GenderBendy

Quasi-spousal musings

I have a fantasy which breaks taboos central to all the families and cultural circles in which I have ever lived. To indulge in this fantasy makes me feel transgressive and afraid, because it involves desires of which, from earliest childhood on, I have been taught to feel ashamed. It also makes me cry, because I've wanted it so hopelessly for so long.

My fantasy goes like this: there's a man (or otherwise masculine person) in the other room, reading the newspaper. I am in the kitchen, making a cup of coffee for him, the way I know he likes it. I bring it in and put it on the little table by his elbow. He looks up at me and smiles and gives my hand a squeeze and says, "Thank you, my dear." I smile back and lean down for a kiss. Then I go back in the kitchen and continue cooking brunch.

Whoop whoop whoop! Feminist, queer (in the man version, anyway), and anti-conventional alarms all going off! But there it is: sometimes I think I might just like to be (except for the married part, probably) somebody's wife.

Hey, it's not bad to do sweet little things for someone you care about, even if it does look like serving them. I can't believe I have to assert that, but such has been my upbringing and my romantic history to date.

Also, I will say in my defense that this imaginary perfect husband of mine is not my lord and master. He's my partner. A minute after the above scenario ends he gets up and comes in and chops veggies for the omelets I'm making for us both. Later on we'll work in the garden together - he'll heft the flagstones I can no longer heft (my hero!). Later on again we'll have friends over for a dinner we both cook. Later on again there will be, as Joni Mitchell puts it, so much sweetness in the dark. And through it all (so my fantasy goes) he cherishes me, telling me again and again in whatever ways come naturally to him that to him I am the most beautiful, most desirable woman in the world.

In short, he is a gentleman, I am his lady, and we are in love with each other. Isn't that a pretty fantasy?

Even if I was done I fear my dreamboat will be hard to find, and I'm not done. Here's the really tricky part: this paragon is also going to have to be at ease with the fact that for nearly half a century I had a male body and lived as a man. He can't love me because of it, though...although I guess it will be OK if he appreciates my history and struggle - how could that not be part of it? (I honestly can't see yet how this part works.) In any case, he can't ever want me to be a man again, not even for one second. And he's going to have to have the patience, creativity, insight, and wit to figure out how to love a woman who for the first fifty years of her life has only ever had secret crushes. I am so inexperienced and so very skittish. Loving me will be a challenge, a conundrum, and a gamble.

Yeah, a gamble; because I do think there is a payoff. I happen to think that I have some truly out-of-the-ordinary, extraordinary love to offer to the right person - to a smart secure sympatico grownup with unconventional and discriminating taste. If you appreciate natural femininity, you'd have to look a long time to find a woman more on-purpose and joyful about her femininity than I am. There's also all this devotion I've been saving up in my secret girl heart for all these years: first-love intensity aged through long but undaunted adversity, then sparked to effervescent life by the miracle of midlife revelation and release. Some lucky someone is going to give me that first kiss. (Or, nearly first...first since the surgery. Too bad, Jasper dear, we turned out to be so romantically incompatible.) That and what follows could be fucking intense, for both of us.

Another thought: I probably know more than any other woman you've ever been with about the burdens and paradoxes of being a masculine person in the world. Who better to appreciate your natural masculinity than someone who inhabited masculinity herself for four decades?

Besides which, you'll never anywhere find a finah desinah vaginah. You're going to have to not get your undies in a knot, though, if you can never beat me at chess.

All together, my love is a curious and rare vintage at long last come to maturity and ready for decanting. Could be vinegar, could be transcendent. I wonder if anyone I'd like to try it with might ever like to try it with me. Here's cautiously hoping...

The Lobster

I have become nocturnal. Last night's adventure in gritty overnight verismo blogging led to napping all day today, and now it's 11pm and I am as awake as I have been all day. That's fine, because the computer is free! Ten-finger typing! This blog post is going to be airy and light because it is being typed about twenty times faster than the last two. And just to give a complete picture: I am dressed in a nightgown and bathrobe, and am kneeling on a folded towel in front of a nice little hardwood desk in a well-appointed living room. One of the many cool things about this aftercare residence is everyone's complete acceptance of all sorts of dress, walking, sitting, and doing, at all hours of the day and night.

