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srb wrote:
My father is of average height, he has had salt-and-pepper hair for as long as I can remember, and though he laughs rarely, when he does, he laughs hard. My father is quiet, my father is intelligent, and my father is gay.

The day my parents told us they were separating was a Thursday in February in Placitas, New Mexico when I was twelve years old. They sat my older brothers and me on the black couch in our living room and told us that my father was moving out. They had been married for over twenty years. Later that evening, alone with my father in my room, we stood looking out my window at the desert behind our house. He held his arm around my shoulders. I asked him if he was having an affair. He said no. I asked him if he was gay. He looked at me, surprised, and said, “yes, I think I might be.”

I have never written about my father because I am angry, and until recently, I was ashamed at the thought that I was angry because my father is gay. I am angry because my father lied to me, for as long as he knew before he was honest with us. I am angry that I was forced to confront and change my definition of family at an age when I felt particularly vulnerable. I am angry that ever since that Thursday when I was twelve, when I felt such an inexplicable closeness to my father, there has been a rift between us.

That day, my father gave me the opportunity to learn who I was. Though it took me a decade to recognize what I could have seen as a twelve-year-old, I now know that I am an accepting person. I am the kind of person who will always listen. I am the kind of person who will ask the questions I am afraid to ask. My anger dissipates in the face of all I have learned about myself because of my father’s sexuality, and because of my willingness to accept the truth.

I want to continue to be the girl who stood at the window with my father. I want to be courageous in confronting the questions that I encounter. I want to be able to define and redefine concepts and theories that seem to be written in stone.

Though I have never thanked my father for showing me who I am, I am fully aware that it is only because of that day when I was twelve, when he answered yes, that I am the woman I am today: confident, accepting, tested and strong. Without my father, I would be lost.

Eight years ago, on September 11th, I was in a state of shock. Now granted, most of the world was in a state of shock on 9/11. My dismay was a little atypical, though: it was on that day that I found out that my newborn son was different.

Honestly, I had already concluded that something was very wrong with Thomas. He was sickly and misshapen. He never stopped crying. At the same time I was still desperately clinging to the ever-fading hope that the diagnosis wouldn’t be anything too significant. Sadly, that proved not to be the case. I came to find that my baby was missing a chromosome, that he would be profoundly handicapped, that he would never walk or talk, and that he would never progress past an infant’s abilities.

It was utterly surreal. Here I was on the morning of September 11th, sitting in a shabby little office at Children’s Hospital, reeling from the news about Thomas. Meanwhile, the nearby television was playing an endless loop of the first tower collapsing. That remote cataclysmic event seemed unfathomable and yet somehow so fitting - the weakened structure teetering in a suspense of denial and disbelief before dramatically imploding from the unexpected blow....