Mama Dragons Stories: Heather

There are similarities and differences between all of our individual stories. We come from diverse religious backgrounds, political parties, family dynamics, and geographic areas. Each of us started at different levels of acceptance, but we all relate to the desire of wanting to protect our children over our own biases.  A few times a year, we will be sharing a Mama Dragon’s story. Today, Jen visits with Heather Gooding In the Den. 

Special Guest: Heather Gooding

Heather grew up in small town America in an extremely conservative non-denominational Christian Church. She believed the things she was taught, even though she often questioned or didn’t really understand. She also grew up with parents who instilled a love of sacrifice and service in her from a young age. Heather has been with her husband for 30 years, and they have 6 children. As their children grew, Heather was forced to face the fact that her beliefs were changing, and she has had to redefine a lot of her personal faith. She is proud of the relationships she has forged with her children, who are now growing into adults, and she’s proud to tell others that she’s an ally and a Mama Dragon.

Links from the Show:

• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.org 
• Mama Dragons on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mamadragons 
• Mama Dragons on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themamadragons/ 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at mamadragons.org. 

Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook

Donate to this podcast

Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

It’s time for the next episode in the series we call Mama Dragons Stories. We have a wide variety of members in our group. We come from multiple countries, we start with different religious roots, we speak several languages. Some of us live in rural areas and some are living in big cities. But on the journey to truly advocating for our children, there are some common threads. It’s what allows us to support each other best. We are united in our desire to protect our children and our relationships with them. Based on that, we have decided three or four times a year to share the story from a Mama Dragon. Hopefully we will recognize our differences as a bonus and celebrate our similarities in these stories.

Today we are going to meet with Heather Gooding and take a deep dive into her story about becoming a Mama Dragon. Welcome in the Den, Heather! 

HEATHER: Hey. Thanks for having me.

JEN: I’m so glad to have you here with us today. Introduce us to a young Heather. What was your childhood like?

HEATHER: As a young kid, I was your typical 80s, spent all day outside riding bikes, had to go in when the lights turned off. My mom, renowned for having a whistle that you could hear two blocks away. So we would be spending most of our time outside. I was the only girl on the block. And so I was always trying to prove that I could hang out with the boys. But I was always too sissy to jump off the bike ramps and do that kind of stuff. I had an older brother and I had a pretty strict house. It was just him and I and my mom and dad. And so we spent lots of time going to church. We went three different days of the week, we were at church. So my world as a young kid was mostly “Everybody should just go to church. We went to church. Why didn’t everybody else go to church?” And I was like, as a kid we would have vacation Bible schools in the summer. And it would be, “Who can bring the most kids,” type of thing. And for probably four years in a row in elementary school, I won for inviting the most people, to the point where my parents had to get a van or a bus of some kind that they could borrow to get all the little kids to go to church with me. There’s still people I’ll run into and they’re like, “Oh yeah. I remember when you were kid. Your parents used to pick us to go to [inaudible].” And I’d be like, “Oh, yeah. that was me. I won a Bible that year. Or I won a concordance or whatever.” So, my world really revolved around family and church and that was pretty much all I knew.

In the same aspect, I realized from a really young age that the life that we lived in our house was really different from the things that happened at church. Like, my dad got caught speeding. He got a speeding ticket on the way to church. And so I was like super excited to tell everybody, “We got pulled over by the police.” That wasn’t okay, like, bragging about, I found out. So, there were little things that were going on in our house that I recognized were definitely not allowed to talk about in public as far as some abuse situations and some just not being what was projected to everybody else. There was a layer, it kind of felt like it was kind of behind the veil. Like, “We don’t talk about this” or “These are our dirty little secrets” type of things. And so it kind of was grounds for realizing there was a separation between what we said we believe versus what we believe. That kind of was the beginning of me really trying to understand how we could be part of a church and have people in our home and feel like these were the family that we had chosen of church people. And then to feel like we couldn’t really be honest or real with them.

JEN: So you mentioned a minute ago that you thought everyone should go to church, right? Everyone goes to church. We go to church. Were you aware that some people weren’t?

HEATHER: I knew that some people went to different churches. But I didn’t realize that church was very evangelical. They were very much: “Reach out, invite your friends, bring people, people should be at church.” It felt like a lot of your status as far as church was about attendance. “You must not be doing very well, because you’re not coming to church.” It was more of a reflection of your spirituality than attendance checkmarks. If you didn’t have so many check marks, then your salvation was in question.

JEN: Did you have any concept at all of LGBTQ+ topics? Did you know what a gay person was?

HEATHER: Not especially. I mean, we were pretty small town, pretty rural. I don’t know. I was pretty naïve. But then by that time, it was pretty obvious that our youth group, the kids that I was growing up with and we were all hitting puberty and stuff, everything was “Gay people are going to hell.” So all I knew was that they needed to come to church with me. That was just my thing. “Oh, I need to bring them to church because everybody should be going to church.” I grew up just wanting to love everybody and be everybody’s friend and make sure everybody was taken care of. But it kind of never really was close to me. It was: “You cut them out. You don’t talk to them. You don’t talk about them. They aren’t part of the family anymore. Basically, they’ve been excommunicated.” Like, the biggest thing was “They are choosing to live this way and they are choosing to not be a part of our body.”

