New York, Dec 2 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The hippie mom in the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties” Meredith Baxter Birney has finally come out of the closet on the ‘Today Show’ and has revealed that she is a lesbian, and she has been keeping her sexual preference a secret for seven years. She is currently in a relationship with Nancy Locke.

The much loved and beloved television mom Elise Keaton from “Family Ties” and the former wife of her “Bridget Loves Bernie” co-star David Birney spoke to Matt Lauer about her late-in-life discovery. She said that it was a late awakening in life and it explained her difficult relationships with the men in her life. “I did not want some tabloid to take a story and make it up,” she tells Matt Lauer on the “Today” show. “So I wanted it to be in my own words.” She approaches it all with a quiet, down-to-earth manner.

This revelation is no surprise to her 5 children from various marriages. She had two children with husband Ted Bush, and later had three more with David Birney. When she broke the news to them then instead of them being surprised it was the other way around, because they said that they knew it all along.

“Some people would say, well, you’re living a lie and, you know, the truth is — not at all,” she told Lauer. “This has only been for the past seven years.” She was forced to admit after a National Enquirer report about her that she was spotted “traveling with a female friend” on a Caribbean cruise sponsored by lesbian travel company Sweet.

She later talks and thanks Matt Lauer for handling the issue in a sensitive manner and for the acceptance of the fact that she is a lesbian. She says that she can live in peace now, after admitting her secret to the world.