What would it take to feel so much at home in your own skin that you become everyone you want to be? What do you need in order to feel so connected, so related, so much a part of the natural world that everywhere you go you wake up in your own bed? Who are those people who blow into any room, breeze into any town, cross every threshold as if it were their own front door?
Home. The final frontier.
I’m thinking of a gay couple that could have lived anywhere in the world. They could have built their house in any gay Mecca from Sydney to San Francisco. But they chose to raise their two sons in Nashville.
I’m thinking of two gay guys who’d felt their way through the dark cave that was growing up gay in the 1970s. I’m thinking of Curtis, the middle son of fundamentalist Christians. I’m thinking of Desmond, the oldest son of an hardworking but impoverished mother. I’m thinking of two gay guys who went off in search of something greater than themselves – and met a woman.
But not just any woman. Not just any fun, fully-alive, big-hearted, beautiful woman.
I’m thinking of Angela. I’m thinking of the woman whose belly became a home.
“I’m just the incubator!” she says.
I’m thinking of the belly of a woman who carried twin sons into this world, and passed them on to the two pairs of male hands who would carry them home. Imagine.
What would it take to so fully inhabit your own form that you don’t even have to click your heels together in order to know where you belong? In search of something greater than themselves, two gay men and one fun woman did one thing right from way down deep.
Just as Angela shared her womb with two separate beings, Desmond and Curtis shared their sons, named Roman and Nyro, with their surrogate mom ‘and her mom and dad.’ Just as Angela passed a pair of sons to the sort of people usually deleted from the family album, two gay men passed their ruby slippers to the very family that wasn’t so sure how they’d fit in.
It’s a song that sings throughout their film, Two: The Story of Roman and Nyro (coming Thursday, Oct. 10 to the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival). In her mesmerizing directorial debut, Heather Winters barely mentions the decidedly un-Christian campaign to banish all things gay from the American family.
Instead, she gives us two gay men who appear to include the entire world in their vision of ‘hearth and home.’ Instead, she gives us something we real, something complicated, something commendable: the parents of Angela, Desmond and Curtis as they confront fear, myth and prejudice. Instead, she gives us a struggle not only towards family, but towards human unity.
Instead Winters gives us hearts, and their infinite capacity for adaptation and growth.
From an evangelical named Mary Ann, Curtis’ mom, to Ruby and Ken, Angela’s mom and dad, the village of grand moms and granddads grows. From Desmond’s father and Angela’s husband, to Bon Jovi and Deepok Chopra, the ruby slippers hop from family member to family member like sticky bee feet from flower to flower.
What would it take to feel so much a part of the world womb that everywhere you go “there’s no place like home” – because there’s no place that isn’t? Angela, Desmond and Curtis shared what they had, and when they did it grew and grew until you get the feeling that it now includes everyone, including you.
In Chopra’s words, this is the law of giving that comes to life when we “give what we seek.” This is the “generosity” defined by A Course in Miracles as “giving away in order to keep.”
It is the generosity which the film spotlights when Angela’s mother, Ruby – who has plenty of reasons for disengaging – walks to Angela’s side as the two babies she carried for nine months go home with Desmond and Curtis. It is the generosity on display when Curtis, who shares no DNA with his sons, is kissed and reassured by Desmond, the biological father.
The law of giving is seen most clearly when Desmond, Curtis, and Angela’s mom enter the delivery room as a team. In that room, the biological father and the birth mom’s mother add one perfect voice to the song of universal awe as Roman and Nyro enter the world.
Peggy Green is a writer, a motivational speaker and a personal coach. Visit her at www.peggygreen.net Email her at peggy@peggygreen.net.
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