JEN: It sounds like you weren’t, like, afraid of the idea of people being gay. You just thought, “Oh. They’re just missing church.” Like it’s fine, just invite them to church and then we can all do what we’re supposed to do together.

HEATHER: Yeah.

JEN: It just makes me think back to my own childhood how the language that I was raised with still exists and it formed the way that I considered and thought about things. But then as I learned more, I can still remember that language and how it actually was a little bit misleading to me. Okay, so you went to high school and then you left for college and you are adulting. You get married and you have kids. Talk about that phase of life and where you were with your original beliefs. Did you maintain those? Were you evolving all along?

HEATHER: I left small town and I ended up going to school at Boise State University. And in Boise, there were like five different churches. And I knew this growing up, when I thought about it. But a lot of the churches didn’t do the same thing. Like, at the church that I attended in my hometown, we weren’t allowed to wear shorts because the preacher said we were sinning if we wore shorts. And so nobody was allowed to wear shorts. Girls didn’t wear shorts, like if you were going to a church function. If you were seen out in public at the mall or something, it would be scandalous that somebody was in shorts. We didn’t clap in church because clapping was a form of music. We didn’t do some of these things. And so when I was going off to school, I was super excited because I knew that one of the churches that was related in Boise was, they could clap and they could wear shorts. And that was the thing I was the most excited about. Like, “It’s 110 degrees, thank you. I can wear shorts.” But I knew I was also the, well, of course I’m going to go to church. I remember one of the first few Sundays when I went into church there, one of the Elders, leader men of the church, was like, “You don’t have anything to do with that campus group, now do you? Because we heard that they let women lead prayers and we’re not okay with that and you shouldn’t have anything to do with it?” And so some of the doctrinal issues that started coming up, I was already kind of like, “I don’t care if a woman prays, but okay. Sure.” I was already questioning and having to find my own. I was having to say, “Okay. Why do we believe these things? Why is it not okay to wear shorts? What’s the prior factors to us not wearing shorts?” And in that was the dating. At the time I went to college, I went with my boyfriend. We had been dating a year before we went up to college. And we lived in the dorms for two years and we were in the same dorm. So we were basically living in an apartment together. I was super religious. I didn’t want to support any of the – there was like a student alliance club and people who would be doing activities. And I’d be like, “Those people are going to hell. I’m not going to have anything to do with it.” Like, I was very pious. “I’m going to make better choices and I go to church so that’s not something that I want to have a part of.” At the same time, I had a boyfriend that we were basically living together in the dorms. And my boyfriend, who hadn’t really been raised going to church, he and I, we got an apartment together and still kept going to church. He had started going to church with me and he actually placed membership with the church. And when he placed membership with the church, we were already living together in an apartment just him and I. But we didn’t tell anybody that. And so we both were like trying to keep it on the downlow. And then a few weeks later, somebody from the church saw us grocery shopping together and were like, “I think they’re living together. Did anybody know that they’re living together? That’s not okay.” So we got disciplined by the Elders of the church for living together. And they told us that we had to live apart immediately. I’m like, “He’s paying my rent. I don’t have all these things. I can’t afford to not live in this apartment.” So we kind of stopped going to church as frequently. I would go by myself every few weeks or whatever. We got engaged at Christmas, and were getting married in July. Six weeks before our wedding, they told us that if we didn’t move into separate locations before our wedding, then they were going to take us before the church for discipline actions. Like the Elders were not going to support us anymore or like they were going to make our sins known. And at that point, we were both kind of done. That kind of burned us out because it was all about the appearance and what looked wrong to the old fuddy duddies in the church that I felt were out of touch with me as a college student and what I was going through. I was kind of disillusioned by religion by then, like “I’m not really sure that this matters to me anymore.”

And so my husband and I got married and started having kids. And shortly after we got married, we had not been active in the church for a while. I thought, I personally totally believe the way that God works in my life and I have a firm belief in, “If it’s meant to be, it’s going to be. And if you’re supposed to be somewhere, you’re going to be there” type of a thing. So my husband and I had been home with our families for a holiday and we were driving back to college. And we both decided, “You know, if we’re going to start having kids, we really want to raise them in the church.” And so we started talking about, “Well, what's important to us? What do we want to look for?” And that was on Sunday. And I got up and I still have the journal entry. Like, I made a journal entry the next morning about, “God, I don’t know where you want us to be. But if we’re going to start a family, I really think we need to follow you.” And then I went about my day. And that day in the financial aid office on the campus at Boise State, I ran into the guy who had been the resident advisor on the dorm floor where we lived. So he and I had gone through our college years together. We were kind of in our last couple semesters. And he’s like, “Yeah. I’m a campus minister with this church over here and you really should come see us. And it’s really active, and really fun, and lots of people, and we love each other.” I was sold on his energy and his passion. And I was also sold on the fact that, “Oh, my gosh. I prayed about it this morning and maybe this was God.” So through that process, we did Bible Studies like, the men did one with my husband. I did it with women. We both decided to go through these studies and did all these little things. And it was part of a really, here come the quotes again, “We were sold out. We were going to evangelize. We were going to invite people to church. We were going to love the people in the church and love God. And we’re going to call sin, sin.” And so I remember very strongly at the time, I was working in a trucking company. And one of the guys who worked in the office was very, he was my very first real, “flaming queer person” in my life. He joked about doing drag on the weekends. But I think he totally did drag on the weekends and he just wanted to joke about it instead of feeling like he could actually be who he was. And I just remember this guy at the office was just, I think that he was my first real foray into knowing a person on a really close basis that is in a same-sex relationship, living totally out-loud the “gay lifestyle.” And I was a new Christian that wasn’t supposed to be supporting any of this and I was still supposed to tell him that he was living in sin and try to get him to church with me. And I just couldn’t bring myself to do it because I just knew who he was as a person and I found myself more and more struggling to fit “How is loving everybody just telling them to come to church? How is that serving the purpose?” And finding out that I was really super judgmental of everybody and using my verses that I had memorized in Sunday School as “Well, that’s a sin, and sinners go to hell.” All the little ways to make myself feel better. “Oh, I’m not doing that sin, so I’m okay.”

