Some Fine Day

Part One: Baby and Toddler

Part One: Baby and ToddlerMaybe I was a mistake; a biological mistake, like a club foot or a port wine stain. Wine, sounds good. BRB. ***

I don’t like autobiographies, they’re too boring, there’s no plot, and the ‘hero’ is so, so perfect. NOT. Mine will not be like that. If that’s what you want, close the book now, buy some coffee and go home. Go to the movies. Robin Williams could have played me in the movie adaptation of my story, the book you are holding now.

So many stories start at the beginning and go on to the end; mine has no end as yet, and I hope, won’t for a long time. Or looked at sideways, has had many endings. I was a child; I was a teenager, a young married woman, an older married-to-a-different-person woman, and then, finally, I became me. Is that six? If I were a cat, I’d have three more; unless I get perfect in some way, I’m not sure I can handle three more of me. I’m not sure I can handle this one, let alone what’s left over from the previous five.

But let’s begin.

There’s a young couple in a 1939 Mercury, let’s say, speeding toward a hospital in East Saint Louis, Illinois. I have no idea what they’d done with the prototype, I mean, their first child, but number two is on the way and apparently, I am in a hurry. A police car gives chase to the speeding car; then when he sees my mother, blowing and grimacing, and my dad for once panicky and brittle, proceeds to lead, wrongly, straight to the closest hospital. So I was almost born Catholic.

But things work out, and they made it to the hospital they wanted, the one where their doctor was waiting for them. All I know about this time was that in 1943 mothers were kept in the hospital for two weeks to recover from the birth, and that I won the most beautiful baby contest for that month. A beautiful baby girl…so they thought, but looks can be deceiving.

Hell, I knew ‘they’ were wrong before I was five—that was the soonest I could articulate it, and I’m sure it came out as an ‘oh isn’t that cute’ moment on my parents’ side.

That being said, why did I go into hiding almost immediately? I felt like I was dead inside, below the neck; I was locked into a dark coal cellar of my own making, with only shame and cold darkness outside the locked door. There was one small window way up high, that I could only reach when absolutely necessary to save my ‘house’ or body from physical harm, or to get a breath of air, to keep myself barely alive. To keep from being completely dead.

Did I try to kill myself? No, because I didn’t feel like my life belonged to me, anyhow; it belonged to my mother, with whom I was fiercely codependent. I had no innate knowledge of how to be a woman in the world, and the information on being a man was not coming in anywhere, not from any role models, not from knowing anyone else like me, not from books or looking it up in the encyclopedia, even if I had had a name for it. Any time I even hinted at it from the time I was five, I was ignored or shut down so firmly, that I knew it was wrong to mention it. Who would believe me? Nobody knew anything anyhow.

All I had was shame and confusion, and guilt, but I don’t know why. I think I knew I’d be mocked if I wore boys’ shoes or trousers with a zipper up the front. And, that also had to be shoved aside so ‘no one would know.’ Why the shame and hiding? Research has not even helped me find an answer, other than that I had to act my role as physically assigned to me at birth in order to just survive.

Up through fifth grade, I was the most popular kid in school. Then puberty hit. Luckily in high school there were other rejects, I have no idea if the boys had rejects, too, but there were three or four other female outcasts in high school. One was poor, another only had a mother, a third was horse crazy. None of us bought into the expensive clothes and hairdos and shallow conversation, nor did we attempt to join in with the popular group. We were lucky to find each other.

By then, I’d been going to church and Sunday School for ten years. All the pronouns in the Bible and at church were him, his, he; I knew they thus didn’t pertain to me as a female. That was confusing and only helped me feel worthless.

I actually heard of Multiple Personality Disorder before I ever heard of Transsexualism and wondered if that was my ‘problem’. Then, because of the male pronouns plus how men worked and had adventures and were heroes, I thought maybe I was just jealous. My sister had blond hair and blue eyes and was the smart one; maybe I was just jealous of everything. That made me ashamed as well. As adults we once shared that we both thought our parents loved the other one better, so we both suffered from that.