Research technician Jean Ansolabehere is surprised to find herself falling in love with a woman in her lab.
Jean Ansolabehere is a cartoon writer with past lives as a research technician at Stanford University and the Huntsman Cancer Institute. She has loved biology since the first time she got stitches and, in her research and her writing, she strives to understand the human condition through the human body. She also strives to live by the philosophy of her four-year-old half-brother, who is pretty brave when it comes to anything, except his T-Rex toy. He's terrified of that thing.
This story originally aired on Dec. 22, 2017, in an episode titled “The Science of Growing Up.”
Story Transcript
So depending on how you count, I either came out to my mother super early or like really late. The first time that I told her I liked women, I was ten years old and we were in the parking lot of a McDonalds. I did it because I've been in love with this girl in my class named Margo since the summer before. It was like the kind of love you can only feel when you're ten before you've gotten any baggage and all your gooey feelings are just on the table. She was so cool. She wore Converse high tops.
And standing here saying this to all of you makes me really nervous because, spoiler alert, I never told Margo how I felt. I didn’t then, I haven't since, but I changed her name and you guys look like you could keep a secret, so let’s keep going.
I didn’t tell her because I went to an all-girls’ school and the meanest insult that kids from other schools could level at us was calling us a lesbian. So I didn’t know very much about being a woman who loved a woman but I knew it couldn’t possibly be a good thing. My feelings about Margo had become my deepest shame, the kind of confession that sits improbably close to the tip of your tongue. I was so scared that I thought if I didn’t tell my mother I might actually explode.
My mother was the smartest person I'd ever met and I thought if anyone would know what to do, it would be her. So it’s a Tuesday night, we’re sitting in my mother’s white minivan and we’re bathed in the glow of Mickey D’s arches. My mother says, “Are you ready to go inside?” And I say, “I’m a lesbian.”
My mother says, “Where did you hear that word?”
I told her where I heard it. I heard it from the mean kids from other schools who lobbed that word like a grenade at my classmates. My mother told me I wasn’t a lesbian. I took a deep breath and, for the first time out loud, I said, “But I love Margo.” And without missing a beat, my mother responds with a litmus test that I will never forget.
She says, “Would you rather have a picture of Keanu Reeves on your wall or Julia Roberts?”
This is 1999 and The Matrix has just come out. Julia Roberts is pretty passé so, obviously, I say Keanu Reeves, and the tension in the car breaks immediately. My mom is like, “You've nothing to worry about. You're not gay. See. This sort of thing just happens to young girls. You're fine.”
Then the knot in my stomach evaporates and I’m like, I’m fine. I’m ten years old and I’m straight. I have nothing to worry about.
I carried around the Keanu Reeves Test as empirical proof of my heterosexuality for the next 15 years, and this is how I know that my mother would have been a great scientist.
She's a teacher, but I’m pretty sure that’s just because when she went to college in 1963, female scientists were pretty few and far between. I think she sometimes still feels like she missed her calling to be a researcher or a doctor. She even talks about it in kind of oblique ways like, example, she sends me a lot of articles about stem cell research or space travel from the New York Times and they always have like, “So exciting,” or, “It would be so cool to do this.”
And they used to be newspaper clippings. Like she would mail them to me, but, recently, she found the Forward-This-Article button on newyorktimes.com and now she's unstoppable.
When I was in college studying human biology, she would call me once a week just to see what was happening in the classes. She wasn’t checking on me, she was checking on the curriculum. I mean, for crying out loud, when I was six years old for my very first science fair, my mother orchestrated this giant, show-stopping project on the circulatory system. It was huge. Like no six-year-olds could have done this.
And the best part of it was she bought this lamb heart and we dissected it together in our kitchen. I remember her pointing with the tip of this bloodstained knife and showing me like the aorta and the pulmonary artery. And I was staring at this glistening heart just sort of splayed open on our kitchen counter and it was so strong and so impossibly complex with these intricate highways snaking in and out of the ventricles. I remember thinking I'd never seen something so beautiful.
I think that might have been the moment that I knew that I love science. From the look on my mother’s face as she sliced open one of the ventricles to expose the valve, I could tell she loved it too. So yeah, I became a scientist.