JEN: Okay. So you’re married and you’re going back to church because you’re ready to start having kids. You start having kids. You’re having the babies. Talk about this phase of life.

HEATHER: I had graduated so I had gone into social work. And I was working at the Juvenile Court with kids who were going through the court process. But I got pregnant and of course I’m thinking, “We’re at this church we’re supposed to be at. We’re having all these great Bible studies every week and I have this group of friends that believes the same thing as me.” I get pregnant and then several of the people in our church are pregnant because we’re a really young church that had about 200 people. And so people started having babies. And every time somebody has a baby something different is happening. And I’m realizing the frailty of life, realizing that having a baby isn’t just all Hallmark cards and happiness because people were having babies that were premature or differently abled or had disabilities. So we go in to have our baby and it actually turns into a really traumatic experience. And I was really, like I said, I’m a firm, “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. And you can’t really do much about it.” So we were at a point where my husband and I were really strong with our faith in each other and our faith in God and faith in the people we had around. Our daughter, Leah, was born and she had severe brain damage and it was from the birth process. And she ended up at 5 hours old, she died in the NICU. And they resuscitated her, but she didn’t fully recover. So we are now facing being first-time parents with a daughter who – it took us several months to realize – but she was never going to leave a vegetative state. She was never going to eat on her own or walk or talk. We didn’t even know, doing vision checks and hearing checks, we don’t know if she had any sight. Like, she failed all of her hearing tests. She had a seizure disorder. She couldn’t eat. She had to be fed into her intestines because everything else had been so affected by her brain damage. And so we didn’t know anything but to love her and to take care of her. This was our first child and this was our first time being parents. And so she needed 24-hour nursing care and she ended up dying just shy of eight months old. I don’t remember anything else going on in our world for that first couple of years. I was having her, our world just revolved around medical appointments and doctor appointments and having nurses in and out of our house and having all the equipment that we had to take care of her. That whole worst period of your life that when she passed away, we had to make a choice of, we could keep her alive and having seizure disorder and eventually something’s going to happen. Or we had a doctor tell us, “You know, she’s going to heaven. The question is, when you get to be with her, do you want her to say ‘Why did you make me wait so long?’ or ‘Thanks for letting me go?’” And to have a doctor who didn’t know our faith, didn’t know our belief system or what we had come into parenting with, those words, I can hear them in his voice.

JEN: I think that’s one of the things I think churches sometimes do best.

HEATHER: Yes.

JEN: Did they show up for you?

HEATHER: Oh, yes. They showed up, like they were made for it. She spent the first nine weeks in the NICU and in those first few weeks we would have weekly meetings where one of the doctors would say, “Okay. We have some new tests. We need to call a team meeting.” And I would just, of course as parents we were like, “Oh my gosh. What’s going to happen? We don’t know what this means.” And all the sudden there would be a whole team of families that had brought us home cooked meals to the family room at the NICU who would sit and have dinner with us and pray with us and make us feel loved, and do all the extra things that just showed the community that we were a part of. They showed up, they were like, “No matter what, we’re just going to be here. We’re going to pray with you. We’re going to hold your hand. We’re going to go clean your house.” They loved us very well through that situation. So, yeah, it was a great community to be a part of. Some of those people I’m still closest to this day, as far as going through that traumatic experience with them. So when Leah passed away, I was already two months pregnant with our next child. So she’s our oldest that’s with us. And so I went on to have five more kids. And in the process of having those five more kids, I kind of learned that I wanted to be a mom more than I wanted to be anything else. And I wanted to love my kids and I wanted to be able to watch my kids grow up and be with them. And nothing was going to separate me from being able to be with them. I already had separated from one kid.

JEN: That’s going to be – to lose your oldest – is going to be so life-changing the way you approach everything with your kids as they’re coming forever after to recognize that.

HEATHER: Yeah.

JEN: That fragility and the gift that is life.

HEATHER: Absolutely. Yeah.

JEN: You learned that in a very intense and difficult way when you were just still so young.

HEATHER: Oh, yeah.

JEN: So you’re raising your kids. Did you go back? Did you raise them like you were raised, like “We’re not wearing shorts and we’re not singing or making music in church and no more clapping?”

