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Witness at the Judgement of Solomon |
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By Perry Brass
I read about the recent case before the Illinois Court of Appeals, in which two women, who had previously been involved in a relationship with one another, disputed access to a baby, with the strange, not exactly comfortable, feeling of being a witness at Solomon's judgment. I was a witness due to one of fate's quirkier turns. In a coincidence worthy of Charles Dickens, it turned out that I knew one of the parties involved, the child's biological mother. In fact, I was related to her. The biological mother of the little girl whom the courts have called "Cathy" was, actually, a cousin of mine. "Helen," as she was called by the court (and which happens to be my own mother's name), and I have had, ourselves, over the years a rather strange—and sometimes, strained—relationship. This, alone, made me realize that the background of this case has been sown over several generations, making the outcome of it even more dismaying, if not tragic. Since I was not at the trial, I have no idea how much of what I have to say was understood by the court; but it is unfortunate that a "legality" (or a "precedent") has come out of a very disfunctional, difficult personality situation. I'd known about this case for close to three years. It just did not seem possible that it would come up and have the national effect it seems to have. As a "precedent," at the moment (these things have a way of being superseded by other precedents, but for the moment it remains) the Court has said that, basically, lesbian mothers, once they part, become again simply separate, "unattached women"; they do not have a binding relationship that can effect the lives of the children they have previously raised together. After reading about the case in various gay media, I have come to the feeling that a lot of very distant people's lives can now be affected by an ugly personality situation, which should have remained simply private and isolated; but won't. The beginning seemed pretty straight forward: two women had agreed to live together and have a baby: a baby they would raise together. Since one was a hard-working professional, the other would biologically have the baby through artificial insemination, from an anonymous "donor," while the other supported her financially and emotionally. After their acrimonious spit up, "Amanda" (the pseudonym the court assigned to the non-biological mother; I have decided to keep using these names) tried to continue to have some physical connection with their child. She agreed to be flexible about this connection, so that she would no longer be considered the child's "mother," but would step in, to keep this connection, as basically a family friend, or an "aunt." Helen decided that this was not the break-up she wanted. She wanted a complete break-off with Amanda, even though Amanda had initially continued to support her after Helen had left their home in Atlanta and had moved to Chicago.
The Court decided that any heterosexual woman (or, woman who has a child in any form that can be considered "heterosexual") has more rights to a child—no matter what—than a lesbian who, in very material concrete ways, created the situation by which the child came into being. Now, I'm not getting myself into a funk because I believe in the inherent "political correctness" of this situation. I'm not sure, in fact, if there is one. One of the things we're dealing with here is money: Amanda, as the non-biological, lesbian mother, provided the economic basis for having this child. Since I don't believe, as some of my more "libertarian" friends do, that life should be controlled only by market situations (in other words: the bucks win), still I believe that this child's very existence happened because not only did both women want it, but because creating this child had been a stated part of their relationship from the very start. So, something cold has settled in here. What Amanda had wanted was simply the right to see the child on some basis, and to be acknowledged, as I'd been told by my cousin, as having some relationship to the child. She was willing to settle, in fact, for the relationship of an "aunt" or a family friend. She did not ask to be accepted as the child's "other mother." But my cousin had decided, after this break up and her own return to a heterosexual lifestyle, that she would allow Amanda not even a supervised visit with Cathy. After having come from my own nightmarish childhood in the South in the 50s and 60s, and having had "biological" aunts and uncles who could barely give me the time of day (and certainly not without very lengthy strings attached) I was puzzled by this whole situation, but after a while the pieces did start to fall, at least somewhat, into place.
When I asked Helen why she would not allow Amanda any visitations, she
told me that Amanda was "manipulative," "mentally unstable," and had
"substance abuse problems." Helen was adamant that she did not want
Amanda in either her life, or Cathy's life, again.