I have a new room and a new roommate, named Cat. She's cool - a tattooed ex-musician DJ with three kids, two of whom are just about the age of mine. I finally busted through the weird calm I have been feeling and cried listening to her tell her daughter on the phone what a great kid she is and how much she loves her...and I am totally tearing up again as I type this. Tomorrow - talk to the children. We've fb'ed, but it's not the same as voice to voice, and I *am* going to blub like a baby. Mad, Sam, if you read this before we talk, brace yourselves. I am so incredibly proud of you, and your response to my turning out to be a woman. Hell of a curve ball, as I've said before, to toss into anyone's adolescence, and we've had a few bumpy patches, but that was mostly me. You have behaved with consumate grace and aplomb, and taught me important teachings, and I am more happy to be your father/parent/mother/whatever than anything else in my whole life ever. I love you with all my heart, and that's for always.

OK. Pause to blow nose...

I think the vibe here must change each week with the comings and goings of new batches of patients. The current batch, as a group, has a lot of humor and attitude...meals are raucous, with multiple conversations going on in French and English. Some quieter people seem to be choosing to eat around the corner at the little wicker tables in the foyer. The staff seem sometimes harried, but in all good-humored and alive to their patients. It's a happier, more communal feel than the hospital. Other things which are better: the food, cooked fresh each meal; the beds, with remote controls on long cords; and (I think I've got the name right) Yvonne, a former patient become semi-official den mother to the house. In ten minutes of confiding and cheerfully bossy chat she taught me and Cat more about what the rest of this is *really* going to be like than all the official prep.

One thing I could do without: two loudly ticking clocks in the bedroom. Ah well.

I'm getting sore, and so must wrap. The key point I wanted to get across: this surgery turns out to be a huge tease. I have *not* seen my new parts yet, and will not for several more days. They will be revealed in slow (and often uncomfortable) stages, the first of which I will encounter on Sunday: the removal of the surgical dressing. Yvonne told us the proper name for it. It's The Lobster, because that's exactly what it looks like - this red ribbed thing crouching in all our crotches. Ew and incredibly cool at the same time. There's a whole other new life under that...I am getting eager to see.

Serenity

Elizabeth woke, slept, and woke again through the wee hours. Her last shot of Dilaudid had been at 10pm, and by 5:30 the next morning she could feel it had worn off, but she did not immediately call Chantal, the night nurse, to ask for more. Dawn crept through the louvers, a muted green-gold luminosity.
There was no sharp pain, only many discomforts: a sore lower back, various itches and tickles, and between her legs, the sensation of the old accoutrements oddly squashed and pinched. The phantom scrotum, she and Sus had both said last evening, simultaneously finding the aptest and funniest phrase. Elizabeth particularly welcomed the clear feeling of a pinch at the tip of her departed penis - her clitoris, now - because one rare but possible bad outcome had been the loss of sexual sensation.
Then there was the growing feeling of something rocklike in a spot for which she had no word to fill in the blank of "...where my _______ used to be." Chantal, not knowing the English word for what was causing the feeling, called it "la moule," pronouncing it like the English word for a tunneling rodent, which was good for a laugh. A quick check on the Android (and, oh, how Elizabeth loved her new phone) provided the translation "mussel," but also "mold," i.e., something in the line of a condom crammed hard with cotton balls, maintaining the vault of her new vagina.
By 630a, pain meds seemed called for again - sensations becoming more raw - and soon Elizabeth floated warm and sleepy...she set the phone aside to finish her laborious yet meditative one-finger typing later...
***
After a delicious hour of nap, Lisa resumed her typing, gently stoned. Breakfast would be soon, then a first try at walking. At her request the nurse opened the louvers, which led to an impromptu duet with Danielle in the next bed on "Here Comes the Sun." Danielle, a garrulous Québécoise paper deliverer with an incomprehensible rural accent and little English, made surreal company.
And what of the expected emotions? The tears, the euphoria? Absent. In their place an enduring calm. The drugs perhaps, but also the release from long tension and suspense. The deed was done. No going back. No desire to go back. No regret. And perhaps, theoretical for the time being, the first inkling of a new freedom to turn toward the world with love in a way which had always until now felt unsafe.
Sitting up for breakfast brought on a sharp bout of nausea and dizziness. Much healing yet to done...time to post, then close her eyes as the nurse had ordered. There would be time for more of the therapy of one-finger typing later.

Time to go

The last three weeks have been a sustained orgy of organization and preparation, and at last I am ready. As of this typing, Monday morning, surgery is about 48 hours away. Sus and I drive up to Montreal starting as soon as I post this.