HEATHER: No, because this new church that we were a part of, they were a much more exuberant church. And so there was music and there was some of that. It was more of a, “We don’t care how you get there. Just get here!” kind of a thing. But “Once you are here, boy howdy, we’re going to point out what the Bible says about your life and how you’re living and make sure that you know what sin is and what it isn’t.”

JEN: “Go ahead and come and then we’ll tell you what’s wrong with you?”

HEATHER: Yeah. “Then we’ll break everything down.” But, at the same time, the church, like I said, had been a lot of really young couples. So, as we were all raising our kids and we were all seeing, “This is actually really harming our kids to say, oh I’m sorry we’re not going to have family night tonight because we need to have a church meeting tonight.” We were growing in our awareness that our family needed to be our first church and the first people we really catered to. And so that became more apparent. And so, I don't know. We just kept having kids. I never wanted to have the chance of going back to not having kids because to go from being a mom and having your kid with you and then we had part of that year after she passed away before our next child was born. But I didn’t want to go back to that. So, yes, it definitely changed everything. But I knew that having my children with me, loving them, and making sure that they knew they were always loved was of the utmost importance to me because I had so much love that I couldn’t give Leah that I had to put it somewhere. So it went into all my other kids.

JEN: And it makes sense when you said you just kept having kids. Like that frenzy. You’ve given birth six times in this little span. And the first year of that was super traumatic. But just raising five kids, everyone’s going to understand how chaotic that is.

HEATHER: Yeah.

JEN: You don’t spend a lot of time thinking deep thoughts or exploring the way that you experience the world.

HEATHER: Yes.

JEN: So at this point, just to make sure I’m accurate so correct me if I’m wrong. At this point you were like, “Being gay is a sin and it’s for other people, but we’re going to be nice to them and love them. And if they need to, we can help them find Jesus so they’re not sinners anymore.”

HEATHER: Yeah. That’s pretty much, yeah.

JEN: It’s not like you were wishing they were dead or thinking violent thoughts or whatever.

HEATHER: No. I remember hearing people talking about that the Westboro Baptist was getting real popular and seeing some pictures of stuff like that and being completely astonished that there were people who could be so hateful. That was completely outside of my range of thought. But, if you wanted to have a discussion with me about wanting to go to church, I’d have to say, “Well, you’re gay. You’re choosing to live a life of sin. So you need to give that up to be a Christian.”

JEN: So you’re not an ally.

HEATHER: No.

JEN: To sum it up, you’re not an ally at this point. But eventually you became an ally. And this was before you ever even know that you had a queer kid.

HEATHER: Yeah, pretty much. I’d already worked with kids in social work. I felt deeply about when I was a kid and how I just had had a couple of people that I had been close to when I was in Junior High and High school that had committed suicide. Before, this one kid, he just never felt loved by anybody for any reason. And he had a hard home life. And I know that one of the last times I had seen him, he had begged me to be his girlfriend again because he just wanted somebody to love him. And so I remember being a kid and just feeling like I wanted somebody to love me as I was, as the kid I was, not as the kid I was when I went to church or the kid that I was when I was being the good kid at Grandma and Grandpa’s dinner table. I just wanted somebody to be okay with who I was as that kid I was. So, as my kids are growing up and there’s more kids that I’m around and that I’m seeing. I’m like, “These kids just need love.” So, anyway, in the process of all of this, we had moved away from Boise. We had still been raising our kids in Boise and we moved out of state. In that process of really being away from family and trying to raise my family, it became more and more apparent, my firm foundation of “Anything that is not a man and a woman getting married is sin and gay marriage isn’t okay.” All of these things are coming up and I’m watching my kids grow up and I’m trying to figure out what I want to teach them because I grew up with this, “We love everybody, but sinners go to Hell.”

JEN: “We love everyone, even those really gross people who are doing yucky things all the time.”

HEATHER: Yeah. “But we need to make sure that they know that they’re going to hell. Because if we don’t try to tell them that they have other choices then we’re going to – if we didn’t do our best to make sure that they know they’re not going to Heaven then we’re at risk of not being able to go to Heaven because we didn’t try when we could have.” And so I was always dealing with kind of this guilt. I can’t tell you how many camp skits or lessons at church were based on “When you stand before God, he looks through the list of things that you did with your life, and what about this kid that you didn’t talk to? And what about this couple that you didn’t tell them blah, blah, blah.” And that we were going to be held accountable for all the things that we missed out on.

JEN: That’s a lot of pressure for a kid to be like, “Not only do you need to get yourself to Heaven, in your long pants without clapping. But also, you need to get everybody around you to Heaven also.”

HEATHER: Yeah.

JEN: That’s a lot of responsibility for a kid.

HEATHER: Yeah. It was. I somewhere felt that. And I knew a couple things with my own kids. I wanted whatever went on in our house, I wanted it to be universal. I didn’t want to tell my kids, “We’re not going to be mean to that disabled kid because he’s different than us. We’re going to be friendly and do what we can to help them. We’re not going to look down on other people because they’re different from us or they choose to do different things.” And through this whole process, I’m becoming more and more aware of how my sin in my world, of all the things that I struggle with personally that I was trying to hold myself accountable for, it doesn’t really go away. I am a disorganized, messy person who believes that the things I buy are going to make me happy. And so I have my own things, realizing that these aren’t going away, why would I think anybody else’s personality, that the deeper good people that they are, just if we pray enough it will go away, like “Pray away the gay.” “Pray away the clutter” does not happen, it takes more.

