When I Wasn't Thinking About What Could've Been

Yesterday it was lunch with Mom and her friend. Tonight, after I took a bike ride, it was out to dinner with Mom and Dad.  We went to what is easily my favorite place to eat in the town in which they live:  Mezza Luna. 

The place is closed on Mondays.  The other day was Easter, and this week is Spring Break in much of the country.  So, the restaurant was full when we got there: We had to wait about fifteen minutes for a table.  In the meantime, Mike, the owner, offered everyone who waited free slices of pizza. And, the waiters and waitresses, who apologized for "backlogs" in the kitchen, brought pieces of dough for kids to play with.

Situations like the one I've described are interesting becuase I don't spend a lot of time around kids or, for that matter, families other than my own.  Sometimes it's hard for me to look at kids, even if they're friendly to me, because I find myself thinking about how I might be different if I had lived as a girl.  But today, I didn't find myself thinking about that.  I also didn't think about what my life might have been like if I'd had kids or if I had the same spouse or partner for most or all of my adult life.

For that matter, I wasn't even thinking about what my relationship with my parents might have been like had I grown up as a girl, or even started my transition at a younger age.  Instead, I enjoyed dinner on a warm, pleasant evening with Mom and Dad.  Perhaps this was one of the reasons to have taken the path I have followed.

Meeting My Brother

Today I saw Mom, Dad and Mike.  They were all understandably tired:  The last couple of days have been busy for them and the weather had been oppressive.  Mom said that she doesn't think she can make any more trips from Florida to New York/New Jersey, mainly because of her age and the health problems that have come with it.  Dad feels the same way, but I think he was dreading the drive back to Florida even more than any prospective future trips.  That, too, is understandable.


Later this year, Mike will have one of those big round-number birthdays.  Given that, he was looking rather good, I thought, and I told him as much.  I think that might have been more of a surprise, for him, than anything else that transpired. It wasn't the sort of thing I would say to him when I was still living as Nick.  I guess it's not the sort of thing male siblings normally say to each other.


Now I realize that I may never have complimented him on anything until today.  Actually, I'm pretty sure that I never complimented him.  I mean, what kind of an older brother would I have been if I did?  ;-)  As if I were ever a model of siblinghood! (Does such a thing exist?)


  
Over lunch, I sat across from Mike, with Mom and Dad at our sides.  My conversation with Mike was, at first, almost an interview:  He asked about my work, when my summer class was ending, and when the new semester starts. Then we talked about my upcoming trip, his plans and about my nephew. I was glad, really, that the conversation went the way it did:  I felt, in a way, reassured because it's the sort of conversation we might have had even if I hadn't undergone my transition.   It was more or less what I could have expected under any set of circumstances that included not seeing him for about fifteen years.  


As we parted, I said, "Let's not let another fifteen years pass."


"Don't worry.  We won't.  I'll probably be coming this way more often now that Matt is grown."


I hope he's right.  Even though we weren't close--in part because of our difference in age and in part because of our differences in temperament and interests--I don't feel like I want to "make up for lost time."  Really, it's not possible to do that.  I would simply like to get to know him.

The Childhood We Always Wanted

The other night, when Pauline and I were scavenging the racks at The Strand bookstore, I found a copy of "Blinded by the Right."  In it, author David Brock tells the story of how he sold out his principles to become the one who wrote "The Real Anita Hill," among other things.  


But what's truly heartbreaking about it is that he was, from his early adolescence onward, a closeted gay male.  His father was even more conservative (in the truest sense of the word) than his colleagues and bosses in the right-wing publications and think tanks for whom he worked.  As he became more and more enmeshed in the world of right-wing punditry (I was tempted to write "puppetry."), he became more and more fearful. As you might imagine, the circles in which he traveled were inhabited mainly by men who wanted to be, well, men, at least by their definitions of the word.  So homophobic and misogynistic epithets were as much a part of their vocabulary as the names of tools are in the language of a construction worker.


At times, Brock says he was trying to gain approval from his father, who never wanted to hear about his boyfriends or any other aspect of his homosexuality after he "came out."  You might say that he was looking for surrogate fathers among his editors, coaches and others who mentored him.  He also felt as if he were always the "outsider" and could operate in no other way. That is the reason why his first political hero was Robert F. Kennedy, but by the time he was a sophomore in college, he was hanging out with the Young Republicans.


Through it all, he felt intense isolation and loneliness, to the point that he couldn't form relationships even if he'd wanted them.  That sounded all too familiar to me.  


I think of that now when I replay, in my mind, a conversation I had with someone who said that he felt gays were always "throwing their preferences in other people's faces."  Now I wish I had explained this:  When you're straight and cisgender, you don't really need to assert your desires:  People assume that you want to have a relationship--in whatever form it might take--with a member of your opposite gender, and that you want to, in some ways, fit collective notions of how members of your gender comport themselves.  When you don't have the same attractions the majority of the population feels or don't think you are the gender to which you were assigned at birth, you must speak up for yourself, especially if someone thinks he or she can "change" you by finding someone for you.


But this self-repression that so many of us practice, whether we are forced into it or feel as if we are, is inevitably self-destructive.  It leads some of us to abuse substances, and others (or sometimes the same people) into abusive relationships.


Some people, of course, want us to conform to their notions of gender identity and sexuality no matter how much harm it may do us. But there are others who simply don't, through no fault of their own, understand why  you cannot be a part of the gender binary or the heterosexual world.  In other words, they simply don't know how to support us in the ways we need.  


Now, at least there are more people who understand than there were when Brock, Pauline and I were growing up.  But I hope there will be more.

Talking To My Father

Today I made it a point of calling my father when my mother was out.   Even though my relationship with my father has improved greatly, I still talk much more, much longer and in more intimate detail with my mother than I do with my father.  Most likely, it will always be that way.  But, because today is Father's Day, I wanted to get into a conversation with my father that wasn't just an afterthought of calling my mother.


He was apologetic about the fact that my mother wasn't there.  Of course, it made no sense:  After all, he didn't tell her to go shopping.  But, given our history, I can understand why he'd still think I was calling to talk to my mother and that I was talking to him only because he happened to answer the phone.




Sometimes I wish I could've had a different relationship from the one I had with him when I was growing up.  Then again, I could say that about nearly all of the relationships I had.  In fact, I could say that I wish many other things had been different.  But, of course, that would have meant my being--or, at least, living as--a different person from the one I had been.  I think he understands that now.  I know my mother does.  Sometimes she berates herself for not knowing--about me, about her own life and life generally--what she knows now.  And he has wished that he could have been a different sort of father from the one he had been to me and my brothers.


Still, even though I  would have liked for him to understand me better than he did--and that I could have spared myself and others, especially my mother, all sorts of pain--I don't regret any of it.  Perhaps that seems contradictory. But I know that had I not lived the life I lived until my transition, I couldn't have understood, much less helped him or her or anyone else to understand, why I need to live the life I'm living now--which, of course, is to say, to understand that I am the person I am.  


That may have been more difficult for my father to learn because, first of all, we didn't have the kind of relationship that my mother and I have shared.  But, equally important, I, and then he, had to learn that I simply could not be the sort of man he might have hoped I would become because, well, I simply couldn't have become any sort of man at all.  And I think he now understands that I really tried--and, it seems, he respects that, and the fact that I've been doing what I need to do in order to be successful in any sense of the word.


The man has tried.  That's really all I can ask of anybody.  And, I'd say, he's learned and showed me a facet of himself I didn't think he had--or, perhaps, that I couldn't allow myself to see:  that he is a man who's capable of compassion, if not empathy.  Right now, that seems to be working pretty well. 


Perhaps I'll never be able to say, as Cordelia says to Lear, "My love's richer than my tongue."  But if we have more respect and understanding for each other than we did before, then I think he's definitely achieved something.