So, how do I feel? Excited, scared, curious, determined, eager, sad, on tenterhooks.

Actually, I’m two different kinds of scared. One is scared of the surgery, the pain, the possibility of a bad outcome. The other is, still, scared that something will happen to prevent me from doing this.  I have had so much can’t in my life - the city of my mind is laid out in the shape of the word can’t - that I will not be free of that fear until I wake up with the act accomplished.

It was an up and down week with the children - we were all at pains, I think, to establish our neediness, which was a little rough for a bit...but there were also many lovely moments. Sam had friends over for a LOTR movie marathon, and I fed them mac and cheese. Mad goosed Sam while he was holding a klaxon horn and made him beep it involuntarily - one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I gave them I’ll-be-thinking-of-you gifts and chocolate, and they’re at their other parents’ house for three weeks.

Other bits: so wonderful to have Sis Sus here...she brought me a book of Maya Angelou poems, with a bookmark at one about being a phenomenal woman...some nice well-wishes at work, and one or two awkward conversations with male acquaintances whose answer to the awkwardness they feel is to make crude jokes...a special order of enough lube (for the aftercare regime) for two people to get trapped in a bathtub.

There’s more, but it’s time to go. I plan to blog through the experience, but with an emphasis on social/psychological/whimsical rather than graphic detail. I will be reachable by e-mail, fb, and phone (207) 985-2053, and the aftercare address is:

908 Boulevard Gouin Ouest
Montreal, QC H3L 1K8, Canada

OK. Here I go.

 

Susan Swartz Bunker, 10/7/33 - 4/8/92

Dear Sue,

How can it be twenty years since I sat by your hospital bed, stunned by the calamity of your aneurysm? “It couldn’t be much worse,” the neurologist said bluntly, and the nurse had to keep clearing your breathing tube after you coughed...they said on top of whatever else the flood of blood in your brain was putting you through, you were also giving up smoking. They said if you lived on in the coma your tendons would shorten, so Susie went out and bought a pair of black high-top sneakers to keep your ankles bent.

You did not live. You died without regaining consciousness, though there was that moment when I asked if you could squeeze my hand and you did, just one little twitch. “Oh, yes, I’m here, I love you!” I cried in a rush, squeezing convulsively back. It was our last communication. The memory of it still brings me to tears.

I wish you were still alive. I want to introduce you to your grandchildren. It still rips my heart apart that you died just before Mad was born, though it is a consolation that you at least got to know she was on the way. I still smile when I remember telling you on the phone we were thinking of “Cosmo” for a boy. “No,” you said, and I loved the flat presumption to veto in your voice. For all your tight-lipped silences over the years, or perhaps because of them, when you spoke you could imbue your opinions with the force of moral certainty.

Oh my dear mother, what would you have made of me? It would have been terrifying, telling you I am trans. Would you have denied it outright, the way you did our whimsical baby-name choice? I imagine you might have; but this time, I would have had to insist.

Would you have been angry? Would you have disbelieved me? Would you have shut me out for a time? Perhaps all of these reactions...but I can’t imagine you would have shut me out forever.

And what might you have been able to tell me about other denials long ago? I can’t remember if I stifled myself, or if you stifled me, or a combination of the two, but if it was you, I bet you didn’t realize what you were doing. If I ever asked you timidly if I could, say, try your lipstick, I bet you never guessed I was telling you who I was; nor that when you said no, it was another turn of the key in the lock of my secret gender prison.

I remember you as an emotionally elusive woman, and I feared your anger, but I also remember your sly sauciness and your laugh. I remember how when I was small you used to rub my back to soothe my distresses. I remember your tender acceptance when I was soft, emotional. I remember songs you taught me. I remember cutting your hair for you, one straight slice across with the sewing scissors after you clipped it back. I remember how one Christmas evening when I was sitting by the woodstove absorbed in a gift-book, you brought me a plate of little sandwiches made of leftover turkey with mustard on crusty bread. I remember, after I brought hugging home from college, feeling your bird-bone shoulders under my hands when we hugged. 

One thing I can’t remember is your voice. I wonder if the voice I’m searching for sounds something like yours. I do find, as I settle into my natural womanhood, that I look somewhat like you, and that I use words and phrases and gestures you used to use. I take after you, it seems.

I can’t imagine you would have shut me out forever, so I must imagine that at some point you would have accepted me, called me by my name, used “she” and “her”...called me your daughter. What a gift that would have been: a second giving of life. In your absence I have had to birth myself this time, and it has gone fine, but I grieve that I will never get to show you who I really am. I just have to live with that.

Mother dearest, I was a girl the whole time, and I am a woman now, and I miss you, and I love you.

Your daughter,

Lisa

 

Maine's Transgender Revolution video

I'm turning 50 next Tuesday. If I figure out what that means, you can be sure I'll post about it. ;-)

In the meantime, video is now available online of a panel discussion I recently helped put together about the past, present, and future of the trans experience in Maine. The panel was presented by the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine on March 21st, 2012, on the USM Portland campus, and it went really well. My fellow panelists - Margaret Cook, Jamie-Lynn Emma Kane, and Alex Roan - were all excellent, sharing personal stories and general insights in a wide-ranging conversation which was variously funny, touching, profound, and inspirational. We also had some wonderful input from the audience.

Links:  Part One  Part Two

Brief personal viewing notes: I hate my voice still. I have *got* to do something about that. But, I thought I rocked the dress pretty well...panel day turned out to be the first really warm day of spring I anticipated in this post.

Anyway, if you decide to check any of the video out, happy viewing! :-)

Got the letter

There it was, at long last, in the mailbox on Monday - a big manila envelope with “Montreal” as part of the return address. I’ve been bracing for it for a couple of months now, thinking each day as I drive up to the boxes, “This could be it.” Well, this was it. Final decision time. Make the down payment and go through with the surgery, now less than four months away, or put it off.

On Tuesday I freaked. I melted down in the morning while wrangling the boy to school, then walked on Wells beach and sobbed. (I had the whole beach to myself, though it was a gorgeous spring-like morning.) The source of my anguish was a sudden powerful resurgence of a fear that going ahead with the surgery now would cause permanent psychological damage to my teenage son.

Actually, that’s understated. On Tuesday I caromed helplessly between black guilt and last-breath desperation to live. I forgot all about the possibility of a both-and outcome. Doom. Catastrophe. Dire dilemma. I felt that I had to either give up my life, or kill my child.

I cried some more in the beach parking lot, stopped to wash my splotchy face in the grocery store bathroom so I could bear to show it at Borealis when I stopped for a medicinal scone, and continued on to work. Then I made a good choice: I e-mailed Sarah, who is smart and Queer and who seems to have a greater capacity than most for the serene fielding of other people’s psychodrama. We met for coffee, and I poured out my confused jumble of hypertrophied emotion while she listened. The first words out of my mouth were “I may be projecting...” No, you think?

Here’s what I’ve figured out, talking to Sarah and pondering since: all my life I have had this powerful irrational fear that if I was ever fully myself, it would kill the people I love. I can feel the reverberations of it going back to earliest childhood. One of my pop-psych novelistic imagination theories is that when I was two or three I terrified myself into internal exile with the intensity of a murderous rage I felt toward my little brother, that...that BOY who had usurped my parents’ love.

Did I reach a little hand through the bars of his crib to cover his mouth and nose and snuff out his life? Did I then recoil in horror and self-loathing from the act I had momentarily contemplated? Was that the end of any chance I might have had to articulate my gender truth for years and years to come? Was I, in sum, a little girl too fierce, too headstrong, and too overwhelmed by her own ungoverned passions, to face living in the world? It all feels, if not literally, then psychologically true.

So Tuesday seems to have been an echo-spasm of the same complex of elemental feeling which was the source of my forty years of self-repression. Even as I talked to Sarah, the intensity of the feelings drained away. The last thing I said, in a bemused and wondering tone, was, “Can I really do this? Really?” And Sarah offered “Yes,” and hearing someone else say it like that, I knew it was right. (Sarah, thank you again for listening.)

Not that my son is thrilled about any part of my gender transition, but he’ll survive. We’ll all survive. I’ll be making that down payment, because I have finally figured out that I can be female without killing anyone. For me, that still counts as a bona fide revelation. What a fucking bizarre life.

That old male feeling

This morning I dreamed that my mother, alive again, had just survived an attack of acute appendicitis. My sister and brother and I flew to the hospital to see her. (In this dream I was a man again, as I still often am in dreams.) We found her in a wheelchair - in the gift shop, oddly - looking old and frail and grim. My sister greeted her, and my brother stood and was seen, but it was only when I knelt and she embraced me that she cried, and I knew it was because now that her eldest son was there to be strong for her, she could let go.

In this dream I again inhabited a specific psychological/emotional state which I used to experience all the time. In this state my shoulders, lower back, and jaw all clench slightly, not with anxiety, but readiness, and I feel tall and solid. Any sense of my own vulnerability or need goes away. I take a stoic breath and hold it, bracing to receive the impact of whatever hurt, my own or others’, I am about to absorb. And, I take a lofty detached pleasure in my own ability to endure. I feel noble.

I have always thought of this state as my personal version of the essence of maleness.

I think now it was this feeling I was referring to when, in the same journal entry back in November of ‘08 in which I first wrote “I just want to be a girl,” I also wrote “I am so sick of being strong.” I now read “sick of” not only as “weary of,” but also as “ailing on account of”, which provides another entry on the ever-growing list of possible answers to the question: why break free now, after so many years? How about, because I had played the selfless noble man role for so long that I was starting to die inside?

Yes. So, for the past three years I’ve rejected this noble man feeling as a part of an old bad way of living which was killing me.

But, I’ve also missed it. It was one of a small number of things I really liked, and which I thought was valuable, about being a man. Also, I have been struggling to find a definition of femininity which doesn't involve some form of weakness; but still, consumed as I have been by the crucial business of figuring out who I am as a woman, I had to push the man-feeling away.

Just recently, though, I have started to feel safe turning back toward that old male time and selectively reclaiming parts of it, and in that spirit I have been experimenting with reclaiming some form at least of that old sense of male strength. it’s more complicated, though, than just saying, OK, I’m calling that old mode "womanly" now. It’s not. Besides, there are aspects of who I have been becoming I definitely want to include in my revamped definition of strength: my impulse to nurture, my sense of resonating to the feelings of others like a sympathetic string, the way I’ve been able to let go into life as an emotional being...the power of flirting, even. These are forms of femininity which feel natural and good to me and which I plan to keep, thank you very much.

So, can one do both?

Well, the other day I was having a meeting with a volunteer at work, and for whatever reason she had a small emotional meltdown. Her lip began to tremble and the tears came. In response I felt that old noble tension come into my shoulders, that impulse to squelch my being and take her pain onto myself, whatever it was. I took the accustomed stoic breath...but then I let it out again. I’ve been practicing not holding my breath, and unclenching all those old male muscle groups too. “It’s OK, honey, I know how it is,” I said, which, by golly, I do. I melt down routinely now, every couple of weeks - usually in decorous private, but not always. I fetched her some tissues and then sat with her, breathing and relaxed, until she felt ready to go on. 

I found a hybrid strength and helped someone - yay! And, it didn’t cost me my soul. Does that sound melodramatic? Yeah, maybe...but if you can’t feel the truth behind it, you don’t understand trans. Change or die, literally or figuratively, my friend Dar said recently. Yeah, that’s right. Change or die. 

But, maybe, you don’t have to discard everything from that old life. Both-and, darling. These days I’m all about both-and.

Daddio forever

My dear children whom I love more than anything,

In December I asked you to come up with something else to call me besides “Daddio,” and to start using female pronouns when talking to me and about me. Then I pushed you, hard. I did it because each year before Christmas for many years I have grieved all over again for my mother’s death and yearned desperately for the acceptance I will never get from her. I was feeling extremely needy, and in my need I turned to you. That was a parenting fail. It is not your job, at this stage in your lives, to parent me, nor, for that matter, to play any role for anyone, no matter how much you love them. It is your job to continue to work on figuring out who you are going to be in the world and to move toward your versions of adulthood, and it is my job to support you in your growing up. I’m back to doing that, and I’m sorry I faltered.

I withdraw my request that you stop calling me “Daddio.” That word is full of love and the history of who we have been together all through your childhood, and I don’t want to lose it or what it represents. So, I welcome “Daddio” as long as you want to keep using it...for the rest of our lives, if you want.

I do still hope that in your own time, when you feel ready, you could start using female pronouns for me, and that you will stay open to the idea of finding other new things to call me which include recognition of who I am now. I say this because while I *am* still the same dad you have always known, I am also in a real way a woman you’ve only just met. It’s like, “Um...hi. My name’s Lisa, and I’ve been lurking inside your dad all these years...actually, I *was* him, but in disguise. Now I’m standing here right in front of you as my actual self. So, anyway, um...nice to finally meet you...and, uh, I feel like baking...what kind of cookies do you want?"

