Waiting For The Call

From Preacher’s Daughter To Lesbian Mom

Jacqueline Taylor

“Well-written, absorbing, and a great pleasure to read . . . will appeal to Christians struggling to square their traditional beliefs with acceptance of homosexuality as well as to all those interested in adoption, lesbian marriage, and the changing shape of America’s families.”–Elizabeth C. Fine, Virginia Tech University Waiting for the Call takes readers from the foothills of the Appalachians–where Jacqueline Taylor was brought up in a strict evangelical household–to contemporary Chicago, where she and her lesbian partner are raising a family. In a voice by turns comic and loving, Taylor recounts the amazing journey that took her in profoundly different directions from those she or her parents could have ever envisioned. Taylor’s father was a Southern Baptist preacher, and she struggled to deal with his strictures as well as her mother’s manic-depressive episodes. After leaving for college, Taylor finds herself questioning her faith and identity, questions that continue to mount when–after two divorces, a doctoral degree, and her first kiss with a woman–she discovers her own lesbianism and begins a most untraditional family that grows to include two adopted children from Peru. Even as she celebrates and cherishes this new family, Taylor insists on the possibility of maintaining a loving connection to her religious roots. While she and her partner search for the best way to explain adoption to their children and answer the inevitable question, “Which one is your mom?” they also seek out a church that will unite their love of family and their faith. Told in the great storytelling tradition of the American South, full of deep feeling and wry humor, Waiting for the Call engagingly demonstrates how one woman bridged the gulf between faith and sexual identity without abandoning her principles.

From Booklist

Taylor opens with a stunningly moving depiction of her 14-year-old adopted daughter’s baptism into a pentecostal church in Chicago that includes gays and lesbians, ‘a place,’ the teen says in tearful gratitude, ‘where both my moms are welcome.’ Taylor then recalls herself as a youngster, loving the church as much as she sometimes resents the burden of being a Southern Baptist minister’s daughter and expressing her wish for ‘the call’ to at least missionary work. As she matured, her life felt restricted to her, and she ‘escaped’ in succession to college, a failed marriage, and a second marriage entailing relocation to Chicago and three failed pregnancies. Meanwhile, her mother’s manic depression steadily worsened. At 31, despite an upbringing in which homosexuality was ‘unmentionably beyond the pale,’ she left her husband three weeks after her first lesbian kiss; struggled to a kind of adjustment with her shocked, disapproving, but loving parents; and eventually found a gay-friendly church and a life partner. A compelling testament on the permutations of love. Whitney Scott

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Details

ISBN	9780472115945
Genre	Autobiography/Biography
Copyright Date	2007
Publication Date	Mar-07
Publisher	University of Michigan Press
Format	Hardcover
No. of Pages	220
Language	English
Rating	NotRated
Subject	Biography & Autobiography / Women; Christian Lesbians; Christian Lesbians – United States; Christian Lesbians/ United States/ Biography; Taylor, Jacqueline
BookID	14151

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Waiting For The Call by Jacqueline Taylor