“Your parents don’t mind that we sleep together?”  “It doesn’t seem so, does it?”  “So they know that you — we — are gay?”  “They certainly do now,” I said.  My parents and I didn’t discuss the subject openly, which was a relief to me. Neither did we talk about it the next year, when they came to Staten Island to celebrate my being hired at an international school in Jakarta where I would live with Ferdy. Nor when Ferdy and I returned every summer for a visit.  Nor that July, when we attended to my father in the hospital room where he would die, and he introduced Ferdy to the nurses as his “youngest son.”  My mother did not fare well through my father’s final illness. She had knee-replacement surgery that left her hobbling.  Worse, her orthopedic surgeon had taken her off the antidepressants that had for decades stabilized her bipolar condition. In her hapless funk, she barely noticed her husband’s passing.  Before Ferdy and I returned to Indonesia, my aunt brought my mother into her Queens home for looking after. But over the next few months, reports from my brother indicated that my mother kept changing her situation, moving among other siblings’ homes, back to Millbrook, again to Queens and at last to an assisted living center near my brother’s home in Rockland County, N.Y.  Every summer for the next 10 years, Ferdy and I spent a month in a motel down the road from the center. We joined my mother for breakfast every morning to plan outings to restaurants, summer-stock musicals, casinos in Atlantic City and visits to her friends and family. We made sure it never conflicted with the center’s bingo nights or the ceramic lessons she enjoyed.  “I’m making a ceramic birdcage with two parrots,” she told us one day. “There are parrots in Indonesia, right? I’m going to send it to you when it’s finished. You like birds, don’t you Ferdy?”  “My father had a pet parrot,” Ferdy said. “It was devoted to him but bit the hell out of anyone else who tried to touch it.” He showed my mother the scar where the parrot had removed the tip of his index finger.  Ferdy enjoyed my mother, and she acclimated him to hugs and even kisses on the cheek. When Ferdy found himself alone with her, she would often ask how I was doing and tell him to take good care of me.  During those wonderful monthlong visits spread out over a decade, my mother fully embraced my lover in ways that demonstrated her love for me.  We kept up with weekly international phone calls, during which my mother would often ask, “Has the birdcage arrived yet?”  It hadn’t. Given the unreliable Indonesian postal system, this came as no surprise.  Eventually, I faced a far more serious Indonesian bureaucratic problem. The government did not issue work permits to expat teachers over 60, so when I reached that milestone in 2007, Ferdy and I needed a legal way to remain together.  Moving to the United States then was impossible for a gay couple, so as we flew to New York a day after emptying my desk at school, my plan was to return to Indonesia on a tourist visa until I could figure out a permanent solution.  Jet-lagged and stressed, we arrived at our motel in Rockland County to learn from my brother that our mother had been hospitalized with hypertension and arrhythmia. She was not in good shape, physically or emotionally.  I found her dazed but wickedly contemptuous of her nurses and doctors and loudly complaining about her roommate. I soon discovered that her cardiologist had taken her off antidepressants.  She was allowed to return to the senior center within a week but remained sullen and dismissive of everyone, particularly the once-close friends who tried to cheer her up. Soon she was pretty much left alone.  She had no desire to go out with Ferdy and me, although she acceded to my demand that we see her psychiatrist to re-medicate her against depression.  This new regimen had yet to kick in when I visited her the day before I was to leave for Indonesia. Because my mother’s behavior had been so distressing, I hadn’t asked Ferdy to join me; he remained in the motel. We planned to bid my mother farewell together at breakfast the following day on our way to the airport.  I had trouble locating my mother because a bazaar had filled the center’s campus: tables, vendors’ tents and crowds of people. When I finally found her alone on the porch in her wheelchair, she said flatly, “You missed breakfast.”  “Ferdy and I ate at the motel,” I said.  I suggested we take in the bazaar. She didn’t object, and I moved her down the porch’s ramp into the crowd. We passed residents my mother had once introduced to me as her best friends, but there were no greetings, no nods. I stopped at a stand peddling personalized luggage tags. “I can use these for the trip,” I said.  “Back home,” I said. “I leave tomorrow, you know.”  I paid for four tags, wrote down the name and address I wanted embossed on them, and was told they’d be ready in 15 minutes.  My mother seemed preoccupied, uninterested in the bazaar. I rolled her back to the porch and grabbed a chair next to her.  “Tell me,” she said after we were settled. “Are you homosexual?”  I was shocked. “You know that.”  “I thought you and Dad always knew. Well, not always, but from the time you met Ferdy ——”  “You have sex with him?”  “We never knew,” she said. After a period of silence, she asked, “How did this happen?”  We had the conversation we should have had a quarter-century earlier. My mother was lucid and direct, but not happy. “Ferdy’s a nice man,” she said. “I’m glad you have a good friend, but not — that way.”  I mumbled: “I’m sorry you feel that, but I’m glad we can talk about it. It’s a good sign.” I rose unsteadily from my chair. It was time to meet Ferdy for lunch.  I bent to kiss her.  Staring blankly at the bazaar, she said: “Goodbye then. Have a safe flight.”  I hesitated, wondering if I should remind her that Ferdy and I planned to meet her for breakfast. But I had been dismissed, so I headed for my car. I forgot about the tags.  That was the last time I saw my mother. Within a week of our return to Indonesia, she suffered a heart attack and died.  It hadn’t occurred to me at our last meeting to ask how she finally realized I was gay. My brother told me she had never discussed it with him. I surmise that one of her savvier acquaintances at the center, learning that Ferdy and I were arriving for our annual visit, may have asked pointedly about us and planted the seed.  A few months later, my brother called to say that a parcel had arrived for my mother. It had traveled around the world, but because she had botched our Jakarta address, the package was returned to sender.  It was filled, my brother told me, with broken pieces of ceramic.
When a gay son brings his boyfriend home to meet his parents, it leads to a misunderstanding that lasts for decades.