For those of you who have been to a city in the Northeast, in particular New England, you undoubtedly notice that you have a massive amount of people crammed into not a lot of space. This is particularly true of Boston and the cities that surround it. Parking is always at a premium, especially in the tightly intertwined neighborhoods who’s street layout was clearly designed by a drunken cow wandering lost.

For this reflection, I bring you to the City of Cambridge. As is typical there is no where to park, and the city enforces neighborhood parking by issuing resident parking permits along with a “guest” pass for visitors (Boston Transportation Department you should take note).

This story revolves around that one time I was “outed” by a parking pass…yes, you read that correctly.

My Sister and Brother-in-law were living in a spacious one bedroom condominium in Cambridge, circa 2002, at some point that spring I had stopped by for a visit and they let me borrow their visitor pass as to avoid the ever diligent “meter maids” that seemingly knew the moment I parked illegally and would swoop in like a seagull to a freshly washed car.

After my visit I left the city and headed back to my parents’ house and forgot to leave the parking pass. I didn’t really think much of it and didn’t really see it as that big a deal. At the time I was working long hours landscaping with little free time after work.

My sister had called me (this was before text messaging was really a thing) and asked me to leave the parking pass at our parent’s house and she would grab it later as they had a contractor coming to do work and needed the pass. I clearly had failed to grasp exactly how critical this pass was.

My sister…much like my mother has an amazing ability to go from 0-100 in the blink of an eye. So, I started receiving phone calls, and then some very nasty voicemails which I’m pretty sure only listened to one and knew what the rest were all about.

Sure, I can understand her frustration but certainly not overreaction. My parents were out of town at the time on a cruise to some Caribbean destination—so they weren’t home to at least intercept and diffuse the situation.

The anger over the neglected parking pass boiled over into a typical “don’t talk to me ever again!” stance on both our parts (perhaps I can be a little stubborn)—but not before she had the opportunity to dime me out to our parents about…the stupid parking pass.

My parents returned from their cruise, and I remember as clear as day sitting in my childhood kitchen talking with my parents about the blowout that my sister and I had…and then it happened.

As I sat there, I became emotional, not over the fight, those had happened routinely growing up, so they were whatever. But at the bomb I was about to drop that I had no Idea I was going to drop…on my parents. As with any person on the verge of coming out there is a lot of stalling while you try to work up the courage so say those words.

A million thoughts run through your head: Will I get kicked out? Will they hate me? Will they disown me? Where would I go? Your emotions start to swell like the tide as it rolls in followed by a tsunami size tidal wave from a deep ocean earthquake that those words unleash.

Ok, here it comes…Mom, Dad…(insert very long and dramatic pause here), I, uh, I…I…I don’t like women anymore…

Dead silence…

If I remember correctly my dad was the first one to break that awkward silence…I don’t recall all what he said however in my memory, what it boiled down to is that I’m his son, he loved me and that’s all that really mattered.

My mother on the other hand…well…You thought by her reaction that I sat in my room and plotted and schemed a diabolical plan to ruin her life. Like me being gay was somehow going to negatively impact her life…Hello?! Mom, it’s not about you! She even went so far as to call my sister to tell her that “something was wrong with your brother” wrong like I had cancer or some other incurable disease…nope, just gay….

 In this scenario I was SURE that my dad would have had the hardest time given his rural Georgia Southern Baptist upbringing…and here my mother is, born and raised in Massachusetts, in one of the most liberal and what we now refer to as “progressive” towns in the state…but no, she had a much more difficult time again, like I woke up one day and decided to be gay to spite her.

There were days and weeks of awkwardness, thoughts that I needed some type of religious exorcism, followed by the typical “I always knew…” You didn’t “always know” mom, you new when I was a teenager in high school and spending idle time searching for “shirtless boys” on a very primitive home computer on Netscape….and trust me, it was no google…because the search results were definitely not prime.

I can’t entirely blame my coming out on the fight with my sister either. The fight was just a culmination of experiences that had happened prior which I’ll cover in subsequent posts.

Like many teens and young adults that face this challenge, you are overcome with emotions and bad thoughts and negative ruminations. They flood your brain and take hold of your body. You’re emotional, angry, scared, lost and looking for a community of like-minded people to support you when all else fails.

I survived, but not without the scars of rejection and failure to acknowledge me and what I needed then and still need now. In my family we’ve always had an amazing way of not talking about things, especially those difficult subjects. We just get mad or otherwise shut down, blame the other person and pretend it never happened, and wait for the next tragedy to hopefully bring us back together.

Clearly this approach is very healthy and I’m sure explains why at 45 years old I’m still a little fucked up. I know that I don’t process things like I should, I know that I compartmentalize and bury difficult emotional and deeply personal traumas.

For all it’s “bad” coming out when and how I did, led to some of the most formative experiences of my life both as a young gay man and as a man in general. Had I not flown out of the closet because of a parking pass where would I be today? Would I be like so many others, still living a lie, still pretending that I dig chicks? Telling myself and my friends, I just can’t find the right woman to date in what I think is a clever ruse to swat away nosey straight friends…but in reality, they already figured me out long before I figured myself out.

I don’t have any regrets, however sometimes I wish I had done things a little differently. Unfortunately, we cannot change the past…we can only affect the future.