Where's My Keys?

Between “Where’s My Keys?” and “We Have to Stay”

I love many people and many things. I love my husband more than you can imagine. I love my family and my mom with every fiber of my being. I love being a gay man. I love being a son, brother and father. I love striving toward a better future. My reflection today is not necessarily about loving someone or something or not loving them. I’m instead pondering the in between. The complexities of trying to thrive and find our way in an imperfect world.

On a recent visit back to my childhood home in Oklahoma, my husband and I sat with my 97-year-old mom in her kitchen after another breakfast she had just made for us. We were continuing days of morning conversation enjoying a second or third cup of coffee. All the prior conversations had been about catching up, sharing memories, without a lot of background tension. I felt accepted and loved and at ease, so much so that I asked my mom if she wanted to see pictures of our wedding. I was certain she would. I quickly pulled up photos from my phone.

She stopped me in my tracks though saying, “No thanks. I’m traditional, old fashioned. I don’t want to see them.”

Shaking her head.

The room froze.

Our facial expressions didn’t change. The split seconds however extended into moments and then just as suddenly the “movie” resumed, the conversation picked up mostly where we’d left off, ignoring the obvious breach. The atmosphere though had altered dramatically.

Hours later my husband and I talked about that awkward, confounding moment. He loves and supports me and said, “These are your people, I get it. We accommodate and keep the peace, of course.”

Then came the big but.

“But If these were my people? I wouldn’t put up with any of that. I’d be, like, where’s my keys, babe? We’re outta here.”

Where's my keys?  Shorthand for that moment when you've had enough. When your personal, hard-won dignity demands departure. Just leave. It’s not worth it to stay now and keep trying.

He was describing a hurt. A sense of righteous anger and frustration. Feeling “less than”. That the seeming “acceptance” may have been superficial or at least had very clear limits.

He was right to be frustrated, for sure.

But we also could not simply leave my family or my home or my mom, all of whom we both love. We couldn’t do that.

I've been thinking about that moment ever since not because I'm sure there was a right or wrong way to react, but because I'm not sure there is a right way. That’s my point here.

All of us in our country right now are faced with unbelievably painful binaries like, leave or stay? Engage or cancel? Impossible choices we're all making, every day, in a nation that's coming apart at the seams while we're still trying to love each other across the fractures.

I am talking a bit here of course about the tensions in our politics and how we all experience social progress. Topics that make some very uncomfortable.

“Can we avoid the politics and just get along?”

I don’t think we can.

Here are some things I do know: My Oklahoma family used to be Democrats. Union Democrats, New Deal Democrats, the kind who believed government could help ordinary people.

Over time, they drifted away. Not because they stopped caring about others, but because they felt unseen and talked down to, told their concerns didn’t count. They worried about immigration happening faster than their communities could adapt. Economic insecurity. About whether anyone in power still understood their lives. And too often, people like me, educated, urban, comfortable, far away, spoke about them instead of with them.

I don't agree with all their conclusions. But I do understand the hurt that got them there. I’ve felt those things myself as I’ve navigated life far from home.

And here's what else I know: When I told my family I was gay, they didn't hesitate. They held me. They told me they loved me. My 97-year-old conservative mother in particular set the tone, “I love my son. Period. I’m so glad he’s happy and has a wonderful husband. Period.” She and my family welcomed us together into her home, into her kitchen, into her heart. Until I pushed asking her to look at photographs of an immensely important event in my life. That was too much.

The contradiction is real. It's not theoretical. It's sitting across the table, passing you the bacon, while also in the next breath refusing to even politely look at an important moment in your life all while also insisting she loves you. It's your husband's righteous anger and your desperate conviction that walking away means giving up on something larger than any single hurt.

We spend so much time now talking past each other or not talking at all. We've sorted ourselves into bubbles and filter feeds, places where everyone already agrees, where we can be righteously angry without having to sit with the discomfort of someone we love saying something that breaks our heart. We've made it so much easier to leave. To find our keys. To go.

But if each of us good people on our own cannot find ways to stay and stay engaged, to keep showing up, to hold the tension of loving people whose viewpoints, or beliefs or politics hurt us, then what happens to us as a nation? If I can't sit across from my own mother, who held me when I needed holding, and somehow hold both her love and her refusal, how do we expect 330 million strangers to do it?

I'm not saying my husband was wrong. I'm not saying anyone should accept degradation or abuse in the name of family harmony or national unity. I'm not even saying I'm sure I made the right call by wanting to stay.

I am saying: This is where we are. In the space between "where's my keys?" and "we have to stay engaged." Between the legitimate need for self-protection and the desperate hope that connection is still possible. Between the hurt of being rejected and the memory of being embraced.

My mother is 97. That means she was born in 1928 between world wars. She was a school kid during the Great Depression. FDR was her childhood president. She grew up in a world I can barely imagine, and she's traveled further toward acceptance than many people half her age. It may well be she can't make it all the way to where I need her to be, but she’s made it far enough to hold my husband's hand across her kitchen table. That's something. It's not enough, but it is absolutely something. Maybe everything.

And maybe that's what we're working with now: not enough, but something. A handhold on a crumbling cliff face. The terrible, fragile knowledge that we need each other, even when we're hurting each other. Especially then.

I don't know if there's a lesson here, or just questions: How do you love people across an unbridgeable distance? How do you stay when staying hurts? How do you leave when leaving means severing something you can't get back?

My husband may have said he’d just reach for the keys. I said we have to stay. We're both right. We're both wrong. We are trying to figure out how to live in a country that feels more fractured every day, starting with the people we love most.

If we can't find a way to do this, to hold the contradictions, to sit in the discomfort, to keep showing up even when it costs us something, then I don't know what happens to us. To all of us.

We of course stayed. We kept talking. We didn't avoid the tension; we just didn't let it be the only thing. And when we left, it wasn't because we found our keys. It was because the visit was over, and we'd be back. We will be back. That's my lesson and maybe my prayer that stubborn, foolish, necessary simple acts of faith in each other just might hold our nation together, one impossible conversation at a time.