My Thinning Years: Starving the Gay Within

On the day of my mother’s funeral, my father had quadruple bypass surgery. It was an odd blessing for my siblings and me.

Hazelden Publishing, 2014

This excerpt is from Jon Derek Croteau’s new book My Thinning Years: Starving the Gay Within.

As a child, Jon tried desperately to be his father’s version of the all-American boy, denying his gayness in a futile attempt to earn the love and respect of an abusive man. With this he built a deep, internalized homophobia that made him want to disappear rather than live with the truth about himself. That denial played out in the forms of anorexia, bulimia, and obsessive running, which consumed him as an adolescent and young adult.

It wasn’t until a grueling yet transformative Outward Bound experience that Jon began to face his sexual identity. This exploration continued as he entered college and started the serious work of sorting through years of repressed anger to separate from his father’s control and condemnation.

My Thinning Years is an inspiring story of courage, creativity, and the will to live–and of recreating the definition of family to include friends, relatives, and teachers who support you in realizing your true self.  –Hazelden Publishing

Excerpt: Saying Good-bye

On the day of my mother’s funeral, my father had quadruple bypass surgery. It was an odd blessing for my siblings and me. While we were concerned about him, we were also glad to have him out of the way. He couldn’t ruin our tribute to our mother. We could make it about her and not him. And I wouldn’t have to worry about him flying off the handle when I held Justin’s hand for support.

As hundreds of people flooded West Parish Church for her wake the evening before, I introduced every single person to Justin, including all of Dad’s colleagues from his career as a traveling housewares executive, and the guys who’d recently had my father as a baseball, basketball, or football coach, the volunteer jobs he continued to be most passionate about. Half of them seemed shocked, not because I said that Justin was my husband, but because many of them hadn’t even known my father had a third child. He had never spoken of me.

As we entered the packed New England stone and white West Parish Church, the polished mahogany wood casket in front of the altar caught my eye and shook me into reality. The melancholy sounds of the bagpipes made me crumble. Barely able to walk down the aisle, I needed my brother, Jared, and Justin to hold me up, each one holding one of my arms. I was in a state of deep disbelief: it all seemed unreal, like I was in a play or a movie. I had just told my mom, a few days before, that I’d “talk to her tomorrow.”

Taking my seat in the pew, with Justin on my right, and my siblings and their families on my left, I couldn’t stop crying. Jared had agreed to eulogize Mom since Julie and I felt incapable of holding it together long enough to get through it. He was magnificent. He honored our mother beautifully and spoke with poise and love, without pretense. With my father on a surgical table at Beth Israel Hospital, Jared was free to be himself and say what he wanted to say. I couldn’t catch my breath as my friend James sang “You Light Up My Life.” My arm clasped Justin’s arm on my right, and my head fell on Jared’s shoulder on my left. Mom had been fond of that song, and she had loved when I sang it as a child.

As Mom’s body was lowered into the ground in West Parish Cemetery, adjacent to the church, the finality of it all petrified me. That death could be among so much life—the autumn trees, the cooling earth’s grass, the pond in the distance teeming with lilies and cattails and frogs, all of us around her—was so confusing to me. None of it made sense. Why?I asked God silently. How is it possible that there will be no more tomorrows with my mother? I couldn’t stay there any longer. I placed my single, long-stem rose on her casket, now in its final place, and walked away and into the limousine.

Justin followed me, as did one of my closest friends, Samantha. They sat with me as I stared out the window onto the picturesque fall day, the colors vibrant and her resting place beautifully peaceful. I put my hand to my cheek, wishing out loud that I hadn’t washed off the lipstick kiss from our last night together. I would’ve done anything for another. And with that, looking at her casket in the grave, I said, “Bye, Mom.”

**********

My father made it out of surgery successfully. Justin and I made many trips to the hospital to visit him. A couple of days after his operation, he asked for some time alone with me.

When I got to the hospital, I found him still in a remorseful state. “I’m so sorry for what I’ve put you through,” he said. “I feel like a horrible person.” I was speechless. Maybe he finally had changed. Maybe this had been my mother’s doing—her greatest sacrifice, to bring us together.

But days later when he was released from the hospital and back in his own bed, my real father emerged once again.

“I just don’t understand,” he began, “why you and Justin couldn’t have just had a commitment ceremony instead of a wedding,” his anger visibly rising. “And in front of all those people. And why did you have to take his last name?” He sounded paranoid. “You did this to spite me, I know it! Why did you do that to me?” I worried he was going to have another coronary, so I held my tongue. “We’ll talk more another time,” I said, and then got the visiting nurse to come and attend to him.

As Dad got stronger, Justin and I went out to dinner with him a few times, but the conversations were never nice. Back to his pre-heart-attack self, he talked badly about my brother and sister, trying to pit me against them. I think he always feared that if the three of us were too closely aligned, he’d be the one on the outside. He criticized my hair for being too long and my outfit for being too tight. He said that my sending fundraising letters to mutual friends and family seeking support for the foundation I created in my early twenties to help gay youth was done purposefully to hurt him. He’s back,I said to myself. I could see he had no compunction, no real remorse.

