Who's Stressing Whom?

Now the fun begins...

Today Mom told me she was "getting a lot of grief" over her promise to let me stay with her after I recover from my surgery. She's also pledged to go to the hospital with me and to stay while I'm there to lend moral support. "I really want to do that for you," she emphasized.

Really, neither she nor Dad will have to do much else while I'm in the hospital. I really don't want anything more: After all, what could they, or anyone else, give me that's better than that?

But Dad and my brother Mike say it might be putting a strain on her if I recuperate at Mom and Dad's house. They have a point, and I promised Mom that if I found out that she had to do anything strenuous for me, or if she simply wasn't feeling well, I would make other arrangements.

One thing (among many) I can say for Mom is that she follows through on her commitments. So I know she did not make her offer idly. And I really don't want to cause her unnecessary stress. However, it looks as if there will be stress anyway, although it (or at least some of it) may not come from where or whom it might've been expected.

Mike expressed his own discomfort about the fact that I'm going through with what my decision to live as a woman, as completely as I can--which he presented as concern for Mom--when I talked with him last week. I have always known that he wasn't crazy about my gender change, and I never expected him to be. As for Dad, he had actually been supportive in his own ways, if not enthusiastic. That has been a pleasant surprise for me.

Still, I wish he'd voiced his concerns directly to me rather than feeding them to Mike, who's using them as fuel for his own agenda. And I wish they both would lay off Mom. Whatever happens, Mike won't be part of my surgery or recovery. He has no desire for that, and I don't begrudge him. However, he did ask me to schedule my surgery so that it wouldn't "interfere" with my nephew's graduation from high school, which my parents plan to attend. That is the reason why I scheduled it for July (which, I admit, is a nice birthday present) instead of June.

I may just make new post-operative arrangements anyway simply to spare my mother from further conflict. Then again, I wonder whether that would work, given what results have come from my attempts at trying to make things easier (I can't make them easy!) for others. Even though I reiterated for them the same promise I made to my mother, my father and brother still are talking as if I don't care and am trying to bleed my mother dry.

Oh well. I kinda knew that when the six-month milestone approached, someone was going to flip out. And I didn't expect that person to be me. And I'm not that person.

All I want is to be happy and to be good to the people I love. Why is that so hard for some people to understand?