My mothers told me stories

Maeve marsden shares tales of love, heartbreak, and a queer family.

My mothers told me stories in the filtered London light of our lounge room, in our brightly wallpapered kitchen, in their tiny bedroom, in that gentle way most parents do: “First I must get the baby to sleep, and then make some dinner, but after that I’ll play with you.” Three-part narrative structures that helped me understand the tiny world I inhabited. Teresa, my British mother, told me her stories of growing up in working class Essex; from Louise came stories of her family’s raucous pub in Catholic Campbelltown. And we knew the stories of their friends, too – warm, funny, strong-willed women who were so quick to laughter that I thought all the laughter in the world was within my reach.

The walls of our home were covered in bookshelves teeming with Sadako and her paper cranes, Patience and Sarah and Looking for Alibrandi, the Ramona stories and The Worst Witch, and Bread and Jam for Frances, a beloved childhood book about a charmingly strong-willed raccoon. All lovingly dewey-decimaled by librarian Teresa, as though this library of books and the echoing laughter of clever women could fortify us all against the world. Stories as armour.

We left London in 1988. That same year, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced a bill to ensure local authorities didn’t “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” – but this wasn’t something I knew about at the time, and it could hardly have been my mothers’ motivation for leaving, considering queer families weren’t offered a much warmer welcome Down Under.

We arrived in Australia to a country grappling with the bicentenary of invasion and colonisation, a country where my family – three kids born to two women – was not recognised, and where Teresa was forbidden from working. Partner visas for lesbian couples weren’t an option, so Teresa spent her days cleaning houses for cash, and looking after me and my siblings – teaching us, playing with us, reading to us. When Louise arrived home from long shifts at the pharmacy, she would climb into my bed exhausted and, still in her white uniform, she’d read to me, often falling asleep mid-chapter, glasses perched on the end of her nose, snoring gently.

Other families’ histories are mapped out in genetics, in bloodlines. For other kids, the connection of shared blood holds such weight that a deep sense of belonging is contained in a simple, “Oh, she has her father’s smile.” Or her mother’s eyes, her aunt’s chin, her grandpa’s nose. We examine babies for evidence. We joke, “She’s definitely yours,” or, “Maybe the postman paid a visit.” This sense of belonging through DNA feels so natural and inevitable to most people that even now queer couples embarking on parenthood ask me with fear in their eyes whether I loved my parents equally, whether I ever felt lost, or like I didn’t belong.

In our family, we didn’t have the unquestioned security of blood. My mothers mapped out our connections in every retelling of their love for me. When I was small, they told me the story of how we were made in blunt and clear terms, easy for a child to digest. They told us so many times that I don’t remember the not-knowing, I only remember from when I could already tell it myself.

Now that I’m grown, I tell the story of my family with the benefit of hindsight and perspective, weaving in my politics, my adult sense of humour, a little sarcasm if I want to disarm the questioner. I have my own queer politics now, built through fierce debate with friends, lovers and, yes, my family. But I’ll tell you my story as I told it when I was small, with simplicity and honesty, told so many times, to friends, teachers, and curious strangers.

“I was born to two mothers, Louise and Teresa, in 1983 in West Hammersmith Hospital, London.”

“Which one’s your real mum?”“they both are…” I always knew what they were asking, but I’d still leave an awkward pause before giving them what they wanted.

“Teresa had Rowan. Then Louise had Grainne and I. Rowan and Grainne’s donor is Graham. My donor is Dave, a New York Jew who lived in the same housing co-op as them in London. Louise and Dave were born on the same day, January 8th, Elvis’s birthday. They used to run the finances at the co-op and everyone would steer clear when they were working because things got a little noisy. Genetically, my family makes a big W – well, a big zig-zag if you draw us out.”

I drew that jagged line so many times, sometimes in the air, sometimes on paper. I drew it because I knew that’s what people wanted of me. They wanted to know who shared blood with whom, whose sperm went in where. People are so horrified at the notion of children understanding sex and bodies, but their fears are quickly overwhelmed by morbid curiosity when faced with an eight-year-old who fully understands her own birds and bees.

From Louise, I inherited a wanderlust as she told me tales of backpacking round Norway with her best friend; the big ship they sailed on from Australia; travelling through Eastern Europe before the wall came down. Louise told me how she met Teresa at a job interview for a women’s shelter in London. Teresa asked her out and she replied, “What?! I hardly know you!” But soon she was writing a letter to her parents to tell them she’d fallen in love with a woman. Her father wrote back, “As parents, we teach you how to brush your hair and brush your teeth, and we teach you how to love. But it’s not our job to teach you who to love.”

