MY EGYPT

Right away, whenever I talk to anyone about my sexual struggle, the phrase “It was your father’s fault” is the first thing I hear. Some are convinced that the reason I’m gay is because I had a bad relationship with my father. And they’re partly right; my relationship with my father wasn’t all that great. In fact, what I can remember of it was downright miserable.

As with any life story, I started my life young and innocent, but I soon grew out of that. I was born in a hospital in Whitefish, Montana, and it all went to hell from there. There were three of us kids, me, the oldest, Rachel the girl, and the middle child, and Brian, the youngest. We were born pretty close together, with only fourteen moths separating me and my sister, and barely three years separating me and my younger brother. Brian, the youngest, was born with a very bad heart defect.

When I was about six, my mom and dad divorced. To this day I remember almost nothing about my father, but I am told by all those who knew him that he was a very abusive man, and according to them, I was the focus of much of his wrath. I remember enough though, and that’s why there hasn’t been much of a relationship between us.

Whenever I get together with my extended family, I hear from them in that self-righteous tone telling me how important it is to forgive him and learn to love the man that they all know and love. I’d like to see them live with him as his child and then see how easy their rhetoric would be. And I will address the area of forgiveness later on, and my work in that area.

There was no denying that this man wanted nothing to do with me. I remember many times after the divorce wanting to go and see my father, but I couldn’t because he didn’t want to see us. (My mom did try and make up stories that he was busy, but even then, I knew better.) I remember that hurt me as a child, and I cannot describe the emptiness I felt because of that. (Eventually I gave up on him and by the time I was in junior high, I had no second thoughts about ever seeing him again.)

I have snatches in my memory of him when he lost his temper. I have one particular memory of him beating my mother and the two of them screaming, and all I could do was hide in my room.

Growing up, my mom was poor, and she worked hard to make sure her kids were taken care of. She didn’t waste her money, she wasn’t out boozing at the expense of us kids, but she didn’t have a lot to feed us with outside of food stamps. At this time my dad was supposed to be paying child support, which he refused to do. So in frustration, the state of Montana arrested him for back child support. His family was living on food stamps, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to have to stretch our meals so they would last. My father informed my mom that he would rather sit in jail than pay a dime in child support. So the state released him, realizing that they weren’t going to get anything out of him.

When I reached the age of 9, my mother met and married Roger, a friend of our cousins. Roger was a Seventh-Day-Adventist, and I suddenly found myself banned from Saturday morning cartoons, pepperoni pizzas and Coke-a-Cola. (Seventh-Day-Adventists have church on Saturdays, and they aren’t allowed to eat pork… nor are they allowed to drink caffeine.) I went from belonging to a family that consisted of mom and three kids, to mom, step dad, three kids, and two stepsisters.

Naturally Roger and I didn’t get along too well. Roger was a carpenter, who worked with his hands and loved to get dirty. I didn’t like working with tools. I wanted to be an actor, or a musician. Dirt was never a problem for me. I could get as dirty as the next boy. In fact, I loved the dirt. I would build roads and drive play trucks. My friend Toby and I would turn on the water at his farm and let it run down a little “riverbed” we dug in the dirt. Then we’d build a huge dam and build a city under the dam while the reservoir was filling up. Once we got a fair amount of water, for fun we would break the dam and watch as a wall of water descended upon our hapless residents and destroyed our play city. It didn’t matter where I was; if there was water, and if there was dirt, then I was playing in it.

<SPAN