There is love here

"I want to tell you something," I stammer. "I'm in love with someone. Someone so amazing and kind and wonderful to me. His name is Dan."

Silence.

My parents take a minute to catch their breath and I begin to lose mine.

"We're disappointed," they say. "We love you but we will never understand this. We will never accept this."

"I'm sorry," I say, feeling the weight of their words in my lungs. We stop talking.

*

"We're going to have to bring him now," the social worker says on the phone.

"I thought we were doing a gradual transition over the next week?"

"His current foster family found out you're a gay couple and say he should stay with them instead. If he's coming to you it has to be now."

The couple had been trying to move him out of their foster home for months, saying his needs were more than they could handle.

"Okay bring him over- we'll be ready."

He shows up with a garbage bag full of his clothes and a talking Moses doll who recites the ten commandments when you touch his stomach.

"Honor your father and your mother" the doll says.

*

"I'm just not able to live ashamed of myself anymore," I tell my son (and remind myself).

"I get it. We just won't be friends," he responds.

"I'm sorry. It's not fair that his parents are putting you guys in this position."

My son had struck up a friendship with a boy from basketball. The boy's parents didn't want him to be friends with someone whose parents are gay.

"It's okay," my son says, "I have other friends."

"It's not," I say. "It's not okay."

*

"You are loved," she says and reaches her hand towards me from her booth at the elementary school fair, offering a bright pink PFLAG sticker.

I pause. I smile. I feel the tightness in my throat as my eyes begin to twitch and water.

"I...um...thank you. Thank you for being here."

"Are you a teacher?" she asks.

"No, no- just a parent. It means so much that you're here."

I'm overhelmed. I quickly retreat to my car, walking by the student carnival booths and the fire truck with children climbing all over it.

"There is love here," I think, and start to cry.