In My Skin (12 page)

T
he summer after my freshman year, I was hanging out in my dorm room one afternoon when I saw that my mom was calling my cell phone. It wasn't unusual for her to call—we talked a few times a week—because she liked to check in and see how things were going. But the moment I picked up the phone and said, “Hey, Mom,” I could tell by the energy on the other end that something wasn't right. I immediately stood up, because I wanted to feel taller and more in control. I could hear she was crying. And then I found out why: she told me she had gone to the doctor and they had found something. She'd been diagnosed with lupus, which I later learned is an autoimmune disease. My mom's immune system was “hyperactive” and attacking her healthy cells. The diagnosis explained a lot, because her health was always an issue, but hearing she had a disease was really scary. It made her struggles seem so much more real, to know exactly what was going on inside her body and what she would have to deal with going forward.

I walked out of my dorm room. I needed to keep moving; it helped me process what she was saying. I was trying to be really strong for her, and I told her, my voice steady, “Okay, Mom, you'll be okay. Do you hear me? Everything is going to be okay. You can fight this.” I walked into the parking garage, pacing around the same area where I had said a teary good-bye to my parents the previous fall, and then I headed over to the little grassy area outside the dorm. I listened as she cried and talked about her worries, and I kept trying to reassure her that everything would be okay.

As soon as we said good-bye, as soon as we hung up, I broke down. There was a seating area under the trees outside the dorm, and I made my way over to one of the chairs and lowered myself into it. I buried my face in my hands and just sobbed, feeling totally helpless. But there was something else, too, another emotion mixed in with my fear and sadness: it was guilt. I started thinking about all the trouble I had given my mother when I was a kid, constantly mouthing off and disobeying her, just to see how far I could push her. I had never made things easy on her. And now I wanted nothing more than to ease her pain, to provide comfort and support. Why had I taken her for granted?

I looked down at my phone. I needed to tell someone, talk it through, and I didn't even hesitate when I hit the number. The line rang a couple of times, and then I heard Kim's voice in my ear. “Hey, Big Girl,” she said with her southern twang. I broke down again, crying, telling Kim everything my mom had told me. She listened and tried to provide some support, playing the role for me that I had just played for my mom. She told me to come over to her house if I needed a place to chill. “Everything is going to be fine,” Kim said. “You need to be strong for your mom.”

We stayed on the phone for a couple of minutes as I pulled myself together. “All right,” I told Kim. “I will. I can do that.”

A few days later, I went to see my therapist, and talking through it with him helped me a lot. I told him I was worried about my mom and also distracted by the guilt I felt for the way I had treated her when I was younger. He encouraged me to put it all out there: if something was weighing on my heart, I should talk to her about it. I had been checking in with her every day or two, just to say hi and see how she was feeling. But after seeing my therapist, I knew I needed to say more.

ONE AFTERNOON
, about a week after my mom had called to tell me about the lupus, I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, working up the nerve to call her, thinking about all the things I wanted to say to her. I knew it would be an emotional conversation, but I also knew it was something I needed to do. My mom was always battling some kind of physical ailment when I was a kid. She had a couple of back surgeries for a bulging disk, which left her with nerve damage, and she had a lot of problems with her left knee. She was in constant pain, which made it hard for her to get out much. On top of everything else, she also just seemed to have bad luck. I remember when I was little, she had a mishap while lighting the grill, and she ended up in the hospital with burns on her face. She is the sweetest person in the world, but it's like she has a black cloud following her around. And dealing with me all those years probably zapped a lot of her energy.

We talked for about ninety minutes that day, and I apologized for every stupid thing I had done as a kid, for being such a troublemaker, for being just plain mean to her. It was an epic heart-to-heart conversation. I was crying; she was crying. She likes to call me “Baby Girl” and “Ladybug,” and when she started dropping those on me, I was just a puddle. I was sitting there going through my laundry list of bad behavior, and she was saying things like “Everything is good, Baby Girl,” her voice all soft and warm. We shared our favorite memories, and I told her how I was learning—in fits and starts—to deal with my emotions better. And when we had both said everything we needed to say, we ended the call with this line we always say to each other: “I love you to the stars and back, to the moon and back.”

