I grew up in a Catholic household, Catholic parents and Catholic high school. When the time comes to tell your family, you go back to that twelve years of Catholic education and upbringing and think, dear God, I’m going to be chained to a cross and burnt outside the front of my house.
The first person I told was my brother who in London, he said ‘No shit.’ and I thought ‘Ok, this could be easy.’ I told my other brother and he said exactly the same thing. But the working up to your parents is the hardest part. My Mum’s like a cool, contemporary woman but my Dad grew up in the country and worked on a farm at one stage in his life and I am respectful of these things, certain things shock certain people.
When I told my Mum she said, ‘Sometimes I think I’m a lesbian’ and that was kind of her way of saying ‘it’s a phase’, but my draw dropped to the ground, ‘You’re a what?!’ and she then spent the next five minutes trying to reclaim what she said. I thought I can’t continue telling this story right now because you’ve just taken it all back to yourself. It was a hilarious moment where I realised that she fine was it and kind of thought it was OK.
I didn’t tell my Dad though, he actually found out when a colleague mentioned it to him at an event, he replied, ‘Well he hasn’t told me’, so then that week I had to tell him and he said he was fine with it. I was surprised by my Dad’s reaction, I thought he’d be shocked…but he was actually OK with it, and that was a bit weird. My whole family was OK with it. It is big when you say, but once it’s done – it’s like OK, next thing.
