SPEAKING IN FRONT OF ANY-SIZED political crowd has never bothered me, but I was as nervous as a middle-schooler onstage when we pulled up in the Glezmans’ driveway for the first time after a four-hour drive north to Grand Traverse County, a few days before Christmas 2015. Earlier that day, I had been in full mayor mode, cohosting an event with Governor Pence to celebrate a major economic development grant. Now, sitting in my sweater and jeans in the passenger seat of the Jeep, with a sleigh’s worth of presents in the back for Chasten’s uncountable slew of extended family relatives, I had become a living cliché from a holiday-season romantic comedy: the boyfriend coming home to meet the parents for the first time.
I don’t know who was more anxious, him or me, but at least Chasten had the advantage of being at home. The front yard was a Christmas wonderland, complete with lights and Santa figures. (When the boys were young, Terry was known to go out while they were sleeping and use deer hooves to create “reindeer prints” in the snow on the roof.) Chasten beeped the horn as we came to a stop in the driveway, and within seconds a yellow Lab came bounding out of the garage door, followed by an equally energetic Sherri and Terry.
“Hey, Bubby!” Sherri enthused, looking younger than her pictures as she emerged from the garage to greet Chasten with a big hug. Next it was my turn, and the hug was just as big, followed by a generous handshake from Terry before he instinctively began helping carry in our things.
It quickly became obvious that I had nothing to be nervous about. Almost immediately I was on a sofa in their carpeted living room, answering questions about home and hearing about what Chasten was like as a kid. Since we hadn’t been dating that long, it had been decided that I would sleep in the guest room, which had previously been Chasten’s own; he, meanwhile, was relegated to the couch in the basement.
By the next day, to Chasten’s chagrin, we were reviewing embarrassing home videos of his boyhood. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet in sweatpants as the smell of homemade cinnamon buns wafted out of the kitchen, watching VHS footage of my goofy boyfriend-to-be at age fourteen in a school skit, while also playing one-handed tug-of-war with the dog, I felt more at home than I would have thought possible. The walls of the cozy living room ricocheted with the sound of Sherri’s high, contagious laugh as she threw back her head of long jet-black hair to relish one joke after the other. Terry was quieter, sitting in a recliner and smiling more with his eyes than his mustachioed mouth, occasionally patting beads of sweat off his shaved head with a bandanna and contributing details to the family stories being swapped.
We’d been dating only a few months, from that August night at the ballpark to this Northern Michigan holiday, but I felt immediately welcomed into the family. I got just as far as discovering the shoe box with the potty-training videos before Chasten felt compelled to intervene in my bonding with his parents, and proposed we go to the kitchen table and play cards or something. Later, when we arrived at the pole barn for the extended-family Christmas dinner, too big to fit in a house, a giant stocking with my name on it took its place on the inside of the garage door alongside those for the two dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins, filled with peanut butter cups and Slim Jims.
SO WARM IS THE BLANKET of love in that household, wrapped around Chasten and me both, that I struggle to visualize the darkness of a time in which he did not feel welcome there. Chasten, braver than I, came out at the age of seventeen. Hungering to understand the world, he had enrolled in a student exchange program against his parents’ wishes and gone to Germany. In that year abroad, he gained a command of spoken German, a little weight on his scrawny teenage frame, and a deeper awareness of who he was. Incapable of self-deception, he fully understood by the time he came back that he was gay, and needed for his family to know.
They thought it was a choice. It made no sense to them, hardworking and churchgoing people who did everything they knew how to set a strong foundation in life for their three boys, that the youngest could select such a destructive and immoral path. How could he harm his family like this? Or was it somehow their own fault, something they had done wrong when he was little, or even before he had been born?
In the weeks of turmoil that followed, it became Chasten’s turn to sleep in a car, as his father had. Working two jobs, enrolling at community college, and rotating between nights on friends’ couches and in a discreetly parked 2004 Saturn Ion, he was too busy and disoriented to contemplate the word “homeless” or apply it to his own case. He worked, he studied, he slept, while back home some kind of battle played out between things believed, things felt, things assumed, and things discovered. That battle took place out of view, but it ended when love and acceptance asserted their victory in the form of an unexpected phone call asking him to come back home.
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THOSE PAINFUL DAYS SEEMED impossibly distant by the time I met the family that warm Christmas, and only more so across the visits that followed and led naturally to a Thanksgiving morning that saw me rise before dawn at Chasten’s side in the guest room, and tiptoe out to head for the deer blind with Terry. A kind of adoption was in progress, communicated that morning in a different way than Sherri’s big hugs and loud laugh but just as clear, in the coffee and jerky proffered on the way out, the companionable silence as we shivered and scanned the woods for hours, and the wide-ranging chatter as we made our way back. I was made to feel the unique sense of welcome that comes from someone whose love for a son means love for whomever he loves, given on the sole condition that he be trustworthy.
After dinner, Terry and some of the boys went out for a second round of hunting, but in the traditional post-turkey drowsiness I decided to stay talking in the living room with the others, as the conversation turned to Sherri’s battle with skin cancer. She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.
And it was, each passing holiday, more and more our family, a different one than the one I’d grown up with, but surprisingly compatible, too. One summer weekend, my parents came up to Traverse and we went out on the Glezmans’ pontoon boat together, nibbling on Terry’s smoked fish and motoring among different favorite swimming and fishing spots.
If the stereotypes of our divided society in 2016 were to be believed, there would be little hope of my liberal, intellectual parents relating to Chasten’s gun-collecting, working-class, small-business-owning rural Michigan mother and father. But five minutes on the boat made it clear they would get on famously. Their rapport got a boost from the universal language of fishing, both social and introspective, which is capable of uniting people of almost any style and background. But mostly it was because of the simple, transitive effect of love: my parents for me, his for him, and therefore all of theirs for each of us and for each other, all rooted in the strong desire for us to be happy.
CHASTEN’S PARENTS ARE THE KIND of people who sometimes pay for the customer behind them at the drive-thru window at McDonald’s, just to put a little good out into the world, so it isn’t surprising that I am showered with gifts whenever I am at their home. Anything I have admitted to enjoying will make an appearance—from Reese’s peanut butter cups left under my pillow at night to offerings of dark-roast Keurig pods that Sherri will save in between my visits, knowing I’ll enjoy them more than anyone else in the household.