I was a research technician at a microbiology lab in Utah, where I was living with this guy I was dating at the time. Long story. And it was a great job. I was basically studying DNA replication in cancer so I spent a lot of time either in the cell culture room or in the microscope room, which is my favorite because I was taking pictures of fluorescently tagged DNA fragments, which, if you've never seen them, they're so beautiful. They just look like fireworks across the slide. It was an amazing job. My mother was so jealous, it was great.
However, I was not great at the job. My first week there I broke a mercury thermometer in a hot water bath, which is bad because mercury is super toxic and more toxic if you heat it and evaporate it into the environment. And it’s worse because I waited a whole day before I told anybody about it. When I finally did, they evacuated the building.
It was humiliating, but I’m not sorry that I did it because that was the day that I met Beth, this postdoc in the lab next to ours just a couple of benches down. She was smart and deadpan with these quick little hands that could do anything, which is super important if you're in a lab.
That day, we were all standing outside waiting for the poison control people to let us back into the building after the thermometer thing, and she came up to me and she was like, “I know you broke the mercury thermometer.” And I was convinced I was about to lose my job when she leans in and she goes, “Welcome to the club.” I fell pretty hard pretty fast after that.
It turned out that talking to Beth was a jolt of adrenaline. I felt like a superhero when I made her laugh. We rode the bus together and we talked a lot about what it felt like to be a transplant in Utah. She was from Oregon, I think, and I was from Los Angeles. I found myself looking forward more and more to days when I wouldn’t be holed up in the microscope room doing my favorite experiment, when I would be out on the floor running gels or something and talking to her.
And she made me nervous. She made me so nervous, the way that Margo made me nervous when I was ten years old. Once, I was holding a box of Eppendorf tubes while I was talking to her and my hands were so shaky that I just dropped them all over the floor, like 200 precious samples just scattered across the lab. I got down on my knees and Beth laughed.
She got down to help me and I was like, “Oh, my God, your laugh is so pretty.” And then I was like, Oh, no. This can’t be good.
But it wasn’t like I was going to do anything about it. It was a crush. It was a full-blown crush that might be signaling the beginning of the end with my boyfriend, but I wasn’t going to do anything about it. I was a straight girl with a boyfriend and a fun work friend who had a very pretty laugh. And I was fine with everything, just the way it was, until this one night.
Beth invited me to a party at her place, this cute little craftsman-style house in the hills behind Salt Lake City. I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but I did my makeup, which I never do, and I insisted that I go alone. When I got there, I spent like five minutes in the car just psyching myself up to be brave enough to go ring the doorbell. I finally do and Beth opens the door and my heart, like, stops for a second.
She's like, “Jean, oh, my God. I’m so glad you're here. I saved you cake.” She saved me cake! “This is Travis.” And she steps aside and she wraps her arms around this very tall, very geeky, very nice-looking guy and he puts his hand out and he goes, “Hey, nice to meet you. I’m the old ball and chain.”
That’s when I realized she's wearing a ring. She's always been wearing a ring. Like we wear latex gloves in the lab so maybe you couldn’t see it exactly but there's a bump. She was wearing a ring. I just didn’t want to see it. And if I was going to be a good scientist, I had to stop seeing only what I wanted to see.
So I went home that night a little bit heartbroken, pretty devastated. But more than that, I went home finally ready to start accepting myself for the person that I was.
So the second time I came out to my mother I was almost 25. I was living in Los Angeles, again, the place where I grew up. We were in a parking lot, again, this time at Baja Fresh. It’s true. I was at the very beginning of the best relationship of my life with a woman named Alicia and she said, “Are you ready to go inside?”
And I said, “I like women.”
She put her hand over her heart and she said, “That makes me really scared for you.”
My mother’s heart is strong and scarred. It is an intricate network of arterial highways and heartbreak. She is still the smartest woman, the smartest person I've ever met, but she's been told over and over again that she can’t. And I am so grateful that I live in a city and in a moment in history where I can, I really can. I can be a scientist, I can be in love with a woman. None of that makes me afraid. Not anymore. Thank you.