#but i'm not gonna fuckin disrespect marion and her son by using Ashkenazi prayers lmao

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

In the early 1980s, my mom came out as a lesbian and her mom told her "fine, but don't talk about it in front of your cousins" talking about my uncle ron's youngest daughters who were young teens at the time.

And for a while mom went along with this, but then her middle cousin started becoming more and more visibly a lesbian in the closet herself, so my mom said fuck it, and brought a partner with her to the next holiday so she could show her cousin it was okay to be herself.

My uncle ron putters over to this giant of a woman (mams always did like her butches over 6ft), looks her up and down, shakes her hand and slips her a gin and tonic, and then turns to mom and just says "cousins is cousins" and wanders back off again to chat with one of his kids.

I grew up my whole life hearing that phrase. Cousins is cousins. And it wasn't just about blood, it was a found family thing, you know? From inception, the whole point of this was "kiddo, I love you, and so I love anyone who loves you like they're my own." I think a lot about what it means to be a man like that with the weight of family obligation and generations of religious trauma on your back, and still look at this young woman you watched grow up and say that loving someone and being loved by someone will always matter more than anything else, no matter how important that other thing might be to someone.

I don't think the man ever understood a goddamn thing about my gender, but I know he loved me and he was happy that I was happy, and he was tickled pink that I liked the idea of aging into him.