My mom and I are different in a lot of ways, but ever since that phone call, she has become one of my best friends. Sometimes when we're talking, I'll think back to those times when she was sitting in the recliner chair, watching the Food Network, with me sprawled across her lap—and I'm reminded all over again that I'm still her Ladybug.

M
y sophomore year at Baylor sucked. There's really no better way to say it. Everything felt like a struggle. The tone was set over the summer, when I found out from my mom that she had lupus, and I just could never quite pull myself out of the quicksand. I clashed with Kim, I clashed with my dad, I clashed with the girl I was dating, I clashed with Baylor.

Most of all, I clashed with myself.

Basketball was the easy part, although I found plenty of ways to make it harder. My teammates and I—specifically, the other sophomores—were a handful. Coming out of high school, we were ranked as the top recruiting class in the country, and when we arrived in Waco, we acted like we were above the law. Kim's law, that is. Freshman year, I was late to everything—classes, tutoring sessions, study hall. And if I wasn't late, I was showing up at the last minute. (When you play college basketball, “on time” usually means fifteen minutes early.) There were a few of us in Kim's doghouse, which meant we spent the summer on permanent workout probation. Every morning, we had to be in the weight room, dressed and ready to go, at 6
A.M.,
under the supervision of our strength and conditioning coach. Technically, these sessions were considered punishment, an extra hour of sweat in addition to our regular team workout later in the day. But I didn't look at it that way. As much as I hated getting up at the crack of dawn, I also saw these sessions as a chance to get stronger. At least that's what I told myself while we were being tortured.

I'm not one of those people who can always remember specific drills I've been forced to do; usually I just go all out and forget about what happened the moment it ends. But there was one particular lifting drill we did during those early-morning sessions that is burned into my muscle memory. I'm sure once I describe it, people will think it doesn't sound all that hard. Trust me, it was. (Go ahead and try it.) We held a small weight in each hand—like maybe five pounds—and we had to keep our elbows locked as we raised our arms until they met at the top. Picture the arm motion of a jumping jack, except we had to do it slowly and in rhythm with everyone else. The goal was to complete 100 repetitions. But here's the catch: if anyone bent her elbows, even just a smidge, we had to start all over again. And of course that is what happened. We'd get so close, like 95 reps, and somebody would screw up. We did three sets, and I would guess that by the time we finished the last one, we had actually done about 500 arm raises.

THE BASKETBALL COURT
has always been the one place I feel free, not weighed down by outside worries. Some people can't turn off their minds when they're playing; they're still stressed about everything happening off the court. I'm not like that. In fact, I couldn't wait to get on the court and play sophomore year, because I was really struggling away from the game. Sometimes I would even go to the gym late at night, when I couldn't sleep, just to shoot and be in that space. (I'd also sit in the locker room and play video games.) There were so many things swirling around me that year, clouding my brain. My dad was still being himself, hovering over me even from Houston. He started harping on one thing in particular: he said I needed a bodyguard. After the final home game of my freshman year, Kim had allowed the fans onto the court, so we could show our appreciation for all their support throughout the season. I was serving my two-game suspension for punching Jordan Barncastle, so I sat in the student section near the Baylor bench. But after the game, I mingled with the crowd on the court. We were swarmed, and I didn't mind it one bit. I had fun signing autographs and posing for pictures; it took some of the sting out of watching my team lose to Texas. But my dad was livid afterward, saying Kim shouldn't have let that happen. “Anyone could have just come up and done you harm,” he said. He believed, and still believes to this day, that somebody might run up and stab me on the court. So as I was going into my sophomore season, he would call me and complain about how Baylor did things, telling me I should transfer and that I needed a security detail. (He also thought I wasn't getting enough touches on the court, which is ridiculous. If anything, Kim would get mad at me for passing too much.)

