Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (18 page)

“There
are never enough ‘I Love You’s.” - Lenny Bruce

When Lila and Miranda were dating, they had become
serious about each other very quickly. We spent time with them in London and
they visited us in Scotland. We often compromised, meeting halfway, and
weekends in Birmingham became a regular feature. Miranda was anxious that we
spend time with Lila on her own, too. Being the sensitive girl she is, she
didn’t want to intrude on our family time.

Whether she was physically present or not, Miranda was a
whirling dervish when it came to organising entertainment for us. Determined
that we have the best possible time, she would often phone Lila to check that
she had arranged suitable and sufficient entertainment for us (and would often
arrange it from afar if Lila’s plans were deemed inadequate). John and I had to
plead with them both to slow down as we needed time to catch our breath between
engagements.

By this time, Lila had moved into Miranda’s ‘small and
pokey’ one-bedroom flat in south London, so they insisted on booking us into
and paying for a variety of interesting local hotels on our visits. Our
personal favourite was a Mexican-themed boutique hotel. It was decorated
throughout with vibrant blue swathes of paint and featured an array of interesting
‘Day of the Dead’- themed artefacts and paintings in our bedroom. Though to be
fair, the colourful and grotesque images of skeletons and ghouls, while
impressive and artistic, didn’t particularly make for a sound night’s sleep.

Lila and Miranda had a pretty full social calendar and a
night spent engaging in only one activity was deemed a pretty slow one. They
appeared to up the pace even more when we visited. We were impressed by
Miranda’s forethought and organisational skills. Whilst finishing a meal in a
restaurant, she asked, “Would you like to have a nightcap in one of our
favourite bars? It’s just up the road.”

“That sounds lovely,” I said.

She immediately whipped out her mobile phone, while John
and I looked on in amusement. “Hello. This is Miranda. We have Lila’s parents
visiting and we wanted to pop in for a drink. Are you busy tonight? Yes? Hmmm.
Any chance you could save us a table by the fire? Great. We’ll be there in ten
minutes. Thanks. See you then.” This was a girl who knew her way around the
city and knew how to get what she wanted. And she did it with grace and style.

As in all good relationships, we could see that Lila and
Miranda were a positive influence on each other. Lila had loved living on her
own when she was in Scotland. In fact, given the eccentric routines she adopted
(especially around restricting her guests’ drinks), we were concerned that she
enjoyed it just a little too much and was becoming a bit too set in her ways.
When she moved to London, we were pleased that she would be flat sharing. One
weekend we visited when her roommate was out of town and, for once, there was
room for us to stay at the flat. It was late on a Sunday night and the few
local restaurants were closed. Lila suggested we eat back at her flat.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said, opening her fridge.
“Oh, you’ve got a pizza and some fresh pasta. We can have that.”

“Why don’t you just go ahead and use up
all
my
week’s food in one night?” Lila said sarcastically.

“Are you serious?” I said. It appeared by her face that she
was. “Okay, calm down. We’ll just use the pizza.”

After a strained half hour waiting for the cheap
generic-brand pizza to cook, we chewed the doughy crust in a somewhat subdued
atmosphere. This gourmet meal was accompanied by a glass of diluted orange
juice. When we’d finished, I said brightly, “Right. I’ll put the kettle on for
a cup of tea.”

“What!” Lila shrieked. “You’ve just had a drink. How many
more drinks do you need?” Hmmm! Apparently flat sharing was not having the
effect that I had hoped for.

At that point, John and I thought it best to absent
ourselves and go to bed, where I spent a good hour persuading him not to leave
and go to an hotel for the night. After a sleepless night, Lila apologised, but
it was a scary episode. When she moved into Miranda’s ‘small, pokey’ flat, she
got her comeuppance− Miranda blithely consumes an average of twenty cups
of tea a day and the kettle is never off. It still makes me smile. Miranda’s
even trained Lila to prepare three different hot drinks for her every morning
and to stop at cafés for tea at regular intervals without helpfully reminding
any of us, ‘You had a cup of tea before you left the house’. Love is indeed a
wonderful thing.

On one of our trips to London, John was relieved of his
wallet on the bus with impressive efficiency, ten minutes into our journey to
Lila’s flat. While we were traumatised and flustered, Lila handled the
situation like a professional and it became apparent she was.

“Oh dear,” Lila said. “Don’t worry. Miranda either loses
her purse or has it stolen every other week. Let’s go to the restaurant as
planned and I’ll sort it all out.”