Trans *is* weird, but it's a thing that can be gotten used to, and we are all such smart people and have so much love between us, I’m sure that over time we can find creative positive ways to incorporate my true gender into our family dynamic. And regardless of what you call me or what pronouns you use, I’m here for you, and I always will be. No doubt I will falter again from time to time...I’m only human...but I’m here.

Now, go finish your homework.

Love,

Daddio/Lisa/E/Zabi...etc. etc.

Insight on the holiday gauntlet

One day as the Christmas season approached Elizabeth told her 16-year-old son that she wanted him to stop calling her “Daddio.” She told him that every time he said it it felt like being punched in the stomach. Looking uncomfortable, he reluctantly agreed. The next day, she followed up: she said she was repeating the request so he knew she was serious about it, and that she also wanted female pronouns and gender words. He listened silently and did not refuse; but as the week went on he used the same masculine gender words as before, and scowled at her when she corrected him.

A few days later, when Elizabeth picked her daughter up from college, she told her that she was asking these things of her too. Her daughter, having recently claimed Queer identity herself, was more accepting, at least to talk about it, but as the days passed she avoided pronouns rather than switching to “she,” and also still said “Daddio.”

Several days went by. Elizabeth wept often, thinking of her long-dead mother, as she often did in the weeks before Christmas each year, with grief and fury and aching need for maternal comfort all balled together in a black mass...and her will to push her children to greater acceptance faltered. She couldn't see a way to back off from having pushed them without returning to the old bad man-box, but she knew it was wrong to have turned to them in her need, so driving her son to school one morning she said, “About the gender words thing...”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, wiping at his eye.

“Wait, let me finish. I think you’re going to like what I’m going to say. You have told me you can’t deal with this right now, and I’m accepting that. I’m backing off.”

“Thank you.”

That felt right, but it didn't stop the storm of pain and sadness, which loomed just as black as ever. Elizabeth held herself together in hopes of making it to her next therapy appointment...but at the appointed hour the door did not open. She waited fifteen minutes, then knocked. There had been a scheduling snafu; her therapist was seeing another patient. “I need to see you,” Elizabeth said. Text me later, said the therapist, and Elizabeth stumbled downstairs.

In her parked car she burst into wild sobs. “I want my mother!” she screamed. And, “I deserve to exist in the world! I do! I do! I deserve to exist!”...needing to say it so vehemently because of a terrible fear that it wasn’t true. Her courage and strength had failed her, and she felt as at other times at this same nadir the crushing weight of so many years of existence with self denied, of existence only through the mask of maleness, of shadow-life. She sobbed in her car for nearly an hour, then texted and asked if she could come back in, and her therapist texted back yes.

The session was oddly strained. Even in the midst of blurting out her dilemma Elizabeth sensed her therapist groping for responses...she sensed impatience, annoyance. Her therapist defended the children’s right to process in their own time, and to be parented by Elizabeth even as she struggled with her own pain, and Elizabeth agreed. But what about her own terrible need then? With time running out, the therapist said the words which Elizabeth needed to hear: “You do deserve to exist in the world.”

In a grateful rush: “Yes, thank you...I needed to hear someone say that. Thank you so much.”

“You do. You deserve to exist as Lisa you deserve to exist as Dave...”

“What? I wish you hadn’t said that last part.”

In a vehement note-to-self whisper: “I’m never going to say that name again.”

The last few minutes of the appointment were awkward, and Elizabeth left without making another appointment.

On the way home, bumped out of her rut of self-pity by irritation, Elizabeth formulated a new thought: OK, for the past twenty years I’ve been mising the presence of a mom in my Christmases...so fuck it, I’m gonna be the mom. My children can call me what they like, but what they’re getting is mothering.

She put her thought and heart into selecting presents; she cleaned; she bought herself a mixer and baked enough not only to satisfy her household’s sweet teeth, but to take plates to neighbors too; she wrapped; she played the piano while her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend decorated the tree. In a word, for the first time in her adult life, she committed to the holiday, not as a religious nor a commercial celebration, but as the simple family gathering it had been for her when she was growing up...and the children seemed to have a good Christmas.

And, what about Elizabeth? Well, she survived. The amount of hurt she felt running the seasonal gauntlet was not less than in previous years; but in trying to make a real warm holiday happen in her own home she felt more joy in the day than ever before since her mother’s death, and she figured that counted as a victory.