I already had enough internal angst that I processed on a daily basis; I didn't have the capacity to absorb so much of his. Plus, there was my mom's health, which I thought about multiple times a day. I was scared I might lose her. The thought of my mom in pain, sad, struggling, weighed on me, especially since I didn't go home as much as I wanted to, because being in the same house as my dad was too stressful. I would call and check on her all the time. I'd ask how she was feeling, then listen carefully to what she said. She would almost always give the same answer—“Okay”—but I could tell when she was lying because her voice would be softer. When it sounded more like a whisper, I knew she was having a bad day. No matter how much I tried to pry the truth out of her, she would still say everything was fine.

Sometimes I would call my sister Pier and ask her what was really going on, why Mom wouldn't tell me the truth. Pier would say, “She doesn't want you to worry, Baby Girl!” But I did worry. In the absence of real information, I would picture the worst possible scenarios, especially because the information my dad passed along often made it seem as if my mom was dying and I should get in the car immediately and drive home. I remember one time he called and said that Mom had fallen down the stairs in the house and was in bad shape. I hung up and called Pier, and she said Mom had slipped the last step or two and was fine. Sometimes it felt like my father was trying to lay a guilt trip on me, another way he could control my actions and emotions. But I'm sure he had his own fears about losing my mother. We just didn't talk about it.

Meanwhile, I was starting to realize there was another topic that would cause me problems at Baylor: my sexuality. Many people have asked me why I went to Baylor, a private Baptist university, if I knew I was gay. After all, the student handbook has a policy against homosexuality (as well as premarital sex between straight people). The most direct answer I can offer is this: I had zero knowledge of the policy. My parents didn't know about it either. My dad worried in general about me, because he seemed convinced that being openly gay would hurt my basketball career. But nobody on the Baylor coaching staff, and certainly not Kim, alerted me to this important piece of information about the school. Keep in mind, I chose Baylor because of basketball. Also, as I have learned all too well, the world of women's college basketball is a homophobic and hypocritical place: it's not like anyone was going to sit me down and say, “Brittney, we know you're a lesbian, so we want to give you a heads-up about our school's policy on homosexuality.” The coaches at Baylor weren't going to do anything to discourage me from coming to play for their program. But equally important, these words—
lesbian, homosexual
—make a lot of people within women's basketball squirm, including all those gay players and coaches in the closet. People want to dance around the subject, pretend it doesn't exist, instead of having open conversations about it.

Here's what I did know: Baylor had an awesome program, it was close to my home, and Kim was a great coach, someone whose personality I thought I could relate to because I had put up with my dad's brand of discipline for so long. There was a lot about Baylor I didn't know, but worrying about the policies and rules of the overall administration felt like worrying about the government in another country. How would that affect me?

Turns out, it would affect me a lot.

THE FIRST TIME I KISSED
a girl—like, a real kiss—was my freshman year of high school. In sixth grade, one of my friends and I shared a little peck, just playing around the way kids do, but it's not like either one of us really knew if we were gay. In ninth grade, I knew. There was a girl who lived right around the corner in our neighborhood—she was a few years older than me—and she offered to braid my hair one day. We hit it off and started hanging out sometimes. I remember there being an energy, a connection between us, but I didn't know she felt the same way until this one afternoon, on the way over to her house after school, when we stopped at the store to pick up a few snacks. We were both standing in the aisle, deciding what chips to buy, when she just turned and kissed me on the lips. I didn't know what to say, so I stated the obvious: “You just kissed me.” She nodded and smiled. A second later, I leaned in and kissed her again, so she would know for sure that I was not opposed to what was happening. After that, I started spending more time at her house, in her room. I was fifteen by then, but my dad was still paranoid about me going anywhere, so I would sneak over there or tell my mom I was “going to get my hair braided.” I'm pretty sure she knew something was up, because I would get my hair done like three times a week.