Some Fine Day

But Hey, Some Background First

But Hey, Some Background FirstOh, but I was talking about my background! Well my dad had a male cousin who…never married. He had a female cousin who had a ‘live-in companion’. Yeah, right. He himself bought Mom satin nightgowns and slips every Christmas, and my mom would go in the bathroom and cry. Guess who really wore them; you think?

So here are all the actors on the stage; Dad, Mom, ancestors in the shadows, my sister and me, various aunts and uncles and cousins. In my opinion, there are two things that make you who you are: one is your family/background/environment and the other is what you brought to this planet, your own inner self, which is probably not even known to us until after it all unfolds, years later. Nonetheless, family; how did they affect me? How did I interact with them? What did they teach me? How did that play with what I brought to this planet? And when they disagree, which one do you believe in?

I think I chose the wrong one; I never validated my belief that I was not a girl but a boy; how crazy a secret was that anyhow, in 1948 when I first articulated my feelings? Of course at age five I had no concept of what that whole difference entailed, anyhow. As I got older, I got quieter, stuffed myself and that deep dark secret down into the coal cellar of my mind, and firmly locked the door. From the age of ten, I wrote, daydreamed, played pretend, and dreamed at night—as male. Exclusively. Only once did I think of myself as a girl/woman; I dreamed that I was a little black girl in a blue dress, crying in a hallway. Not until after surgery and hormones did I ever dream of myself as a female, and not very often then either. Oddly enough in my dreams I could never see what clothes I was wearing. (Note: I am 75. Last night I dreamed I was a normal, ordinary, beautiful young man, teenager, naked at the doctor’s office, no big deal, nobody cared. I lay back over some chairs as if it were the most common thing to ever happen. That feeling of wholeness that there probably isn’t even a language for, because it’s never been needed by the majority of people. I feel now that if there is indeed a spirit form of ourselves, that it was complete.) How do you make a life when you are not a whole person, but only the shadow of one?

From my dad, I learned to keep quiet; that if I bothered him, I’d be sorry. I don’t think he ever sexually abused me, but I’m not sure. Physically—yeah. Long story short; he’d hit me on the back of my left hand at dinner out of the blue for what felt like no reason—I laughed too loud or had my elbow on the table. Years later when I became a cutter, you know what I cut? The back of my left hand. Yeah…The morning after he died, I woke up feeling safe. That’s a fact; I have no explanation why. The only advice he ever gave me was, ‘Be nice, even if it hurts.’ You can translate that as ‘be a victim: don’t bother anyone; you’re only a girl’.

My mom taught me how to be—or pretend to be—a woman. I had no freaking clue. I knew I couldn’t copy my dad (that would be crazy, right? After all I was only a girl.) Anyhow I didn’t like him, did I? Hell no. He was cold, remote, busy with anything at all more important than me. Though he was a good father until…until I was about the age, three or four, he had been when his father was lost at sea. Swinging me around by my hands or building me a swing set doesn’t exactly make up for a dozen or so years of being told to pipe down, go away, and keep quiet. Being afraid of him wasn’t exactly a way for a daughter to learn how to interact with men, or for any child to learn s/he had any self-worth at all.

Nor did my sister and I bond too much for too long, unfortunately. In our shared adult past however, she has been ‘there’ for me in more ways than I can ever repay.

Ancestry shows that I am English, Welsh and German. As it is, I had an ancestor at the court of a German king; unfortunately, he was the jester. Suits me. So that’s where I got my sense of humor from.

My father emigrated from Wales and met my mother, who was at Deaconess School (whatever that was) in New York or Connecticut or wherever it was. For some reason they hit it off (he had a flivver for one thing, and I guess Mom liked the tall and moody type). Because my father was employed by United Engineers and Constructors as a de facto cost engineer, we moved a lot. We were in Illinois when I was born. When I was four months old, we moved to Colorado, then New Mexico just in time to live downwind during the atom bomb tests (that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it) and then to Texas. All I know about that time is that at one point we lived in a converted gas station, and I sat on the floor and ate bugs. Later they moved to Connecticut where we lived in three more different places. We moved on average of every two years until we got to a place I personally hated, and there we stayed for six years. f**k me.