Some Fine Day

Bye, Bye, Connecticut, Hello Michigan

Bye, Bye, Connecticut, Hello MichiganDuring the fifties, adults were no longer concerned with war years. History claims the important things were prosperity and compliance. Being different didn’t even seem possible, let alone desirable. Now this is based on me as a small child in a small town, with small-minded parents. Three different towns in Connecticut, two in Michigan; eight different houses, four different schools. Every two years something new. I don’t remember it bothering me until the last two, the two different houses on Grosse Ile. Grosse Ile was different: money, distance, attitude, and I was by then hitting puberty. Up until that move, I had no idea what prosperity meant or difference in economic levels; no, that’s not quite true. I knew, it just wasn’t a big issue yet. On Grosse Ile the income difference made ‘prosperity’ not only noticeable but an issue; the wrong clothes, the smaller, older house, the old furniture. Yes, I knew what fingerbowls were, but there were a lot of wealthy-type ways of doing things, and of being, of which I had knew nothing.

Compliance was also a bigger issue. In fifth grade, still in our first town in Michigan, Marine City, the only time it was a big issue for me was in ballet. We were doing minuets, and simply because my partner was taller, she was to dance the male part, in the male costume, while I got the long dress and the curled hair and girl part. I can still feel grief over that; it was just so wrong and there wasn’t anything I could have said or done about it.

What I could see of compliance, was, at puberty, having to wear the same straight or plaid pleated skirts, the same Peter Pan collared blouses, preferably from the Little Shop and not sent away for from Montgomery Ward or sewn by my mother at home (even though one did have kittens on it; yeah, you can picture that). I forgot what else I was going to say. I’m currently having a hot flash because my testosterone shot is due in two days. Yeah…fun and games. And I just realized that, if I had been snarky, I’d have called The Little Shop ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’, but I was jealous and hurt at the time, so maybe not.

Talk about compliance, both behavior and dress, and probably more grown-up ways than I can imagine even now, I wrote an essay about ‘Nonconforming to the Rules of Nonconformity’. Should have had an A on that one and I probably did. Maybe an A+, I don’t know. I did on another paper I wrote. The teacher, Mr. Kastre, said to put this on the title page; ‘(Title) for Mr. Kastre’. Mine ended up as ‘Life after Death for Mr. Kastre’. A+ material there.

Who was I then? That wild little girl who pretended all the time, in privacy being a cowboy or a boy and having real adventures, because only boys had adventures, not girls; in public a girl like any other, only more determined and more attached to her mother because without that role model, she would have no clue on how to be a female, and terrified that only a dark dank basement full of monsters, with all exits closed and locked, awaited if she did not act the part proscribed by her body.

I think I was truly happy then, until age ten/eleven and the move to Grosse Ile, but it was a happiness built on quicksand. I had not yet figured out that the phrase my father used the most then, ‘Some Fine Day’, meant probably never. And even though my first-grade teacher told my mother I had leadership qualities, I could not lead myself out of the darkness that was to come as I grew out of innocent childhood.

The first place we lived in in Michigan was Marine City: I loved it there, along the river, two different houses but both within walking distance of downtown, the river and my friends. I am still in contact with my best friend from that time, though she was highly uncomfortable the one time she met Robyn and me during our beginning transition times. I’m not sure just how much she’s changed in that attitude since then, but remember, this is a little girl who would sit naked on my bed reading comic books with me. This is the one who was screaming her little girly lungs out when I saved us from drowning in the river. This is the one who, later, I saw sitting on a float in a parade, with one knee drawn up, looking more feminine than a poster girl, something I would never be able to, or necessarily want to, emulate.

I was going into third grade when we moved to Michigan. As the schools in Connecticut had been so far ahead of the ones in Michigan, I was put into fourth grade instead, which I always think was a mistake. For the rest of your school life you are younger, smaller, less mature than all the other kids in your classes. The only time I was comfortable was in eleventh grade when I refused to take Home Economics. They would not let me take Shop, and I was put into Art class with all tenth-grade boys. Talk about feeling like I belonged! If only I hadn’t been so heavy into hiding. I wonder if any of those boys were gay?

It was only a few months before we moved, autumn of sixth grade; I was ten years old, when my puberty issues came to my awareness. I wanted to talk to someone, for someone to really see who I was, and there was nothing I could bring myself to do. I’d never heard of my feelings before in anyone else. I’d never heard of the word ‘transsexual’. When Christine Jorgensen returned to the USA in the early fifties, I heard nothing about it, but later when I did, I would have thought that it did not pertain to me, as I was already female. Can you call it denial if you don’t know that there is something to deny? Reading about it now, the fact that the news stressed her beauty and her mink coat would have also put her transition far out of the world of accessibility or ‘normality’ (ha-ha) for people like me, anyhow.

I just found my Marine City sixth grade report card. It has only the first two sessions because we moved after that. My teacher was Mr. Ferrett; he liked me best of all the kids. I got all A’s. And some of the categories we were judged in were in ‘Citizenship’; yes of course I got all ‘Satisfactory’ in these important, life-long, future-determining habits, such as keeps hands away from face, uses handkerchief, works and plays well with others, and controls speech habits. I can remember my mother often telling me to ‘modulate your voice, dear’ but I never did understand what the frick that meant. If she’d said I should be a little quieter? Or not sound snotty and angry? Yeah, that probably wouldn’t have worked either, because I think even then, I was too deep in denial and control to understand much of anything, let alone thinking I had any control of my body or future. Being nice, now, that I could do.

Note: right now as in most days, the drunks and homeless sit across the street waiting for their free dinner at the Catholic Church with its Feed the Homeless program (so they have money for drugs, cigarettes, dope and alcohol, as it turns out). But where I’m going with this is, even now, I’m so tuned into the anger and trying to be quiet and not annoy anyone, and being so afraid of my father’s displeasure, that I’m tensing up. I hate that aspect of where we live right now. And writing about the time I am, when all seemed so peaceful and people were so compliant and homogenous, but underneath…yeah. It’s like it’s erupting right around me, hearing them curse and argue out there. It’s like a volcano in the past is finally, finally, erupting. Maybe it wasn’t my father; maybe it was myself.

As a kid—I was popular and had many followers, I mean, friends. When I hit puberty and we moved…that was over. The saving grace was that I had already been writing for almost two years and had my innermost hidden identity firmly in my mind (locked in, but still active when I was alone) for the six years of junior and senior high school. No longer popular, my friends were half a dozen of the other outcasts.

So two periods into sixth grade, in Marine City, Michigan now, where I was the most popular kid, and very comfortable with myself and my surroundings, and the adventures available to me, we moved. We had been moving every two years or so, but this one coincided with the onset of puberty for me. This one took me from my friends, my river, my ability to walk to town/school/everywhere, to Grosse Ile, Michigan, a wealthy enclave with no way to walk to anything reasonably quickly. There was no after school activity; one had to catch the bus. There was no beach; there were no friends nearby. And what I hadn’t really thought about till now is how inflexible wealthy places are compared to the free and easy ways of an average town. My clothes were no longer the same as everyone else’s, but much cheaper. My hair wasn’t cut at the right place and in the right way. The best thing about our house was the undeveloped field out back, where I reenacted Audie Murphy in ‘To Hell and Back’ on some old rusting farm equipment that had been left there.

I learned to be invisible, at the same time that I yearned to be visible. Standing beside my father in church, listening to his one note, bass voice, how I wished to be invisible then, and yet, I wanted to be acknowledged by the other kids from my class who also went to little St. James Episcopal. It’s there, out of all the church going years, that religion affected me the most, and negatively at that. One thing was that the Bible and church literature all used male pronouns; as a female, I assumed they did not include me. It certainly confirmed in my mind, that I was unimportant, as did my father who would tell me to ‘pipe down’ almost anytime I had anything to say.

TEN UP (first time through puberty, the wrong one)

Ordinary Life Becomes a Battleground

So, puberty. Now is a good time to write about that because I am sick right now, anyhow and feel like crap, and I felt like crap all those years, too, from age eleven and three/fourths until I had my first child. That is sort of the end of puberty, I guess. Womanhood for sure. Ready or not, willing or not. Of course, I had to hit it early—I mean not even twelve yet? What the f**k was my body thinking? I’ll tell you what my mind was thinking; let’s see, menopause happens when you’re fifty or so, so that’s FORTY f*****g YEARS OF THIS s**t? That dark, door-less basement had just gotten very real.

I’d started writing and pretending when I was just ten. And from then on, all my dreams, daydreams and writing, I was male. Remember that I had only once dreamed that I was female—and that was the little black girl in a blue dress, crying in a hallway.

And yes, around that age I started having female problems (already) as well as Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and migraines. My periods were not just emotionally horrible but physically horrible as well. At that time, hard periods were said to be caused by your own attitude toward them; blame the victim even then. It was horrifying. Why could I not tell someone why? Because I didn’t really believe it was possible, myself. I thought it was some shameful insanity I had; what did they call it then: ‘p***s envy’? I see now there are multiple websites concerning transgender and self-doubt. For me, just reading some of them in recent years, made me see how self-doubt carried over into almost every area of my life.

I can picture my ten-year-old self lying on my bed in the house on South Water Street, Marine City, writing my first story. It was set in the Blue Mountains, and I was so proud of thinking that name up all by myself. Of course, I found out years later that there were Blue Mountains, for one, in Australia. Great minds think alike. I have no recollection of what the story was about.

The older I became, the more I had to write, and almost all the stories were of teenage boys. There were more cars in the stories than girls. Yes, I was boy crazy as a teenager and even wrote a short journal about that, but the stories I wrote were with the main character being male. That was how I would live through being a teenage girl, by opting out a few hours every evening and being a boy in my writing.

Now back in Marine City; my best friend M. and I had gone to see King Kong. It was dark when we came out and my mother forgot to pick us up, or my sister, or someone, and there we were downtown, in the dark, all alone…So we walked home. I might have been a few months older than my best friend, I don’t remember, just that I wouldn’t let anything hurt her. And she was such a pretty child, and graceful and all the things I knew a real girl should be, and I was not. Didn’t make me jealous and sometimes I thought I should copy her, but I did not. She’s still beautiful. Last week I saw a girl behind me in line at Starbucks who reminded me so much of M. as a teenager, and I told her so, and that she was still beautiful, so she would probably be a beauty all her life as well. It wasn’t a lie, I meant it.

I’m pretty sure my transition either frightened her or repelled her, but we’re still in contact.

There was a time that left me with a scar I still have. I was running and leapt onto the corner of a cement wall. The corner of the block went into my shin. I had jeans on and didn’t feel anything, but I knew something wasn’t right, so casually went home, sat down on the living room floor, and raised my pant leg. There was a triangular shaped hole in my leg, and inside it I could see the blood in the vein running, flowing, and the bone right behind it. “MOM!” Everyone came running, and even my sister who started stroking my hair. I don’t remember getting to the doctor, but I remember the stitches coming out and the stitching having to be redone. Turns out I couldn’t just recline on my bed and read like a good little girl, could I? Nope. Yes, I still have the scar. Want to see? At least it was an adventure and only boys have adventures; only heroes get scars, ran my thinking at the time.