JEN: That would be handy if it did, though.

HEATHER: Right.

JEN: Pray away the clutter. I think you’re onto something there.

HEATHER: Don’t trademark that because I think I will.

JEN: Okay.

HEATHER: No. But I just knew that I was who I was, and I needed to feel loved as that person by God and by the people who represented Jesus in my life. And I didn’t want my kids growing up thinking that this way is okay at church and this way is how we do it at home. I saw the lives not matching as I was growing up. And I wanted it to be different in my house. And just being more aware as times were changing and as things were coming up more obvious in the world that we lived in that gay marriage was accepted and that some of these things, like same-sex attraction has always been in society. Gay people have always been around. It’s not new. There’s nothing new under the sun. So why do we have to try to solve the problem or save the sinners or whatever kind of colloquialism we want to put on it? I didn’t want anybody to feel like they had to hide who they were to be around me because I didn’t want to have to hide who I was around other people. And so it just became more important to me to just really not be judgmental, try to show other people the same kind of love and friendship and kindness that I wanted shown to me, regardless of who they were as a person or who they were attracted to or who they lived with. At the time, that family from Arkansas that had multitudinous children were extremely popular. And I wanted to raise my kids like that.

JEN: Is that like “a quiver full?”

HEATHER: I was trying to not say the…

JEN: Just to put a name on it. I was just trying to figure out what we were talking about.

HEATHER: No. Well, the Duggars.

JEN: So you were looking at the Duggars and you were like, “That’s it.”

HEATHER: Yeah. I want my kids to love each other. I want my kids to grow up close knit. I tried to homeschool them so that I could make sure I could control the influence they had from other people. I think by the time my oldest was probably ten, she started doing theater. That kind of opened me up because we had moved back to our hometown and it was small. But when she got involved in theater, it kind of opened my circle of people that I knew in my community besides just the church. And when we came back, we didn’t even go to church for the longest time. And I just wanted my kids to memorize verses and know the books of the Bible and stuff like that. But, all of the sudden, they were 11 and 12 years old and being told that their friends were going to Hell because they were gay. I remember very distinctly within that first few years through theater we had made some really, really great friends. And I had found some people that were also trying to figure out how to be good parents and be good moms and were also questioning like, “How could we be good Christians or how can I still want to be a part of this church but don’t agree with everything they’re believing?” I started really realizing that going from being in Boise where it was fairly progressive to going back home where it was not as progressive and not as common to see a couple holding hands at a mall that were same-sex. It just wasn’t as prevalent And so knowing that it was going to be different and it was something that if I wanted my kids to learn about loving other people, then I was going to have to encourage them to love other people because they weren’t learning it in church. They weren’t getting that kind of vibe as far as everybody come to church, we love our friends. But they were also already learning that if they didn’t do what God wanted they weren’t going to be saved. When I saw this good friend I was making through the theater community who was having this sincere faith crisis about how to still stay with the church that was the only thing that she ever knew, but her son had just come out as gay and now she’s got three other kids beneath her son that she’s still trying to figure out how to be their parents and love her son and all the different paradoxes that come in in trying to love your kids and still find your faith at the same time. When I don’t want necessarily to choose and having to really decide which one is more important. And so one of those younger kids of my friend’s had gone to a church activity with my girls because I was more, we weren’t into really going to church. But I wanted my kids to have Christian friends, right? And so they went to a couple of activities.

JEN: Like the Awana type, is that what you’re talking about?

HEATHER: Yeah. Like Awana, yeah. Or it was like a youth activity weekend where they did like sleep-in at the building and they stayed up and did all these other little things. But it was like they’d have a lesson and then they’d do an activity and then there was food. And one of the lessons that came up was that kids who were gay weren’t okay with God. And this friend that we had invited, I remember picking my girls up with their friends and then they all got in and they were just chattering a million miles. And I was like, “Why are you guys so angry? What has happened that I need to know?” And they’re like, “They told us that their brother is going . . . “ And I was like, “ Well what do you think about that?” And so that was like, hearing them . . .

JEN; So the kids were told that this guest’s sibling was going to Hell because he was gay?

HEATHER: Yeah. And my kids were up in arms because they were like, “That’s not how it works and you don’t get to say that about my friends.” And they were very protective of their friend and the brother because they were like, “That’s just not okay.” They didn’t think that’s how it should work. And I was like, why don’t I get that riled up and why don’t I want to defend the people around me like these kids want to defend and take care of each other? So during the time that all of this is happening, where the theater friends, these kids are being told this. And then we have the church friends over here. It was just this whole mess. And in the process of all this, our theater friend, their youngest child that was a friend of ours, started having some gender dysphoria. And that was like our first experience. And I already knew this kid. I loved this kid. This kid was in my home so much. And they were one of my own, kind of, because they were one of my kids’ best friends, right? And to have church friends who were saying, “Well, they need to use their regular pronouns.” Like, “No. She’s a she. And we’re going to call her . . .” and knowing that and going back to that, I wanted to love somebody as they are and not change them or make them feel like they have to jump through hoops to not be their authentic self to feel like they deserve to be loved. And so that really kind of was a defining moment for me because this young person who was the first time that suicide had been talked about in one of my kids’ friends. And I didn’t want my kids to feel that hurt that they had felt. And I just wanted this kid to be able to grow up knowing that they could be loved just as the person that they were. So our family just kind of dedicated ourselves to loving them. And it was awesome. I feel like my kids, my second oldest daughter, they were best friends and they did all this stuff together. And my kids wanted to be the bulldogs that were protecting their friends because they knew it wasn’t okay for people to be treated like that.

