugs and alcohol had taken over.
One morning, unable to get out of bed, I called my mom.
“If I stay in New York like this, I might die.”
“Then come home, Nick.”
I came back to Northern California and kept using. After I crashed her Prius while high, I spent several days in jail.
Months later, I ended up alone in a motel off Ventura Boulevard and typed two words onto Twitter: "Help me."
A friend saw them and called the police. The welfare check led to a psychiatric hold and, eventually, a bed at Van Ness Recovery House, an addiction treatment center in Los Angeles.
By the time my mom flew down to see me, she had an Al-Anon sponsor and meetings of her own. She didn’t arrive with a plan for taking me home. She was learning, she said, to keep her attention on her side of the street.
For the first time, my recovery had to belong to me.
Six months into sobriety, I met Walker at a gay A.A. meeting in West Hollywood. He already had five years sober. My mom loved that.
Her trust came back in pieces too small for either of us to mark. Before we were engaged, she gave us a Christmas ornament shaped like a wedding cake. When my father died, Walker came north for the funeral and stood beside me.
...
We married a few years later, in matching pastel linen suits that made us look like Easter eggs.
By then, the markers of an ordinary life had accumulated around us: a marriage certificate, a mortgage, two bulldogs named Bronx and Brooklyn, Home Depot receipts, and a refrigerator that told us when it was time for a new filter.
When my mom visited, she’d sit with us on the couch after her bath, not saying much, Bronx asleep against her feet. If I left the room, I’d come back to Walker telling her how well I was doing at work, what I’d cooked that week, what a good dog dad I was. He knew she needed to hear it.
Walker did not make me sober, but the ordinary life we built made my sobriety visible to her. She could imagine me growing older again.
I was downstairs with the dogs when her Uber pulled up outside the condo. The dogs saw her first and pulled hard at their leashes.
She dropped her bags and hugged me. Upstairs, the elevator opened onto a courtyard with tall palms and a fountain.
“Oh, Nick,” she said. “This is actually really nice.”
Then I showed her the guest room. The bed was made.
She stopped and looked around the condo I had furnished in a matter of weeks.
“You’ve come a long way,” she said.
I had expected her to compare it with the house I’d left. Only then did I understand she was measuring a much longer distance—from the motel off Ventura Boulevard to here.
That evening, I started my bolognese early. My mom sat in the living room scrolling on her phone while the sauce cooked.
“Oh my God, Nick,” she called from the other room. “That smells so good.”
“It better,” I said. “It takes four hours. Slow and low.”
I had cooked it often in the house Walker and I shared.
At the table, she asked me to send her the recipe.
“I want to make this for Fred when I get home,” she said.
I didn’t tell her I was OK a third time. The made bed and the sauce on the stove had said what I’d been trying to tell her since the day I called.
Nick Dothée is a Los Angeles writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic*,* New York Magazine*, and* The Guardian*; his addiction memoir,* Dosed*, is in progress.*
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Do you have a personal essay you want to share with Newsweek? Send your story to MyTurn@newsweek.com.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines