{"id":464,"date":"2012-08-10T10:59:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T10:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/?guid=f3c20fb11f2605678435098a95d624c3"},"modified":"2012-08-10T10:59:37","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T10:59:37","slug":"my-mothers-attitude-to-my-bisexuality-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2012\/08\/my-mothers-attitude-to-my-bisexuality-2\/","title":{"rendered":"My mother’s attitude to my bisexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Catch up on other things I’ve said about my mother in: http:\/\/iamabisexual.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/07\/a-step-with-my-mother.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday was a doozy.<\/p>\n

It started when I was looking up churches. I’m flying to Virginia in a few days, and I wanted to research beforehand where I would go to church on the Sunday that I’m out there. Obviously it’s a big issue for me when finding a church to know whether they are gay-friendly, and while that was on my mind, it got me thinking, and the thought-path led me to text my dad.<\/p>\n

“Just had a worrying thought. Do you know if the family in Virginia are liberal or conservative?”<\/p>\n

When he got home, we sat in the living room, and he basically said it was best not to even bring it up, and use ambiguous language (eg when asked if I have a boyfriend) to avoid having to deal with a bad reaction, of which there was a chance.<\/p>\n

It normally doesn’t bother me when meeting new people and I never hide anything, but family is different, especially when I’ve never met them before and I’m flying 4000 miles to accept their very generous hospitality. If they do have a problem with LGBT, I’m only there for 12 days and I don’t want to cause a family rift, or something equally dramatic, nor have to excuse myself from their home and come back early.<\/p>\n

But I fought with him about it, saying that if felt like lying by omission, and not true to myself.<\/p>\n

Anyway, besides that situation, the conversation turned into my longed-for confrontation of my dad about my impressions of my mother’s attitude (see other blog post). He was shocked at what I thought, and promised me to talk to her. [I also learnt that it is not general knowledge throughout the family, because my dad sees as purely my business, and not somewhere to declare. I suppose I understand that, but isn’t it usual that when someone comes out to their parents, relatives are made aware of it? I surprised my parents haven’t wanted to discuss it with their siblings, my aunts and uncles.]<\/p>\n

So later that day my mother sits me down and says she was also shocked when my father revealed all to her. She had felt she was a great example of an accepting parent, because ultimately she does not care who I choose to be with, as long as they make me happy. We discussed it, and really her silence on the matter and her moments of being odd when girls were mentioned is all down to it being new; she doesn’t know a thing about the LGBT world, and so she is only very slowly learning how to be mother to a bisexual.<\/p>\n

Well, you can imagine my relief! My mother is perfectly fine with my sexuality, and that is so much of a weight off my shoulders. Great big cheers all round.<\/p>\n

It still feels weird to talk to my mother about being bi, but then it feels weird to discuss anything to do with my love life, so I’m not worried about that. The only difference is, when we talk about LGBT things, our relationship roles reverse, because I’m the one in the know, wiser about the whole thing, than she is, when she’s had two whole decades as a mother being the one with the upper hand.<\/p>\n

I’m sure there’s a lot of psychoanalysis that could be done, lots of deep set things about our relationship, but I don’t care. I am much happier knowing what my mother thinks, and that it’s positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catch up on other things I’ve said about my mother in: http:\/\/iamabisexual.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/07\/a-step-with-my-mother.htmlYesterday was a doozy.It started when I was looking up churches. I’m flying to Virginia in a few days, and I wanted to research …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}