JEN: It’s kind of interesting to hear because you said before that your primary goal was to teach your kids to love people.

HEATHER: Yeah.

JEN: And to let people be authentic around them. And then simultaneously, you’re like, “Oh, it worked.”

HEATHER: Yeah.

JEN: Like it’s happening. But for you, that’s a pretty big jump, right? Like, within the realms of these conservative, conservative spaces like maybe you could be nice to somebody that you learn is gay. But you got this kid, gender dysphoria, that’s like a new world. But you had already sold your kids. They already knew “We’re being nice!” That’s the only option. So it was almost like all these lessons that you had spent dedicated focused time teaching your kids, didn’t leave you with a ton of options when push came to shove, right? Like you were kind of like, “Oh that is what’s important.” Which I think is really beautiful. So you’re learning how to ally and that’s a learning curve for all of us, like learning what works and what doesn’t work. And we all have these bizarro questions compared to the reality of the people we love, versus maybe some of the misconceptions we’ve erroneously believed our whole lives. And you get good at it. You’re allying. You are the ally. We talked about becoming an ally. Now it’s it, you’re an ally and showing up at Pride events and learning and basically still trying to live like the Jesus that you believed in would want you to live. But somewhere along this trajectory, you learned that yourself had a queer child.

HEATHER: So I think I’m being this great friend to my friend who’s going through this faith crisis of her own. And in the process, I find out that my daughter, my oldest daughter at home, has been playing this online game that I thought was safe. And I thought I had been monitoring pretty well. But it turns out that this boy that she kept playing games with was actually a girl. And this girl thought that she was in love with my daughter. And she lived in a completely different state. And it turned into this whole thing. So my oldest daughter – and I was so grateful because I had had this friend – if I hadn’t of talked to my friend from theater about “How do you even have these kinds of conversations and how do you respond and how do people react?” And she’s, now all the sudden, my daughter's going, “I think I might be attracted to this girl that I met online.” And regardless of the fact that it’s online and she lives in a completely different state 25 states away from us. And she might want to have a girlfriend. And I was so much more concerned about the whole out of state and everything else. That I was like, oh my gosh. But I remember having to call my friend and be like, “Okay. I need your help. I don’t know how to do this.” And just some of the conversations I was able to have and just to deal with the idea that I myself was going to have a gay kid. Okay. And then it kind of felt like a false alarm at the beginning because we went through this thing and processing the whole, “I’m going to have a kid who’s gay. How do I love them? How do I make sure that they feel love as they are? How do I support them and make sure they’re safe?” So there was a lot there. And she started high school and started dating boys. So I kind of was like, “Okay. Maybe it was just a little blip on the radar.” And then we’re going along and the more that I’m part of the theater group and that becomes more of our world then any kind of church related anything – like I start speaking out more in the circles of theater about, “No. We need to be more inclusive. No, You need to be okay. That person is going by this name and we’re using this name and these pronouns. Can you be respectful of that while we’re doing costuming? Can you be considerate of that in the casting?” Like I found myself just wanting to more and more make sure that the adults that I was around were making sure to validate these kids and to respect what the kids were asking to be a part of. And then I had the great big realization that my second daughter who had always – when she was 15, for her birthday, she wrote me a letter and she put it under my pillow and then went and hid. I was like, “Okay.” I think she didn’t want to see my reaction. And by then, she had already talked enough. I knew she was just going to be somebody who loved everybody. She loved her girl friends. She loved her guy friends. When she told me that she was gay and that she didn’t ever want to marry a boy – I can’t remember what else it said – but she just thought it was important that we knew. I remember I didn’t know what to say because she wrote me this cute little note and put it under my pillow. And I was like, I think to her, she was expecting some big discussion. And I was like, “Okay. Let me know what we need to do about that.” And she’s like, “Do we need to talk about it?” I was like, “Do you want to talk about it?” She was like, “Well, not really.” “It’s going to be okay no matter what. I’m going to love you and you’re always welcome home and we’re going to figure it out.” She talked about being a preteen when we were going to these church activities. She was 11-years-old and in a nursery, babysitting little kids for VBS. And somebody was talking to her about “When you grow up and get married to your husband and you have your own babies…” and she was thinking, “I don’t ever want to get married to a man.” And now that she’s 15 and she feels comfortable talking to me about it, she’s telling me, “Yeah. I was so grossed out. I never want to marry a man. And here she is talking to me about marrying a man and having his babies and I’m not going to do that.” And she knew that at 11, but didn’t feel, I don’t know if it was safe or didn’t put it into words until after she had specifically told us.

