The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story by Doug Wythe, Andrew Merling, Roslyn Merling, Sheldon Merling Read Free Book Online

going to tell him?”
    “I’ll tell him, O.K?”
     “Soon?”
    “Mmmm-hmmm.”
    “You really should tell him as soon as
possible.”
    I was getting mad, because I wasn’t ready to be
pushed. The fact that we were having this conversation was a fluke in the first
place, now here was my mother, dictating my next move.
    “Just don’t tell Daddy. I want to tell him
myself.”
     
    ROSLYN    On the ride back from
the restaurant 1 was silent and thoughts were racing through my head... I
won’t have any grandchildren from Andrew... He’ll never walk down the aisle...
Now I’ll only get to make two weddings...
    When we got home, I was the one to give Sheldon
the news. I told myself I did it to pave the way for Andrew. Truthfully, I felt
the need to unburden myself. Who else was I going to talk to?
    I saw a wave of pain wash over Sheldon as I
broke it to him. After the initial shock, I could sense his tension ebbing.
Although I could see for myself how he felt, I pushed him to talk about it.
     
    SHELDON    It was the day of the
Super Bowl, coming home from a restaurant, Roslyn told me outright, Andrew is
gay. It was a real shock, although I suppose it shouldn’t have been. Years
before, when Mitchell told us he was gay, I almost took it in stride. But
finding out I had two sons who were gay really depressed me.
    Even though I was fully cognizant of the
prevailing scientific view that there are genetic causes to homosexuality, I
still felt a sense of guilt. Here I was the father of two gay sons, and
Mitchell was adopted.
    Each of them came from different genetic
backgrounds, so either the odds were just stacked against me, or I had to ask
myself, could I have contributed somehow to this? How could I ignore the
possibility that environmental matters entered into the equation?
    I won’t give myself a gold medal as a father,
though truthfully, I really thought I was above average. I certainly wasn’t a
disciplinarian, aggressive or domineering. On the contrary, I would usually
give in to my kids’ every request, perhaps to a fault. My friends make fun of
me, in fact, for the time I’ve spent with young kids over the years. I seem to
have more patience with children than I do with adults. Now that Roslyn and I
are blessed with grandchildren, I spend the whole day with them when we visit
Toronto. Other friends of mine say they love to visit their grandchildren, but
after a half an hour, they’ve had enough. Not me. So I’m certainly not the
“absentee father” some claim contributes to a gay male’s sexual preference. Is
it possible that I was a good father, and still raised two gay sons?
    In
addition to my own guilt feelings, I worried about their future. It’s tough
enough to succeed in our sophisticated and complicated world. Why did both of
our sons have to carry this extra burden? Being gay could only make their lives
harder.
     
    ANDREW    I know she told him
anyway, even though she promised she wouldn’t. My plan was to tell him when I
was ready. But, truthfully, I wasn’t ready as soon as I thought I might be. The
way my parents remember it, I turned around and told my father in a few days.
But as I recall, it took a couple of months. It’s funny how some recollections
get compressed, or smudged until they’re almost obliterated. I don’t know if
this is just one of those details that fades with time, or if they blocked the
memory.
    In any case, I certainly wouldn’t blame my
parents for not wanting to recall the scene that played out when I summoned the
courage to tell my father myself. Or, I should say, when I made my first,
failed, attempt.
     
    ROSLYN    Like Sheldon, I was
concerned about what barriers might be put up before both Andrew and Mitchell,
just because of their sexual orientation. I could relate to that fear on a very
personal level, because twenty-five years earlier I’d had my own experience of
failing to live up to society’s expectations. We adopted Mitchell because