And indeed she did. She sprang into action; firing up her
laptop, cancelling cards and even notifying the police at breakneck speed. By
the time the waiter arrived to take our order, it was all dealt
with−well, almost. The thieves managed to withdraw five hundred pounds
from our account in the space of the five minutes it had taken Lila to cancel
our cards.

“How did they get your pin number?” the bank clerk inquired
over the phone.

“I have no idea,” John replied, in his most convincing
voice.

Apparently his cunning code of disguising his pin number as
a telephone number scribbled on a business card hadn’t been as impermeable as
he had thought.

Miranda influenced Lila on a wider level when it came to
her career. Having trained as a doctor, Lila assumed her future career would
have to lie within hospital grounds, even though she never felt entirely
comfortable or fulfilled within that parameter. Miranda transformed Lila’s
understanding of what her career could be, releasing her from the belief that
she was limited to clinical medicine. Lila has since embarked on a crazy
whirlwind of careers all over the world, ranging from health policy to public health,
health management, lecturing in global health and health writing.

Lila in turn opened Miranda’s eyes to the world of travel.
Miranda hadn’t been particularly interested in foreign travel, whereas Lila had
always loved it. During their first year together they holidayed in Cambodia,
India and Eritrea and Miranda caught the travel bug. When they got the
opportunity to move to Washington, then Tokyo, they both grabbed it in delight.

It was obvious to us even back then that Lila and Miranda
complemented each other beautifully and, if they ever had a cross word, they
rarely did so in our presence. Something else they never did in our presence
was become overly affectionate, but it was blatantly obvious from their covert
glances and hand touching how they felt about each other.

“We’ve
begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet − so we bought a dog.
It’s cheaper, and you get more feet.” - Rita Rudner

When Lila came out, I wasn’t even thinking about
grandkids, but I was mourning the life I thought Lila would have had and kids
would have presumably been part of that life. Not that I had any reason to
presume Lila would ever have wanted kids. Remembering her distinct disinterest
in dolls, and her baby brother, it certainly wasn’t a given.

Growing up, both Lila and Lee despised younger children. It
was one of the few things over which they bonded. Their nightmare was being
seated next to a toddler, or even worse − horror of horrors − a
baby, on a plane journey. They referred to them scathingly as ‘M&Ps’, their
private code that was in fact an abbreviation for ‘mewling and puking infants’
¹⁴
(Lila always favours a Shakespearean insult). Lila might have been the instigator,
but Lee joined in with fervour. His pet peeve was that young children were
allowed in restaurants. When I pointed out that, if they weren’t, he himself
would have missed out on numerous Mallorcan lunches spent eating paella and
having the odd sip of wine in restaurants, he was unrepentant. For John and me,
having children was the accepted next step after marriage. We never for a
moment contemplated a life without kids. But given Lila and Lee’s horror of
M&Ps, it looked like we could be facing a life without grandkids.

The issue of children proved to be a stumbling block for
Lila and Miranda; one that, early on, had even threatened to end their
relationship. Miranda dreamed of creating the happy family unit that she’d
never had when she was growing up. Lila, as I had predicted, was adamant she
didn’t want children. Lila went through a lot of angst about it. She knew that
their relationship was about to move to the next level, but also that, given
how much Miranda wanted children, it would be unfair to make a commitment
unless she was prepared to accept them as part of their future together.

I spent a few angst-filled hours listening to Lila’s
reflections over the phone. I respected the fact that she was taking the
decision so seriously, but, at the same time, I was distraught that she and
Miranda might actually break up over it. I knew how perfect they were together
and I also knew it was highly unlikely that Lila would ever find another
soulmate. We already considered Miranda part of our family and the prospect of
losing her seemed unthinkable.

It was a considerable moral dilemma for Lila and one she
would have to resolve on her own. After much deliberation and soul-searching,
Lila conceded. “If having a family means that much to Miranda, I’ll just have
to grin and bear it.” (Perhaps physically, as well as metaphorically.) “I love
her too much to let her go,” she told us. John and I breathed a sigh of relief.
We also loved Miranda too much to let her go. 

Having children would raise both physical and moral
considerations for Lila and Miranda: Who would carry the baby? Would they
choose the father from someone they knew, or would they use a sperm donor?
These were major issues, and ones which Lila and Miranda were already finding
traumatic, though they were still hypothetical. However, Lila later told me
that, almost as soon as she’d agreed to have children, the idea began to pall
with Miranda. Maybe she just needed to know it was a possibility.