JEN: So, back up a little bit for me. When she told you she was gay, she writes this cute little letter and she leaves it under your pillow. Are you like a little bit “Oh, we did this once with your sister and it might go away.” Or were you like, “I know these kids. This one’s different.”

HEATHER: Yes. The second one. It was very much an, “Okay. That was a trial run. Good to see my reaction. Good to know.” But I mean, there’s a part that’s still, she’s 15. She’s not dating anytime soon. I’m not thinking about her getting married. We’ve got some time to deal with it, like to let her grow into whatever she’s going to be, right? I didn’t want any kind of pressure on her. But I was very aware from then on out when we talked about, you talk around the dinner table when it’s just us and the kids and we’re like, “Well, in the future when your spouses come home for Christmas.” And all of the sudden we were more aware that we’re saying spouses. We weren’t saying when your husband, when your wife, when your whatever. When you’re realizing these little shifts that all the sudden seem innocuous but are suddenly so important and inclusive to them.

JEN: And how is she doing now?

HEATHER: She is fabulous. She has had her first girlfriend. She’s been off at college. She’s got her first year of college under her belt. It’s definitely a learning curve trying to figure out, like I hear lots about all these people in her classes. And I’m like, “Now is this somebody we’re interested in or is it …” “Mom. It’s just another girl.” Okay. So it’s hard. Is this a friend-friend or is this a want-to-be-more-than friend. Because it all of the sudden it changes, “Oh, you want to have a sleepover with somebody this weekend. Oh, that’s going to look a little bit different.” Just being cautious and wanting to protect them but at the same time knowing that they’re going to – just wanting to make a safe place for them to be themselves.

JEN: You just modeled a great example. We talk a lot here about leaning in and being curious. And, “Oh, sleepovers. Okay. Let’s rethink this. Let’s talk about it. What does this mean now?” As opposed to before when we have all of these super stereotypical things happening, it’s easy to just do them. That’s what you do. That’s the rules. That’s what’s expected. But when you’re thrown a new situation, something new, you kind of have to go back and be like, “Oh, now we have to think about it. Now we have to think about what does this really mean and how are we actually going to do it?” And it sounds like you did a great job of staying curious through all of that.

HEATHER: I tried to, yeah.

JEN: My question for you now, is do you think your years of preparation prepared you for having a gay child and do you think your actions during those years prepared her to come out to you? Like, do you think if you had done things differently, maybe she would’ve been much older than 15?

HEATHER: Yes. I do. I think she would’ve been a lot more suppressed in who she is as a person. She's a very artistic, creative, loving, outgoing person. And I think that if she felt any kind of judgment or that she couldn’t be herself, I think she wouldn’t be as confident. I should say, like my oldest has gone on to have both girlfriends and boyfriends. I think that it might not just be a blip. I think my kids, all five of my kids, I try to make sure that they know, “You can like whoever you want to like and we can talk about whatever you want to talk about.” Like my middle child has already said – they came to me one day and said, “I think I’m asexual. None of it interests me.” And I’m like, “That makes sense.” At the time they were 13 or 14. And I think because older siblings were putting names on things and they kind of felt like they were supposed to claim a camp, type of a thing. And I’m like, “That’s fine. That’s great. That’s good to know.” And so my middle child has also gone back and forth. On some social media things, and they can’t really tell me why, but on some social media things they put their pronouns as he/him. And on some of them they put they/them.

JEN: So a little experimenting may be going on.

HEATHER: Yeah. A little bit of curiosity and they’ve shortened their name that could be, I think some kids suddenly if you have a Mikey and they want to be called Mike, it’s just the sign of kind of growing up. And so her name has been shortened from the very feminine name to the kind of kid name to now she can be whatever she wants to be.

JEN: Like a more gender neutral?

HEATHER: Yeah. She’s definitely become more gender neutral. But it also doesn’t help to be, she’s 16 almost 17 and she’s 6’4” so she’s bigger than pretty much everybody around her.

JEN: By any standard, that’s just tall.

HEATHER: Yeah. She’s a tall kid, yeah. So she has to shop in the guy’s section for clothes. So I think I just think there’s things that they’re just going to be the person they want to be. And I hope that they know that – any one of my kids, even in second grade, when my daughter was 15 and going to Pride, my second grader was like, “I want a bisexual sticker to put on my water jug to take to school so that everyone knows that I’m okay with either/or.” And I went, “Okay.” So I think every kid down the line has had a little more exposure than the kid above them as far as living out loud who they really are. So I just think it’s made everybody a little bit more aware of the idea that we live in a nonbinary world and they are good at seeing people as people and not sinners who need to go to church.

JEN: Some of this is going to make you fairly incompatible when it comes to beliefs with your church community. So there’s probably, of necessity, been some changing and stuff there. Have you been pleasantly surprised at the people who loved your kids, continued to love them right through this or has that not been your situation?

