What the inside of the closet looks like

I get what it feels like to be gay and excluded. Before you laugh me out of the room, I know, I’m a totally privileged middle class to-all-appearances-hetero white American woman, but at the same time there's another side to my story. I have a darker seam, a sadness born of experience and a caution bred of the same. And I have raised a freak flag a mile high by painting my house purple. Yet I can’t really come out as what I am.

The problem is this: If my honey and I ever want to adopt again, we have to be so upright and squeaky clean. For the most part, I am a great mom, but if I say out loud that I do not abide by the same rules that most people have no trouble with whatsoever, every time the folks with a choice would pick for a different mom for a child who needs a home and family. But I want to leave that option open, so I can’t totally come out. So I fly my purple house flag (which just cheers me to no end when we drive up – you wouldn’t believe how many colors of purple it can be in all of the different kinds of light that hit it). I indulge my cravings for musical thrill rides. I still go out at night.

But it’s like being gay and not being able to say so in every situation. Or telling your doctor you have a history of some disease and having that come back and bite you in the ass later by making you uninsurable – something that you never would have anticipated back when you first told your doctor in the spirit of being thorough and honest about your medical history. So I can’t say it now. I can’t preach what I practice. It’s just not ok. Because I see a good chance that some day we will want to adopt again. For I would hate to miss the opportunity to share the love that we have the potential to add to in the world over this.

But I do feel one of my jobs here is to be myself as truly as possible, so I'll find a way through all of this.