I thought I could accept how this emotionally-charged situation might lead to such feelings. But I began to question this when I realized how "manipulative" my cousin was herself, especially after she told me (quite openly) that she had only gone into the relationship with Amanda after this woman had promised her that she would provide a home for her and would, financially, make it possible for Helen to have the baby that she'd wanted so much. Previous to their relationship, Helen had been leading a marginal, "alternative" (what you might call a "macramé-ish") sort of existence in the heart of student, hippyish, lesbian-feminist Atlanta. She had been a student for years, bouncing from one major to another, as she had gone from one marginalized job to the next, as a chef's helper or a massage therapist. She had no real, regular income, except what she got from her father. She had been, as she told me, a "confirmed feminist, vegetarian, counter-cultural" young lesbian, who for a while refused to wear leather shoes—it was too cruel to animals—and always wore rubber sandals instead. But this lifestyle, even in laid-back "lesbiantic" Atlanta, was starting to fall apart. There was no stability in her life. She had never been involved with a man, and she wanted to have a child. Helen told me that after almost ten years with Amanda, she started to see the "holes" in their relationship. Mainly, Helen decided that she wasn't really a lesbian, but had become a lesbian "politically," as part of her own, deeply felt counter-cultural feminism. Her sexual life with Amanda had come to a halt; and also, Helen began to see Amanda as "extremely manipulative" (one of the leitmotifs, or repeating themes, in Helen's life, coming from a family where emotional manipulation was an agreed-upon tactic) and "mentally unstable." The situation came literally unglued when Helen decided to leave Atlanta—and Amanda—and go into divinity training in Chicago. Although Amanda was in a high pressure medicinal job, she continued to provide some support for both Helen and their child, and flew up several times to see Cathy. Helen was able to make the move up North, to a more expensive lifestyle in Chicago, due to the fact that her father, my uncle, was still giving her substantial financial support at close to forty. It was at this point that we met up again, after not seeing each other for about twenty years. I had to go to Chicago regularly for book functions. We had been corresponding, haphazardly, for several years. She had read some poetry of mine somewhere and had admired it. I noticed that sometimes a year would go by between letters from her and sometimes she would lose my address and then write to me at an older address, where neighbors would forward the letter. At first I was wary about reconnecting with her. Years earlier, I had cut off my relationship with her father, the younger of my mother's two older brothers, who had given me virtually no closeness at all as a child, when, after my father had died and we were left impoverished, I had desperately needed it. I had been the "sissy" son and he had been the "artistic," "sensitive" uncle, yet he stayed as far away from me as he could. Finally, after about four years of corresponding, I met Helen in Chicago, with her small daughter; we had not seen each other since she had been eleven years old. At our first meeting Helen told me that she had been trying to cut off all contact with her ex-partner. When I asked her what had kept her together with this woman for so long, she told me, very candidly, that Amanda had been able to provide the home for her that she had never had. Helen's parents had been divorced just before she entered her teens. She was completely estranged from her mother, an ambitious, utterly perfectionist academic who, repeatedly, used and discarded people like old file cards. Helen's father, my uncle, had actually come out as gay himself, at a late age after his second wife had died. My uncle had a distant, guilt-ridden relationship with Helen. He would push her out on her own for a while, then at some point come back to her, when his own situation, that of bitterness, loneliness, and much hiding, dictated it.
Helen's father had actually used a very similar technique with me, earlier, when he had tried to reconcile himself with me after a twenty-year absence. He had finally come out, and he knew that I had been out for decades; so why not, then, make an overture towards me? He wrote to me that he could "provide" me with "the roots" that he "knew" I wanted, if I could overcome the coldness that he was sure I had towards him. Momentarily I capitulated; it was true: not having had any contact with a larger family for years, I did want some "roots." It was around the time that my mother had died, and these situations always bring you back to your childhood. We became close for about a year, and then he started his campaign of little demolition jobs around my life, a skill at which he was famous. What he was actually doing was "uprooting" me, and I started to realize that the person who in truth needed "roots" was my uncle, someone who had finally come out in his sixties—not someone who had already established a gay community around him, who had a successful relationship with another man, and who, despite my uncle's ever-cynical doubts, was leading a satisfying life on his own. As anyone might imagine, I felt wary about any reconnection with Helen. Even though I started to realize that her background might produce (or necessitate) her behavior, that did not make things easier. I began to see that Helen gravitated towards weaker people and knew how to use them; for this reason, top among her curses and sins was that someone else was being "manipulative." She watched out for "manipulation" everywhere. That fact that she was going into a mid-life career in divinity and counseling seemed strange to me. She had nothing that resembled a religious background at all; she told me that she had never, in fact, even opened a Bible, even to read it as pure literature. But as I got to know her better, theology seemed like a good field for her. She could find her own usefulness there, as well as lots of people who might be useful to her, who might be pulled in by Helen's talent for almost instant identification of their weaknesses. The kicker came when I met the man she is now married to, and realized that her relationship with him was so castrating, dogmatic, and unsettling that merely being around it (as well as dealing with Helen's own manipulative process), was more than I felt I either could, or needed to, handle. The last time I saw Helen was several years ago, and I forgot about the court case she had been fighting with another woman. Helen receded into the background of my life, although I wondered from time to time how she was doing in theology and, if, despite the often close-to raging hostility between them, she would be able to keep the man she had become involved with from breaking off with her. Finally, a few days ago, I read about the case in Chicago before the Illinois Court of Appeals. It told me that Helen and her boyfriend had married; and that she had been successful in terminating Amanda's relationship with a child she had helped bring into the world. The story started to have a "tragic symmetry" of its own: it began with my mother's sad family of struggling, poor, immigrant Jews who had started out in the deep South and who, as always embarrassed poor relations, could never be close to others. It went on to Helen's embittered relationship with her own two parents, then on to another woman who allowed Helen to have the beautiful child she wanted: another woman whom Helen could use and then reject. This is an ugly story, and it is sad that it will have some effect on other lesbians and possibly gay men as well. If this, indeed, does set a court precedent, it means that other women can become used and exploited by their partners, while at the same time "heterosexual" women can be free to do anything they want to their own children. I am not saying here that my cousin Helen is a bad mother. She is actually a very good, capable mother to Cathy. But the precedent here is that even if she weren't, the Amandas of the world will have to suffer for the decisions of their hearts in silence and isolation. Perry Brass is the author of How to Survive Your Own Gay Life. His new novel, Angel Lust, will be available in stores in late February. He can be reached through his website, www.perrybrass.com. |
The Wisdom of Solomon: 
Author Perry Brass 
© 1997-99 BEI