An unexpected milestone

Well, it's been a rough week in the world of headlines.  Kim Kardashian's divorce is turning ugly.  Joe Paterno has gone from potentially resigning to fired, and Ashton Kutcher is no longer allowed to tweet his own tweets as a result.  Herman Cain maintains that he doesn't know the women accusing him of sexual harrassment, and Rick Perry stuck his foot in his mouth, but he'll survive to joke about it.

In the Atsma household, however, things have been looking up. After two weeks of training in Taiwan, my husband is home again.  The irony there is that we got out of the Navy to find a job that would allow him to spend more time with the family, and now we find that his new job is going to send him away for the whole month of December.  That means that once again we most likely won't put up a Christmas tree this year, but that doesn't disappoint me as much as I thought it would.  I guess I'm getting used to it.  I got a half an hour with my best friend and cleared up a few matters that needed clearing.  I found curtain rods for the livingroom and got half of our kitchen table stripped.  Boogaloo made overtures toward going #2 in the potty after a disastrous accident at the park Tuesday morning (oh ick).  I found a good chiropractor, and I made the acquaintance of the dog-walking lady.  Oh, and the Broncos won last Sunday.  Overall, this week has been a week on the heartening side.

But I had a growing moment today that gave me pause, and after reflecting on it for a while, I just have to share it. 

Boogaloo and I were at the park walking Max and playing on the climbing structure, and there was another mom there with a little boy about two years old.  She had overheard my conversation with the aforementioned dog-walking lady, so we just pretended that we'd been introduced and started making conversation.  Her little guy was named Merrit (which I think is a brilliant name for a boy), and he was living up to his name by trying to do everything on a playset designed for five- to ten-year-olds.  We as moms deplored the lack of toddler friendly equipment and the presence of a slippery dew.  Then as conversation lagged, I noticed that her sweats said Air Force down one leg, so I said, "I see you have Air Force connections."

"Yeah," she said.  "My father was in the Air Force, and my wife's father was too, so it's something we like to commemorate. Do you know someone in the Air Force?"

My mouth made reply.  "Yeah, my dad was in the Air National Guard, but my husband just got out of the Navy."  My smile did not falter, and my tone of voice did not change.  However, my brain and gut both screeched to a halt as I tried to process, "Did she just say wife?" 

Yes, she did. I'm embarrassed to say that I ran an internal diagnostic to make sure that I wasn't mistaken in what I was seeing or hearing.  I mean sooner or later I should have expected to meet someone of the homosexual persuasion, but I guess I didn't expect to meet one at the playground.  I was thinking in a group of theatre people or maybe among Seth's coworkers.  I think my basic mental picture was yuppie intellectual male, not mom in sweatpants who refers to her partner as "mommy" in the hearing of her little boy.  I guess I didn't expect something so foreign to my psyche to be so close to my world. 

I related my little adventure to Seth over lunch.  He laughed at me.  He even grinned a little when I admitted that until she said wife, I had been thinking about proposing future playdates, and after she said it, the desire just died away completely. 

"Love," he said.  "You let her play with Wiccans." 

He's right, as usual.  One of my best friends in Bremerton was a Wiccan, and Boogaloo played with her kids all the time.  People thought Boo and T's youngest were twins because they were so close to the same size.  I was similarly startled when I found out that S. and T. had kids, but then I had the excuse of processing the appearance of two totally pierced-up, gothed-out, black bedecked people at night. Somehow, that image just didn't fit with my concept of "parent." There was nothing strange about this woman that I'll call M. (for mommy).  I wouldn't have been surprised to see someone like her at my Bible study.  Someone like her just doesn't fit my concept of "lesbian."

So what does it say about my mindframe that I get a gut-check at the idea of letting my kid play with the child of a lesbian but not at the idea of playing at the house of a witch?  Wicca is a religion, a spiritual state, and it's contrary to Christianity.  They don't acknowledge the rights of God, and they're inclined to defend the claims of the devil, literally.  They open spiritual doors and converse with spirits that are by Christian definition hostile to humanity.  I don't regret my friendship with T.  It helped me grow a lot, and I hope it leads to her to Jesus eventually, but the fact remains: you can't be a witch and be a Christian. 

You can be a lesbian and be a Christian.  There's considerable controversy over whether or not you can indulge your feelings, but the two are not mutually exclusive.  Homosexuality is not, in itself, a spiritual activity.  So why did it cause such an instant change of emotion in me?  Why did the urge to get to know her better just die? 

I don't know.  Part of my response probably comes from hanging out on the pro-family scene.  Most pro-life organizations are also against homosexual normalization.  I've been telling myself that I'm not going to form any opinions about LGBTQs until I know one well enough to ask awkward questions, but I don't think I ever expected to meet someone of the persuasion.  Maybe, and most likely, I just need time to process this.  A part of me ponders the boundaries and requirements imposed by my faith.  If we become friends (and we don't even know each other's names, so really, I'm fussing about nothing at this point), how far can I reciprocate friendship?  Can I invite them into my home if I decide that I can't validate their lifestyle? How do I explain to my daughter that good, friendly, responsible people that we like a lot can be live contrary to what we know is true?  I needed 30 years to come to that conclusion.  How do I teach her to stick to the Word without sticking it to her neighbor, a fence the Christian community walks all too often?