HomeYou can't go home again
CW: death. Sometimes you don't even feel grief when someone is gone
It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her. There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my mother’s deah pivot on it being, when it happened, less than a year into my gender transition. As I wasn’t open about being transgender on this site until this March, I could hardly recount a lot of the things that happened, from the excited curiosity of the funeral arranger, to the cold stares some of my mother’s friends gave me as I walked into the church behind the coffin.
Some of this, though, is down to how I feel about the death. I don’t feel grief at the death of my parents. Rather, I feel anger, a low, slow-bubbling anger that they let me down in life. And that is all rolled up in my gender too, to some extent.
My parents never supported me. Financially, yes; emotionally, no. I came out to my parents as trans when I was in my early 20s, and they were universally unsupportive about it. My mother cried. Prayed. Said I should start going to church, or take up a new hobby like playing bass guitar, and that would take my mind off the idea. When I started to seek medical support, she kept telling me I didn’t have to go through with anything, at every turn.
So when I decided to stop putting my life on hold, when I decided twenty years later that yes, I needed to transition, that I would never be myself if I did not: I also decided I wasn’t going to tell her. After all, I’d already come out to her once. She didn’t deserve to put me through that a second time. I came out to everyone else; I started wearing nail polish; I changed my whole wardrobe. I did it all right in front of her, and just let her watch and work it out for herself this time.
She died about ten or eleven months into that process.
By the time she died, she knew my name, even though she always claimed she had forgotten it. She even used the right pronouns for me, some of the time. When I am still sorting out her belongings, cursing the state she let things get into, I am also always, in the background, angry that none of that happened until the last few months of her life, until she knew she was on her own apart from me. I wish I’d had the strength and the bravery to cut both of my parents out of my life, and find my own way forward. It would have been very different.
This all sounds quite bitter and nasty, but I’m posting this now because this is June, this is Pride Month, this is the month that for queer people, is supposed to be all parties and parades and excitement. I’m proud of who I am every month of the year though, which is why I’ll always still be angry at the way my parents treated me when I needed them. I wish my mother could see me now, so she could see just how much I’ve changed since she died, and see just what I missed when I was younger.
Eventually, I will write down all those stories, about the dark comedy of the Accident and Emergency ward where half the staff couldn’t get through the doors, and about lying on a bed, half asleep, listening out for the ambulance I had asked for three or four hours before. I’ll have lots of other stories to tell, too, all those fragments and pieces by which I realised I was transgender and started trying to do something about that. Those are important stories. They’re not just for June.