The hardest thing that Barbara Terhorst ever had to do in her life was reveal to her children what she thought then was her most shameful secret.

"I never wanted to be gay," said Terhorst, 73, who moved to Grass Valley in December 2006 to be closer to family living in the area.

Growing up Catholic in the Bronx, New York, during the 1950s, Terhorst felt that admitting the truth about her sexuality would have disgraced her family, not to mention condemn her soul to eternal damnation.

This Mother's Day, as Terhorst reflects on how grateful she is to have six children, she's also glad that she gathered the courage to come out of the closet in 1980, at the age of 47.

Even though same-sex unions are legal in three states and Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, the decision by a gay person to come out to family still can be difficult, according to Pat Paddock of the Nevada County chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

"I imagine it's the hardest thing they have to do," said Paddock. That's because people coming out "risk taking the ultimate rejection" from loved ones, Paddock said.

For Terhorst, the decision was excruciating.

In 1980, she had been a widow for more than 10 years after her Marine husband, Bernard Terhorst, died in the Vietnam war in 1969. While the marriage had been a happy one, it had not changed the fact that Terhorst was gay, which she had told her husband before they married.

A development in Terhorst's personal life forced her to call a family meeting. She told her children that she had fallen in love with a woman and wanted to move in with her new partner.

"I'd just blown the lid off their lives," said Terhorst, who described her kids as "pretty shaken" by the news.

They were upset, she said, not only because their mom was a lesbian, but "they were going to have to move."

Brian Terhorst, who was 16 at the time, remembers being angry with his mother for a couple of years after that.

While he suspected that "something different" had been going on with her, he said, "I didn't have a place in my head to put that."

Terhorst's children, (who ranged in age from 11 to 22) in turn outed her to her mother, who was still living in the Bronx.

Her own mother's acceptance was paramount.

"I could not have stood to be estranged from my mother," Terhorst said.

In the end, Terhorst's budding relationship fizzled and the family did not move out of its Novato home. But as wrenching as her confession was, it changed her life and made her feel a new sense of dignity regarding her sexual orientation.

"Being gay is such a huge fact of life for so many people in so many families," she said. "It isn't going away, and it isn't a choice."

To offer confidential support to people with gay friends or family members, the Nevada County chapter of PFLAG meets on the fourth Tuesday every month from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Community in the Mountains, 246 S. Church Street, Grass Valley. For more information call 273-4735.

<i>To contact Staff Writer Jill Bauerle, e-mail jillb@theunion .com or call 477-4219.</i>