WebCastro
Under the Surface
---The Soul of a Web Author
by Dwight Stevers
"Expectations"
There has always been a nerd lurking inside me, a webaholic looking for this platform. I was the freckle-faced kid with the black-frame glasses and car-door ears, the sissy, the math tutor, the class clown, the white boy with "soul" who danced with all the black kids. I spent much of my childhood in my room, away from the dysfunctional humdrum of my family, alone with my secret codes, my idols -- Helen Keller, Harry Houdini, and a little Jean Harlow thrown in. No one really understood me. I was an enigma to my parents. "You're a genius, but you got no common sense." All those expectations -- the first child, the first grandchild, a son, a junior, the first to go to college...my parents were proud. I was their valedictorian, their psychologist, I could become everything they weren't. I did get my artistic bent from my mother. She could have been a commercial artist -- if I hadn't come along when she was 16. My dad, the proud father at 18, passed out cigars, had another beer, and felt he had a new reason to live. His father had died in his arms 3 years before. Borrowed a gun from a neighbor to "kill a rat" and shot himself in the head. The intensity of this experience left a deep scar in my father's heart, one that my birth helped to heal a little. I was his son. He just couldn't deal with it when we sat down to eat dinner that night, and he said, "If I didn't know better, and you weren't my own son, I'd think you were a queer." I didn't deny it. I was then 18, and thrown out, disowned. I also lost my father as a teenager, just like he had. It took 10 years and 3,000 miles for us to reunite.
I tell this story because I think there must be other gays who have had similar experiences. I often read about those fortunate ones who have supportive parents, whose mothers say, "We always knew you were special," or whose fathers say, "Well, you're my son, and I love you no matter what." What I would have given for that! I have come to realize that our parents do the best they can with what they have to work with. There is no more blame or guilt. But I do carry scars that peel back slowly over time to reveal a deeper part of my soul. This is the human condition. We grow up thinking we'll never be like our parents, then one day, look in the mirror and see them both, the joy, the pain -- the expectations. I try to spend some time each day looking into my own eyes in the mirror. Just to see who I am. To remind myself that I will never abandon me.
© 1995 Dwight Stevers
[Under the Surface]
[Home]
© 1997 WebCastro