Homophobes and T-shirts

Days later and I’m still on the childhood crush thing. I think it’s my brains coping mechanism, keeping it from going scary places it’s best to avoid. Jonah, my 10-year-old, and the kindest, sweetest, biggest-hearted human being I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, asked me today if I’d be better by Christmas and it made my stomach hurt. He was so sad when I told him that by Christmas, I’d probably be pretty sick and tried to explain the longevity of what will be happening, but kids have no sense of time, who knows if any of us do. But then his brain wheels successfully spun and he got happy and chirped “but then you’ll be all better and we’ll be so happy!” And my brain just can’t go to the place where the alternative of that lurks, and really, as optimistic and stubborn as I feel, I don’t know where I’ll be in a year, if we’ll be celebrating or not. So for this week, I ponder the past.

I hate homophobes, and I’m always confounded when they dispute that many {most} people know they’re gay from very early on. Anyone who’s ever had a childhood crush knows that it’s either on a girl or a boy and only rarely both, and either way we remember it always. So maybe homophobes were dull, lifeless little boys and girls who didn’t have childhood crushes, maybe there’s something wrong with them.

My other HS crush was more of the lifelong, beginning in early childhood variety. I’ve known DT my whole life. Our families were friends and then they weren’t and then they were and then they definitely weren’t. One day in third grade, I must have been only 7 or 8, I looked at DT and cupid's pesky little arrow struck...yep, I liked boys. We don’t label it as kids, we only label it when we’re forced to, when we grow up and start labeling all sorts of things that would be better just left alone. I never had to declare my heterosexuality a luxury not everyone gets. When you’re a kid, you just know what you feel and what could be more innocent, sweet and natural. I swooned over DT without him ever having a clue until HS when we briefly dated, but mostly became friends. I do, however, remember our first kiss on a random St. Patrick’s day, like it was yesterday and it was thrilling. Yep, I’ve liked boys ever since, in my more experimental phases I really wanted to try being with a woman, but I just can’t, I really can’t, I’m stinkin’ 100% boring old hetero which is kind of a shame because women are lovely and it would surely expand the playing field. I hadn’t seen DT in 30 years until last month right before the cancer tornado hit land and I swear, having a crush on him is hard-wired into my DNA. I realize I’ve had a lifelong crush on DT... it’s not real, it’s not based on reality, who knows who someone is after 30 years and I suspect DT and I while having some things in common are quite different and have chosen different paths. But it’s just like the friends you have when you’re really young... they get hard-wired into you even after you’ve long since gone your separate ways and maybe that’s why people migrate to strange surreal events like reunions.

My very first girlfriend was CK and we met on the playground in nursery school. I remember going to her house, my first “play-date”, {although, we didn’t call them that back then} and she told me her favorite color was light blue. And being the life-long idiot that I am I thought “wow, that’s so cool, I wish my favorite color was light blue.” What the fuck is that all about? Why did I think liking green was inferior to light blue? Because we met so young, it doesn't how long I go without seeing CK, I'll always be comfortable around her... it's hard-wired and you too, NMP.

I love that Jonah’s lifelong theme color is orange because everyone should have a theme color. Every year on school picture day, He picks out his current favorite orange shirt and we’re amassing an impressive collection. I’ve been known to have shirts especially screen printed on orange for him. So if laughing and being happy helps you heal, I’ll need lots of my orange-shirted love bug, but I’m just so damned worried about what this is and will do to him. He’s in 5th grade, getting ready for middle school and that’s stressful enough, this seems so unfair to him. I guess that’s a mom-thing, it never once occurred to me that this wasn’t fair to me, but it kills me, how unfair it is to him.