So you think you have family drama?
Imagine Englishman James Lubbock’s surprise when after he left home for college, his ‘happy” parents separated after a huge Christmas argument and were divorced by the end of the next year.
A few years later, his father asked him to dinner saying he had something he had to tell him. According to Lubbock’s account in the Huffington Post, “He played with his soup, and looked decidedly nervous through our starters, which was very strange for me to see – Dad was usually so confident and certainly never awkward with me.
“Losing patience, I asked him to reveal all.
“He looked up but avoided eye contact, and began by telling me that at school he sometimes had feelings for boys… he was gay.”
Lubbock said he was shocked. He left the restaurant “feeling as if my life had completely changed, but in a strangely positive way.”
Imagine his shock a week later, when his mother asked him to dinner, “We were having a general catch-up when Mum mentioned she had recently moved in with a lady called Susan.” His mother explained that she was a lesbian and that Susan was her partner.
Lubbock’s mother and Susan were together until her “untimely death from ovarian cancer eight years later, which shook me to my core. I’m still very close to Susan and we see each other regularly,” Lubbock wrote.
He also said that this experience gave him a whole new look at the complexity of the human experience.