If Miranda nursed any lingering fantasies of hearing the patter
of tiny feet, the patter of tiny paws squashed them. The paws in question
belonged to a one-eyed cat with major health problems, answering to the name of
Nelson, for pretty obvious reasons. Lila and Miranda had been discussing
getting a cat for a while and, while Miranda was off on a yoga retreat in
Corfu, Lila met and fell in love with him. Nelson was a poor soul with a ‘great
personality’. On his last legs (or so the pet shelter led Lila to believe), he
needed an owner (or owners) to care for him in the last weeks of his life. She
couldn’t leave him to die in that tiny cage.

Lila felt she was up to the challenge. She arrived home
with this sorry bag of bones, accompanied by a suitcase full of his medication.
Nelson immediately and predictably took over her life. Within a few hours she
was on a long-distance call to Miranda for advice on how to give him his
medication. “It’s easy,” Miranda − who’d owned cats before− coaxed,
during a very expensive phone call. “Just pop him on his back, pop his mouth
open and pop in the tablet.”

“Okay, put like that, it sounds simple,” Lila said. “Pop on
back, pop mouth open and pop tablet in! I’ll try it.”

The yowls and shrieks that followed (from both Lila and
Nelson) demonstrated that this advice was a tad insufficient. Lila tried, and
failed. At one point she feared she might break his jaw, while Nelson, in turn,
summoned the strength to give her a few deep scratches. In desperation, Lila
took to knocking on strangers’ doors pleading for help, while Nelson shook his
head, spraying pus all over the walls, furniture and his new owner from one or
other of his suppurating ear tumours. Every twelve seconds. Poor Miranda
eventually had to cut short her holiday and come home to help. 

On top of all his health problems, Nelson needed feeding,
of course, so they had to curtail their extremely busy social life. Now they
were lucky to fit in even one engagement per evening – when, such a short time
before, that would have previously been considered a wasted night. Nelson cried
whenever he was left alone. He employed his one good eye to great effect and
gave them the ‘stink eye’ whenever they tried to leave the flat. He was much
too ill to be let out, so the flat constantly stank (and I mean
stank)
of pus and cat. Not a pretty combination. One weekend John and I slept in Lila
and Miranda’s bedroom which, unfortunately for us, Nelson was used to accessing
at night. The door didn’t close properly, and putting our suitcase in front of
it didn’t provide the impenetrable barrier we’d hoped. John and I endured eight
solid hours of pitiful meowing, interspersed with a tiny, mangy paw snaking
round the door, trying in vain to open it.

And the worst part of it was − he refused to die! At
times he was very ill and Lila or Miranda (whoever drew the short straw),
having said their tearful goodbyes to him, carted him off to the vet, fully
expecting that he (and they) would be put out of their misery. In the event,
the vet smiled hugely and said, “What a great job you’re doing with him. He’s
never looked better. Keep up the good work.” With that, he would send them home
with a pat on the head and yet another new bottle of tablets. 

They couldn’t take much more of this. Desperate times
called for desperate measures. In the throes of buying a new flat, Lila and
Miranda convinced one of their soft-hearted friends that they weren’t allowed
pets at their new abode. The friend fell for it (if you’re reading this, er,
sorry), and she relieved them of Nelson. When their new flat purchase fell
through, they were scared their friend would find out and return Nelson to
them, but she never did. She just spoke sadly of vet visits, regretted that she
could no longer invite dates back to her flat and dabbed at cat ear pus stains
on her new jeans. Nelson went on to live for years. (For all we know, he might
still be alive.)

When they had recovered sufficiently from the cat trauma,
Lila and Miranda both firmly agreed that, if Miranda hadn’t already gone off
the idea of having kids as soon as Lila agreed to it, Nelson had well and truly
cured them of the desire to bring another living creature into their flat! Lila
and Miranda would not be providing us with grandchildren any time soon.

I don’t know if Lee grew to love kids by his own volition,
whether he always secretly liked them and was just trying to bond with Lila by
claiming he didn’t, or whether his wife talked him round. Whatever the reason,
my husband and I feel truly blessed to have a wonderful grandson and
granddaughter. We’re incredibly proud of Lee and Ainsley. They are wonderful
and loving parents. In fact, between them, our two children have provided us
with the dream combination for a happy and fun life: grandkids and glamour.