Life Lessons I Learned From My Lesbian Mother

Sexual preference and sexual orientation has become very acceptable in the past decade. The LGBT community in the world is growing exponentially with many countries legalizing the marriage of people to the same sex. There are many influential figures that have relationships with members of the same sex and have gone through transgender transformations. If this was how society was 40 years ago when my mother was growing up, I am not sure if I would be here today. My mother is a lesbian and I am proud, inspired and strengthened because of this fact.

My mother and father got a divorce 17 years ago and my world as a child was turned completely around. Divorces between parents are always difficult for the children in families, but mine was exceptionally emotional. My sisters and I (all younger than 10 years old) were realizing our family was never going to be the same. The next 5 years were filled with tears and denial. Our parents were separated, our father turned into an alcoholic, and our mother became a lesbian.

I have learned many lessons from my mother who is a lesbian and here are the ones that have most impacted my life.

1. Love Who You Want to Love

This lesson was taught to me at a very young age because my mother had changed her sexual preference to love a woman instead of a man. This was difficult to understand at first. Now as I look back at it, I realized that she had always been teaching me to love who I want to love. Have no exceptions and don’t hold anything back. Our family history has had many circumstances where women were not allowed, by family, to love the people that they had true feelings for and this has shaped our family history. My great grandmother had my grandmother with a man who was not socially acceptable (due to religious purposes). My grandmother was given up for adoption and was never told that the family that she was living in was not blood related to her. She later found adoption papers and never had the courage to discuss this matter with her family.   This has a large impact on my mother and who she chooses to love. She passed the lesson onto her daughters, that they can love whomever they want t

2. Beauty Comes From Within. Look For Beauty In Everyone

Most parents teach their children “You are beautiful! No matter what!” This is told to children as they are picked on in school, when a person who they have a crush on doesn’t like them back, and when children bully other children because of what they look like. My mother taught me that everyone is beautiful and that beauty comes from within. A few years after my mother had told her children that she was going to become a lesbian she drastically changed the way she had looked, by completely shaving her head. As a child I was shocked and mortified. My mother had always had long, dark brown hair that I remember playing with as a child. Getting used to her not having any hair was not the hardest part. The thing that really threw me out of my comfort zone was my mother showing up to a Christmas concert at my school and telling my classmates that my mother was the bald woman in the audience. Did this mean my mother was no longer beautiful? Of course not! She was my mom and I loved her. She would always be beautiful in my eyes. She taught me to carry this vision of looking past people’s appearance and to see the beauty that everyone has, which comes from within.
3. No Matter How Broken You Are, You Can Always Pick Yourself Back Up

Our family motto is “We glow but do not burn.” As a child I had to deal with many challenges that broke down my spirit. Some childhood problems included but were not limited to alcoholism, drug use, depression, and identity crisis.  My mother would console me in my time of need. She would tell me how strong and beautiful I was and that I had the strength to get through my sadness. I would survive. We are candles in the wind and may dwindle and loose light, but we will never blow out. We will keep glowing and stay lit.  Now she is the one who seems to have forgotten that we have the strength to pick ourselves up. No amount of tragedy, sickness, pain or negativity will be able to stop us. We glow but do not burn.

Thank you Mom, I love you.