Considering they both came out in the 1970s, it’s surprising that Louise and Teresa’s families were fairly supportive of their daughters’ sexualities. But, despite fears for my mothers’ safety in a homophobic world, they were. Teresa’s mother, a staunch and quick-witted woman nicknamed Nanny Bingo due to her skill in the game, responded with characteristic bluntness and the perspective gained through years living in a cruel and difficult marriage. As far as she was concerned, as long as Teresa’s partners weren’t hitting or hurting her, they were welcome in Nanny’s home.

My parents took up space in the community, protecting us and ensuring a place for our family, marching into the school grounds to confront ignorant teachers or quietly speaking to parents who didn’t want us coming over to play with their kids. Louise got a licence so she could set off the fireworks at the annual Summer Hill Primary School fireworks night; her small frame encased in bright orange coveralls, racing across the field to light spinners, rockets, Catherine wheels. Nearby, Teresa (wo)manned the veggie burger stand, her secret recipe growing ever more popular till finally, when I was in year 6, victory was ours: we outsold the sausage sizzle.

I am 34 years old, I’ve travelled to strange and wonderful places and loved strange and wonderful people; I’ve had more misadventures than adventures, hilarious, heartbreaking and true. But I come back to this queer family history time and again because I’ve been telling it so long it’s become my heart. I feel it at the far reaches of my ribcage, in the pit of my stomach and in loud blood rushing, this family of mine.

When my parents split up in 2005, this story was disrupted, this tale I’d told over and over till I grew into someone who spoke and spoke and had to be reminded to shut up. I was facing not only the pain of my family’s separation, but also the destruction of the public image and identity we’d constructed. And I wasn’t alone. Some of their lesbian friends were remarkably angry. “What will we tell our kids?” they said. It seemed my family had become part of their story, too – the example they held up when their fears took over and they wondered if this new way of parenting was OK. “Look at Teresa and Louise, they’ve been together 28 years. Look at their kids. Look how happy they are.”

The year after Teresa moved out of our family home, and I moved back from uni in regional NSW to live with Louise, was the worst of my life. I’d held on to my family’s unity to build myself up as a person. It was my identity and I had lost it.

Also, my mothers behaved like total dickheads. Teresa lied and cheated, and in the midst of her heartbroken breakdown, Louise lost sight of her boundaries as my mother, told me too much and added to the strain on my relationship with Teresa. When I tell my story, I usually leave this part out, ‘the divorce’. I don’t tell people how we yelled and raged, how my mothers fought over money for two years, that I only found out how long it took because my ex-girlfriend, then a court reporter, saw them in court with their lawyers. I don’t tell people that in 2006, my first year of work, fresh out of uni and ready to take on the world, Louise would climb into my bed each morning and sob and sob and sob, grieving not only her relationship but also her oldest brother, John, who died that same year. I’d get into my little car to drive to work, playing the same song on repeat over and over while I sobbed as well. With all the crying I did in cars that year, it’s a wonder I never crashed. I leave these stories out because they aren’t the ones my community wants to hear. They don’t fit the Love-is-love narrative we’ve been selling to Australia for over a decade. People want to watch the adorable grannies, together for 50 years, finally getting hitched; they want the little boy desperate to be a ring bearer, or indeed flower girl, at his dads’ wedding; they want to hear how happy our childhood was, not how it all fell apart. My siblings and I were living in three different cities the year my parents split, and I still see us, sitting alone in Sydney, Bathurst and Canberra, not quite able to unite against our parents as they self-destructed. We fell so hard and fast from the pedestal I’d placed us on.

When I don’t tell these stories, I do us a disservice. Stories aren’t press releases for a cause. We should have never been poster children, a position we held through no fault of our own, or our parents’, but because broader society didn’t understand us, and were scared, inexplicably, of a family without a mum and a dad and a nice, neat family tree. We performed our successes for others because we were afraid if we weren’t perfect, people would blame my mothers’ sexuality. But we were all just flawed little people, and stories have conflict and drama and pain. And sometimes, resolution.

Now, 13 years later, we can all sit around a dinner table for birthdays. My mothers come to the airport together to farewell me on my longer trips; they go to the opera together on occasion because everyone in our family has a passion for melodrama. No friendship or relationship is perfect, but my parents loved us kids so hard that they weren’t willing to leave things unresolved; they rebuilt our family in a new way and started a new chapter. And, thanks to all the lesbian emotional processing we did during the fall-out (some stereotypes hold kernels of truth), my understanding of adult relationships has progressed past what I knew at 22. Their break-up wasn’t the soapbox drama of infidelity I saw at the time – a simplistic explanation that hides the complexity of years, the complicated dance between two women over monogamy, sexuality, class, gender, pregnancy, birth, raising children, migration, intimacy with friends, family obligation, work, money, growing up and growing older.

society was scared of a family without a mum and a dad

This is an edited extract from Queerstories, out now through Hachette. Find it at hachette.com.au or in all good bookshops.