I started to have a sick feeling when we got together, and then even when I wasn’t with him. I began regressing, emotionally, to the insecurity that plagued me through my teens and early twenties. With my father back in everyday view, I started to obsess and be compulsive about things I had let go of years before. Prior to this most recent and seemingly forced reconciliation, I’d come to accept that I’d never have a father who acceptedme. After years of hard work in therapy and time with him out of my life, I earned a freedom that I noticed my mother, sister, and brother did not enjoy. I wondered, why had I allowed this unchanged, disingenuous man back into my life?

Mom’s sudden death had thrown me way off course. Without my greatest ally, I felt unmoored, completely lost, and once again craved the strange but familiar comfort of my old, destructive customs.

Somehow my mind tricked me into believing that I deserved this nonsensical turn of events. Intellectually, I knew I had no business going back to this way of thinking and doing. I now had the love of my husband and knew this wasn’t fair to either of us, but I couldn’t stop myself.

It wasn’t long before Justin noticed the changes in me. I was isolating myself, running more and more, and eating less, sometimes skipping meals all together. I dropped five pounds, then seven, then ten.

“I know what you’re doing,” he finally said to me one day. We were sitting at the kitchen counter in our Charlestown home, as I made yet another excuse about why I didn’t want breakfast. “I see where you’re heading, and you need to stop now.”

“I’m grieving, Justin,” I snapped, rolling my eyes like the teenager I was when the addictions began.

“No, you’re starving yourself,” he replied. “And I’m not going to let you do that again.”

He took me in his arms, and I bristled. The pain of losing my mother reminded me of how deeply afraid I’d been of being so close to someone. It reminded me that real people can desert you, their absence leaving a void that couldn’t be filled. Justin kept holding me, though, until I finally warmed and relaxed into him. And yet, emotionally and psychologically, I still couldn’t overcome the return of the flood of chemicals in my brain and body taking control of me. I kept acting out, punishing myself.

My runs around the Charlestown neighborhood Justin and I lived in started to extend to the Navy Yard, past the Bistro where we dined before Mom’s death. I started to cut back on portions and began adhering to the Paleo Diet—another popular diet I’d discovered months before—more strictly. I was getting scared of carbohydrates the way I used to fear fat. Then, I started running even longer. It had been years since I’d run so many miles for such a long period of time. One day I even asked Justin to bring me water halfway through a run from Charlestown to Watertown and back. It’s back,I thought. That voice in my head returned. Those miles on an empty belly felt strangely painful, but good. I was making excuses on a regular basis to Justin why I didn’t want to go to our favorite pizza place on Main Street anymore.

I rejected his accusations at first, but then admitted I’d become overwhelmed with the obsessions and the compulsions again, albeit not to the degree I had when they took over my life a decade and a half before. Still, I knew in my heart that I was regressing to a Jon that felt much like the childhood or adolescent Jon I had shed so long ago. I was angry and I was turning that anger inward, like I had in the past. But this time I realized that I was angry. I was angry athim.

I resented that I was spending time with my father and could no longer see my mother. Visiting his house made me sick to my stomach. The eggshells I had walked on all throughout my life were still all around him. He hadn’t changed, criticizing me for one thing after another. He didn’t like my pink tie. He thought my untucked shirt was sloppy. He bitched about my sister not taking good enough care of him, and he complained that he had to send Jared money to replace a broken furnace and wondered how he couldn’t afford it on his own. The toxicity in my father’s veins never left after they removed the clogs in his heart. His own hurt was pumping stronger than ever through his recently restored heart, “the heart of a thirty-year-old,” he egotistically declared. Given another chance, my siblings and I had imagined Dad would change. Instead, Dad had started in on all of us, again.

“You know, I am sorry for what I’ve done to you in the past, but I just don’t get it,” he said again one day. “Why did you have to call your ceremony to Justin a wedding? Gay marriage isn’t what God had in mind. And remember when you created that foundation?” he continued. “That was really embarrassing that you sent letters to people I know, to my family.” I couldn’t just silently walk away any longer.

“Dad, I created the foundation to help save lives,” I said. “I’m not sure how that is embarrassing to you. And I married Justin because I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him. Why did you call your wedding to Mom a wedding?”

Then he puffed up, like he used to. “Don’t give me a lecture in my house, Mister.”

That’s when I knew: I had to leave his house altogether.

One day, sitting at my kitchen counter by myself, my iPod shuffled “Keep Holding On” to the play position. I began to cry. I remembered showing Mom the song sung by the Glee cast on the television that night we celebrated my birthday. I listened to the words and heard the many voices. Instead of just hearing my mom’s voice singing to me, “Keep Holding On,” I heard the chorus of my friends like Samantha, James, Charlie, Deborah, and Meredith telling me to hold on so many times in the past. I imagined my sister Julie that night she intervened when I was planning to kill myself, Jared at Rollins and at the Chicago Marathon telling me he loved me no matter what, Justin’s family loving me like one of their own, and Justin telling me and showing me each and every day that I was the best thing that happened to him. Did I really need my father telling me the opposite, still, in my thirties? Was this really what my mom would have wanted our relationship to be?

I didn’t want my father in my life. He was bringing me back to a Jon I didn’t want to be again. I didn’t want to go back to those doldrums, those self-loathing behaviors. I wanted to be the man my mom danced with at my wedding. And, in that instant, I knew that I had to get back on the path of letting my dad go for good. I needed to say good-bye forever. I know what I have to do, I thought. And I did.

You can find Jon Croteau’s memoir My Thinning Years: Starving the Gay Within at these retailers: