family

Gratitude

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A friend of mine nominated me on Saturday via Facebook to come up with three moments of gratitude a day for five days. Well, that was about five days ago, and I haven’t done it yet, but that seemed like a good direction for the blog this week. So Amanda, here’s my list; thanks for the inspiration.

  1. A partner who will join me on silly, spontaneous adventures. Last Thursday, I had the wild idea that we should rent a car over the weekend and drive to Cedar Falls, IA to catch Joe Stevens in concert. The conversation went something like this:

    A: We should go on a road trip and see Joe Stevens!
    E: But it’s Iowa.
    A: But concert!
    E: But IOWA.

    I acknowledged it was a pretty ridiculous idea, but I was a little sad…until I got off work and was greeted by a text to the effect of, “So, about that concert…”

  2. Friends with whom I can escape reality for a while. Saturday was Dungeons & Dragons & Knitting, which is the monthly Pathfinder game with some folks in our knitting circle (the original idea was to play D&D, but Pathfinder ended up happening instead…we just never changed the name). Four of us have an adventure in group storytelling while our partners hang out in the other room and knit and make fun of us. It’s consistently one of the highlights of every month.
  3. Open spaces. We did end up renting a car this weekend and going on a road trip into Iowa, taking a detour on our way to Cedar Falls so that I could show Ethan some of the northeast corner of the state, which is not entirely flat and very, very pretty. The farther we got from Chicago, the more I relaxed. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in Chicago. But wide open spaces do wonders for my soul.
  4. People who choose to love me because of who I am, not in spite of it. The reason I know that there is a pretty part of Iowa (the aforementioned northeast corner) is that my grandparents live there, on a farm in a valley surrounded by trees and bluffs and wildlife and gardens. I remain convinced at age 26 that their farm is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. We were close enough on Sunday that, had I so chosen, we could have stopped by for a surprise visit. But I didn’t. I love my grandparents very much. They love their grandchildren very much. But when I came out to them as Alyx in a letter two years ago, their response (also in a letter) was that they would never call me Alyx, because Alyx was “an imaginary person.” I am almost entirely certain that they don’t know that I started any sort of physical transition. I haven’t seen them in over two years, and I haven’t been on their farm in at least three, and I don’t know when (or if) either of those things will happen again, which is heart-wrenching whenever I think of it. But it also reminds me that I have a whole bunch of people in my life who not only accept that I am Alyx but actually celebrate my life with me, and that is a great comfort.
  5. Those moments of recognition by others in our communities. Visibility is such a huge thing, both for those of us who are still frequently misgendered, and those in our community who pass so well that no one believes they’re trans. There were a handful of those moments this weekend.
  6. Approachable heroes. Meeting Joe Stevens was great: he’s one of our songwriting idols, and is just a fantastic person. But even better than meeting Joe was the fact that we got to actually talk with him. By the end of the night, we were giving each other hugs goodbye. We’re now friends on Facebook. This is still blowing my mind.
  7. Adventures that lead to more adventures. When we got to Cedar Falls and started talking with Joe (and River Glen, who’s touring the Midwest with him), we mentioned we’d road tripped it from Chicago, at which point they told us they were actually going to be playing a house concert in Chicago on Monday night. Throughout the night they told us several times that we should come. We got in touch on Facebook and got the details, and despite the fact that my partner had only slept about 45 minutes and had worked a full day, and the fact that we’d returned the rental car and weren’t entire sure how we were going to get home after transit stopped running, Monday night we found ourselves in the very humid basement of a hippie couple we’d never met, sweating with strangers (and new friends, and someone we met at a karaoke bar three-and-a-half years ago), enjoying more music.
  8. Music that inspires me to create more music. I felt two things in regard to the music at both shows: first, that my songwriting is totally inadequate, and second, that I want to write more songs. There are times when I get the first feeling but not the second one; this was one of the beautiful moments where my feelings of inadequacy were outweighed by inspiration.
  9. New friends. We met some awesome people on Sunday and Monday.
  10. Thinking about the future. My partner and I have been doing a lot of talking about our future together, and it’s really wonderful not only to have a partner I want to have a future with, but to be able to think about the future at all. There was a long time when I could barely see past tomorrow. I’m learning to dream again.
  11. Air conditioning. This is a silly one, but it’s been ridiculously humid in Chicago this week. We don’t have AC at home, but I have it at the office, and I’m grateful for the times I can spend in places where everything does not feel soggy.
  12. Comfort in my skin. This isn’t a constant, but I’ve been feeling fairly centered and okay within myself this week. I was able to go to both concerts without feeling more than momentary social anxiety, and a lot of that had to do with being comfortable being myself. I spent a lot of years stuck in self-loathing, and while I’m not my biggest fan, I’ve at least reached the point where I feel a sort of benevolent indifference toward myself, which is unbelievably better for my mental health.
  13. Fresh perspective. I’m not sure exactly how to explain this one, because it’s been a largely internal thing. Mostly, there have been tiny things happening in the past few weeks that have helped me to look at the world in new (or old but forgotten) ways, and it’s been refreshing.
  14. A (mostly) calm brain. There have been a lot of storms here in the past week. My brain tends to get really uncomfortable when the weather is shifting back and forth rapidly. I’ve felt surprisingly stable in the midst of all of it.
  15. Concrete future plans. I alluded to this in last week’s post, and now that I’ve told my family, I can announce it to all of you: at the end of September I will be filing the requisite paperwork for a court date to legally change my name. By the end of the year I will legally be Alyxander James! There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world to express how excited I am.

This Week in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

On Monday, we laid Grandma to rest after a service that paid great tribute to her life and character. The surrounding circumstances have left me feeling uncreative and exhausted, but make for some decent stories, so that’s what I’m going to tell you about for this week’s installment of the blog.

  1. Finding reasonably priced flights at the last for Mother’s Day weekend leaves you with few options. The only real option there was, in the end, was Spirit Airlines, which still felt exorbitant for a flight lasting just over an hour and thirty minutes, but was reasonable enough that my dad was willing to fund the trip not only for me, but also for my partner, who graciously agreed to take unpaid time off work and come with me for moral support.
  2. Spirit Airlines is…interesting. We’d flown Spirit before, but this was a flight to remember. While we waited at the gate, we were entertained by a couple of year-old babies who were becoming fast friends, their interactions narrated by the boisterous grandmother of the smaller-but-older child of the pair. Once we were on the flight, we found ourselves behind a couple of men who appeared religious and looked like they’d fit right in on the youth ministry team of an evangelical megachurch somewhere (one of them was reading a slim volume entitled Jesus Christ: The Real Story)…and who also appeared to be completely stoned out of their brains. The one who wasn’t reading was extremely chatty and spent the entire flight talking with the Russian woman across the aisle. At the end of the flight, he tried to tell my partner and I that we should stay on the plane and continue on to Vegas, which prompted the following exchange:

    Me: This isn’t that kind of trip.
    Him: Why not?
    Me: Grandma’s funeral.
    Him: Oh, man, I didn’t know that. That sucks…You should smoke some weed!

  3. I have really wonderful family with whom I share no actually biological ties. My dad is an only child, but he’s known his two best friends since kindergarten and junior high, respectively, and I think I was well into my teens before I realized my Uncles weren’t actually related to me in any way. As we gathered to remember Grandma, I was struck by how wonderful it is to know that the chosen family members I was handed as a child have truly chosen me as an adult.
  4. The trip home was…an adventure. We were supposed to fly out of Minneapolis at around 6:30 Monday evening. Our flight was delayed five times (I’m not even exaggerating when I say that) before ultimately being canceled. Not wanting to deal with the airline any longer, we decided to get the tickets refunded and rent a car to drive back to Chicago instead. We slept a few hours at my partner’s parents’ house before heading out just after 3am, which mostly meant that Monday felt like the longest day ever and I think we skipped Tuesday entirely. When we finally stumbled into our apartment, we literally kissed the door frame, we were so happy to be home.
  5. I have the world’s best support system. From a partner who was willing to travel with me at the last minute, giving up paid days at work to be my moral support, to the friends who were willing to be our transport to and from the airport at all sorts of hours, this whole trip really drove home the fact that I have been blessed with a strong, unbelievably wonderful network of support. If I had needed to make that trip home by myself, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably cried and screamed and possibly done someone bodily harm. As it was, I had my partner with me, who remained calm (cheerful, even) for the entire airport experience, and who was loopy and exhausted with me all the way home. I’m one seriously lucky human.

Weekend Reflections

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

One of the perks of working for a Jewish social service organization is that I wind up with extra paid days off for religious holidays that I don’t observe. This past week, we had Monday and Tuesday off for the last two days of Passover. I decided to take the opportunity afforded by a long weekend and take a little road trip up to Minnesota, mostly to meet my new nephew. My partner wasn’t able to join me for the trip, so I had a lot of hours of solo driving in the car to do some reflecting on what I was heading toward and, later, what I was coming home from.

The trip was full of excitement of varying sorts (my dad had an emergency appendectomy the evening I got into town, for one thing), but there are just a couple of things I really want to get into.

First, today (April 24, 2014) is the three-year anniversary of my grandfather’s death. He passed away Easter Sunday, ten days after his 90th birthday. Since his grave is in Rochester, MN (an under-two-hour drive from the Twin Cities) and I happened to be in town over Easter, I decided to get up early that morning and drive down to pay him a visit.

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I think a lot about my grandpa. He was a man of deep faith and quiet love, and to this day I respect him immensely. I found out five months after he died that my dad had told him that I was queer; I never knew that he knew, and it is one of my few major regrets in life that I never shared that part of myself with him. I was too afraid, and I thought I was doing what was expected of me.

I think because my grandpa never treated me any differently, I have sort of built him up in my head as being this paragon of tolerance, a rarity in my family. I’m not entirely sure that this is fair to his memory, though. I know that, ultimately, he loved me, and that was the most important thing. But I also know that he probably struggled with the idea of having a granddaughter who liked both boys and girls. About six months after he died, I adopted the name Alyx, and started walking a bit more boldly down the road of gender variant identity. As I stood by his grave (and in the car on my way back to St. Paul), I wondered how he would have handled the knowledge of my decision to start on testosterone.

I don’t have an answer. In the end, I don’t know that it matters. I have hope that the view from where he is now offers a greater sense of perspective, and that he’s able to be happy that I am happy. I hope that he is still proud of me, even though I know I am not the person he imagined his grandchild would be.

Being with my family this weekend was challenging. My mother very pointedly avoided using any names or pronouns in reference to me, though there were ample opportunities for both. My brother called me Alyx when talking to my nephew, but addressed me by my given name at dinner and apparently never gave it a second thought (he also called me “she” a lot). My dad is clearly trying, but it’s still hard.

But it was worth it for the handful of minutes I got to hold my nephew.

photo 3

I was crazy about this kid before he was born; I’m even crazier about him now. He is absolutely adorable, and I realized as I held him that there is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep this child safe. While it’s still frustrating that my brother has declared that I’m not allowed to be his child’s uncle (ommer is the title we’ve settled on for the time being), it’s something I’m willing to put up with if it means I get to be involved in the kid’s life in any way.

My strongest enduring memory of my grandpa is of the fact that every time we said goodbye, he’d give me a hug and say, quietly and earnestly, “You’re special.” As I said goodbye to my nephew on Sunday, I found myself saying the same thing to him. I hope that if I have any influence in this child’s life, it’s to teach him that he’s special and loved, no matter who he grows up to be.

photo 1

My Brain in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I promise there will be a longer, much more detailed blog next Thursday. In the meantime, here’s another five-item list of what’s been on my mind this week:

  1. My Grandpa. My grandfather’s birthday was Monday. He would have been 93 years old. He passed away on Easter Sunday three years ago (on the 24th, which is one of the reasons next Thursday’s blog will be bigger). I still think of my grandpa often, but his memory is particularly close at this time of year.
  2. My nephew. This weekend, I’m heading up to Minnesota all by myself (my partner has to work, sadly) to meet the tiniest member of my family. I am the proudest of uncles ommers (ah, the joys of language in relation to non-normative gender identity), and I’m so excited to meet the little one, and to deliver the sweater I finished knitting today, which I hope will fit for at least a little while.
  3. My biological family in general. I don’t have the very best relationship with my biological family, for a lot of reasons. Things have been improving with my parents, but they’re far from comfortable. My brother and I don’t really talk, except (in the last six weeks since the baby’s arrival) about his kid, and I have zero confidence that he will ever consistently call me Alyx. (My relationship with extended family is essentially nonexistent at this point: my grandparents have said they will never call me Alyx, “because Alyx is an imaginary person,” and to the best of my knowledge are completely in the dark about the fact that I’ve taken any steps by way of medical transition. One of my aunts congratulated me on new-aunthood on Facebook after my nephew was born, and when I corrected her language, thanked me for the correction and called me by my given name in the same sentence, despite the fact that I have been Alyx (on Facebook and elsewhere) for almost two-and-a-half years.) Needless to say, there’s a lot of anxiety that builds up anytime I am going to be seeing my family, and so I’m feeling pretty tense at the thought of multiple days in a row with them. I’ll be seeing other people while I’m in Minnesota (some chosen family and my partner’s family, who are also chosen family, now that I think of it), but there will be more time spent with my family than there has been in a long while.
  4. Knitting. I tend to come at knitting in spurts. I’ve been in a dry spell for a while, but the pressure of finishing the aforementioned baby sweater before this trip has gotten me working on things again. Aside from the sweater, I’ve recently cast on for the second of a pair of socks, the first of which I knit in about two weeks at the beginning of December. I forget, when I don’t work on them, how much I enjoy knitting socks. Once I finish this one (I’m just starting the heel, and because I have small feet, the end of the heel marks approximately halfway through the sock), I’ve got another pair I started ages ago that I need to pick back up, and I keep looking at patterns and getting excited about possibilities, which has been fun.
  5. Finding ways to feel healthier better in my body. “Health” is such a nebulous concept, and being built as I am (short and stocky and round), I have no expectation that I will ever achieve someone else’s standard of what “healthy” looks like. I’m generally relatively comfortable being the size that I am, but I’ve noticed lately that I’m feeling less okay being in my body (in ways completely separate from dysphoria, which is thankfully not something that haunts me too consistently). I’m increasingly aware that I’m slower on my feet than the people around me. It’s harder for me to keep up than I’d like. I worry a lot about loss of mobility, between some issues with chronic pain and a history of back and knee problems. So I’ve been thinking a bit about steps I can take to do better. I haven’t been back to the gym since the whole misgendering fiasco, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t make myself go back, and that maybe a traditional gym setting isn’t ideal for me. So I’ve started looking around at other options, and have come back to an idea that pops up now and again, which is taking up Aikido. There’s an Aikido center here in Chicago that has a four-week introductory course that they say is appropriate for all body types and fitness levels, and there’s a session starting in July that I think I can work into my schedule. I’ve wanted to take up some sort of martial art for a long time, and Aikido’s lack of competitive spirit and focus on the safety of both the self and one’s opponent is really appealing to me. I’ve also started walking home from work (about 2.25mi) on days when the weather isn’t awful, and I’m finding even the handful of times I’ve done that have made a big difference in how I feel in my body. Admittedly, a lot of this processing is still very much just that: processing and thinking about change, and not a lot of actively making changes. But it feels like it’s paving the way for movement in a positive direction, and for right now, that’s enough.

New Life

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Last Monday, my biological family welcomed its newest and tiniest member. My brother and sister-in-law had their first kid, and I got my first nephew.

I am thrilled beyond words and proud enough to burst buttons. Being an uncle (even if I’m not officially allowed to call myself that) is pretty much my favourite thing ever. I’m still, a week and a half later, showing off his pictures whenever I get the chance. I want to knit all the baby things, and it’s killing me that I won’t get to meet this kid in person until he’s already over a month old.

I’ve been thinking and feeling a lot of things in the ten days since my nephew was born, mostly about family and where I fit and the fact that I’m frustrated that I’m not allowed to define myself in this situation, but that I love this kid to pieces and have since I found out he was coming and so I’m going along with being painted into boxes that I don’t fit because I want to be a part of his life and that matters more than me being able to breathe freely.

I want to give my nephew safe spaces in which he can be himself. I want to do everything I can to ensure that he is always surrounded by the love that surrounded him on the day that he first entered the world. I want him to know that he is special.

So here’s to you, little one. This game of life is not an easy one, but I am determined to make sure you have plenty of support along the way.

A Break From the Laughs

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I realized around 11pm last night as my partner and I were leaving our friends’ apartment (where we spent a good chunk of our Christmas, which was lovely) that I didn’t have anything queued up for the blog for today. It’s been a pretty uneventful week in terms of physical changes related to transition, and I couldn’t come up with a funny story. But as the holidays tend to be rough for a lot of folks, particularly surrounding family issues, I’m going to dispense with the humor for this week and talk a bit about my grandparents.

I’ve seen my maternal grandparents once in the past two years, at my brother’s wedding. It was the first time I had seen them since my paternal grandfather’s funeral more than a year prior to that. We barely talked, but it was evident that I had been outed as queer by someone else in the family (which made me angry, and caused a fair bit of drama after the fact, but that’s another story). They didn’t seem particularly pleased, but more or less avoided talking about the fact that I had not grown up to be the granddaughter they expected.

A few weeks after the wedding, I received a letter in the mail from my grandfather (dictated to my grandmother, as Grandpa is blind). He encouraged me to write. He remembered the children’s book that I had written for a college course, and expressed hope that I would continue to use my gift for words.

As I held his letter in my hands, I made a decision that I never thought I would make: I was going to come out to my grandparents officially, not just as queer, but as genderqueer as well. I never came out to my paternal grandfather, and it’s something I still regret. I had to try.

So I wrote him a letter back, and said that I was writing, and in fact, a piece I wrote had been included in a theatre production that was a series of monologues and short pieces about gender and identity. I told him that the play had been hugely successful, and had touched lives in huge ways, and that I was so proud and honored to have been a part of it. And then I explained, in terms that I hoped would maybe make sense to my octogenarian grandparents, that part of why I wrote the piece that was in the show was the fact that I did not identify as a woman or as a man, but that I lived somewhere between or outside of the two.

It was a difficult letter to write. The response was even harder to read:

We love you, and you will always be our granddaughter. We will never call you Alyx, because Alyx is an imaginary person.

Since then, I have gotten the occasional card or note from my grandparents, usually ending with something about how they hope I’ll return to Jesus and turn my life around. Last week, I received their Christmas newsletter in the mail. Aside from being addressed only to me (ignoring the fact that I live with my partner), and using my given name more times than the note necessitated, I was surprised to find no hints of hellfire in their most recent missive…just a simple statement that they wanted to see me.

And that’s when I was hit by the full realization that my grandparents don’t know that I am transitioning. And I don’t know how to tell them.

I’m afraid to tell them.

I’m afraid that I’ll be uninvited from every family gathering from now on. (I generally avoid family gatherings for the sake of my own sanity, but it’s nice to get the invitation, you know?)

I’m afraid they won’t want me to come to their funerals.

More than anything, though: I’m afraid of being more of a disappointment than I know I already am.

Because I love my grandparents. They’re good, intelligent people. I admire the depth of their faith, even if I disagree with many aspects of what they believe (though I probably disagree with less than they think). I want them to be proud of me.

I want them to be proud of the fact that another piece that I’ve written will be performed in the newest rendition of the show I was in before.

I want them to be proud that I am in a happy, healthy, wonderful relationship.

I want them to be proud that I have chosen to take steps to feel more comfortable in my skin.

I want them to be proud that I am happier and healthier and more whole than I have ever been in my life, and that I take more steps in that direction almost every day.

And I know they’re not.

And I know they never will be.

And that hurts.