003 | Coming Out as a Modern Family

Modern Love是《纽约时报》最受欢迎的专栏之一，刊登的是读者投稿的真实情感故事。

从两年前开始，《纽约时报》和波士顿公共广播WBUR合作，推出了同名的播客节目。每期的节目都会挑选一篇专栏文章，邀请明星嘉宾朗读，并回访作者，请他们分享后续的故事。该节目绝对是良心之作，故事简短丰富，明星嘉宾的朗读丰满贴切，后续的回访分享也是耐人寻味，能让人产生情感共鸣。

本电台将会持续给大家更新节目的音频和文本。

以下是本期节目的部分文本：

003 | Coming Out as a Modern Family

When my 12-year-old son, Jackson, asked me if there was something I wasn’t telling him, I replied, “There are a lot of things I don’t tell you.”

“Like what?”

“Adult stuff.”

He persisted: “What kind of adult stuff?”

This was the moment I had been anticipating and dreading for months. “Like romantic stuff,” I said, fumbling for words.

“What kind of romantic stuff?”

“Well,” I said. “Like how sometimes you can be friends with someone, and then it turns romantic, and then you’re friends again. Like with Dad and me. Or romantic like Bryn and me were, and then he and I became friends.”

“So are you romantic with anyone right now?” he asked.

I took a deep breath, knowing that my answer, and his response, would have an impact on our lives for a very long time.

He was right; I was with someone romantically and I hadn’t told him. I had become involved with a woman who was my best friend, and, as it happens, a person who is like a godmother to my son.

How and when should I tell him? When I explained the situation to a therapist, she smiled and said, “Your son may say a lot of things about you when he’s older, but he will never say his mother was boring.”

Her advice was to wait until he asked. And now here he was, asking.

About a year before this conversation, I had been sitting in my garden in California, looking through photos and old journals I have kept since childhood. From a green tattered notebook with ink hearts drawn on it to the one I started in Haiti while helping after the earthquake there in January 2010, the journals told stories that seemed woven together by a similar theme.

.......

文本过长，不能全部都放上来，如需完整版的文本，也可以移步到我的微信【下班哥泡英语】，回复“Modern Love”即可获取。