HEATHER: So I think I’ve withdrawn myself from a lot of organized religion of any kind. And we don’t really participate. But I do find myself mostly surrounded by people that I grew up going to church with and those people who knew my parents and knew me as a five-year-old. And the people who like to see me in the grocery store and are like, “You know better than that.” or “We taught you better than that.” type of a thing. And having to say, “Well, you know, my world is just a little bit different now that I’m [inaudible] and I don’t believe that anymore.” Then of course, I know, because I spent so long in that mentality. I now know that I’m a “Lost cause and I need Jesus.” And it’s made me extra emotional in those situations because I can’t put into words yet how desperately when they say, “Oh, love you.” I want to say, “No you don’t.” You love the idea of me or you want to love me, but you don’t really love me or my kids because you don’t really know them. If you knew my kids, you’d tell them they were going to Hell, and I don’t want you to have that opportunity. So I will not bring my kids around you. and I won’t put them in danger of having your judgment in front of them. So it has changed, definitely. I don’t sit down and read my Bible. I have a hard time wanting to read my Bible because I don’t trust men and the interpretations they’ve made of the Bible and the ways that they want to twist it to be controlling and use it as a way to get what they want out of the world. So my kids don’t see me as Bible-reading, praying, in the closet for hours at a time, kind of a Mom. But I think that they also know that I’m the mom that they can come talk to when they have questions or get hurt or are curious or having something exciting. Like hearing about first kisses and first hand-holds and first crushes. And I think about all those things that I would be missing out on if I wasn’t willing to love them as the kids that they are. I feel like I’m coming more into wanting to be that out-loud person because I’m losing patience with the people who just want to be jerks about it. I don’t want to tolerate that anymore. Before, I could kind of be like, “Oh, I’ve been there. I understand.” But now I’m to a point where I’m like, “Oh gosh, I was there. I learned and I chose to love differently and I know that you are probably thinking that I’m going to Hell and you can think that all you want. But I have great kids who have great attitudes about life who are thriving and surviving.” And I’m okay with that.

JEN: Do you have any regrets about how it all unfolded?

HEATHER: Probably. I’m hesitant to share very much because I did overstep some boundaries at the beginning and wanting to make sure that I don’t overstep those boundaries. I’ve had to talk with my older kids and be like, “Okay, I’m doing this.” And my one daughter who’s been at the college, she’s like, “I don’t care. I don’t care. Anybody can know. Tell them whatever you want.” And so I was like, I still want to respect because there’s still some extended family members that she’s not – in the past she’s like, “What if they don’t like me after they know?” And I don’t think they’ll be that way, but I need a [inaudible] confidence that, whether they liked her or not, she was still going to be okay. I needed to let her get there. So we had to be pretty adamant when the name changed for my middle daughter when she abbreviated and wanted to be more neutral. I think regrets would be, I regret a lot putting them in the situations, especially in religious situations where people could be like, “Well, that’s just not okay. God’s not going to love you.” I wish my kids didn’t ever have to have that feeling like they had to be a certain way to feel valuable or to feel worthy of living a life. I didn’t ever want them to have that. But I think that they have handled it pretty well because they were able to handle [inaudible]. But it’s also made me a lot more aware, I think now about how religious people in the media are talking about how – oh what is the word?

JEN: Grooming.

HEATHER: Yes. That word. That word. And I think, “Gosh. I remember I’ve been more groomed by those kinds of things than I have ever been by some of this other stuff.” Even just a few weeks ago, we went to go to Pride and I just looked at it as a family outing. We’re just going out to do something fun together. We didn’t go to the parade. It was just like an afternoon in the park with some vendors and some people performing. And there were religious people at the corner. And we were trying to walk across. And one of the guys with his Bible in his hand was telling me that my kids were going to Hell. And I was like, “You don’t get to talk to me like that. I don’t want to talk to you. That’s not the same God I know and love. I don’t agree with you. Just don’t talk to me.” And he was like, he made the comment, basically he said my kids have been molested. I had let my kids get molested and that’s why they were gay. And that was the one that made me turn around and lose my crap because I’m like, “You’re not going to tell me I’m a bad mom. You’re not going to tell me that something that happened to my kids makes them gay.” I just want to educate them. And at that guy, I wanted to educate him at the top of my lungs and say not nice things. But I found that I want to protect my kids and I want more people to understand that they might not ever agree with my kids’ lifestyles or me loving my kid no matter what their lifestyle is. But they also don’t have a say in it.

JEN: Before I let you go, do you have any advice for anybody who might be listening? Like some of the lessons you learned, you could give them a shortcut path.

HEATHER: It’s going to go a lot better if you can honestly tell your children that there’s nothing they can do or nothing they can say that will ever change how much you love them and want them to be a part of your life because that was something I absolutely refused to do was to let my religion, let the people that I went to church with, tell me that, “Oh well, if they’re not going to change, then you need to put them out of your life.” And I will never, there’s nothing that can separate me from my kids. There’s nothing they can do that will make me love them any less than I love them because your kids are going to be their own people and if you want to be in their lives and you want them to be in your lives, then you kind of have to, especially as they grow up, you have to just love them as they are and let them figure some things out themselves and just be there to catch them when they fall.

JEN: Thanks so much for coming today and sharing your story with us. I know it always feels a little vulnerable to put your life out into the internet. So thank you for coming and sharing.

HEATHER: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. While we have you, we want to let you know about the inaugural LUV Conference coming up this October 18th and 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference is all about learning and connecting and creating a more supportive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. Get more information at www.luvwithoutlimits.org . That’s L-U-V- without limits.org. Or find the link in the show notes under the links from the show. We hope to see you there. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating and review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.