My Mother’s Gift
By Shawn Lane
I hadn’t seen my mother in years.
We’d never been that close, I guess. It was hard to be close to all your children when you had seven of them. We used to joke that we were the Waltons from the television show, with me even being named Jason, and my younger brother being Ben. No John Boy, though.
But it wasn’t our lack of closeness that kept me from seeing her for so many years. It was more a matter of location. I lived in Hawaii and she in Connecticut. Worlds apart in so many ways.
And though she didn’t exactly disown me when I came out as gay, she would never have marched by my side at a Pride event either.
She and my father were registered Democrats all their lives and they tried to think of themselves as progressive, and she was supportive of all th
