life

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.

Losing The Quintessential Grandma

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandma this week. On Monday, she was placed in hospice care. While this isn’t the first time she’s been in hospice (the first time, she rallied after being taken off most of her medications), we’re fairly certain it will be her last. She has fairly advanced dementia, and she fractured her hip last week; the main goal now is to try to keep her as pain-free as possible.

Grandma H

Top left: Grandma as a little girl (this photo lived on my desk when I was growing up); Bottom left: Grandma as a young woman, looking like a movie star; Top right: Grandma and Grandpa with my brother and me; Bottom right: Grandma and Grandpa as they’ll always look in my head.

Quite frankly, I don’t know how to feel about the impending loss of my grandmother. Because of her struggle with dementia, she’s been slipping farther and farther away over quite a long period of time. In a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve been mourning my grandma for years, and so this doesn’t feel like very much is changing.

But it’s still sad.

And sadder than the thought of the physical loss of my grandmother is the knowledge that a lot of my memories of her from before dementia took her away are getting hazy.

This particular grandma is the archetype in my head for what all grandmas are supposed to be like. She’s tiny (at her tallest, she was only ever 5’2″; I’m fairly certain she’s been under 5′ tall my whole life). She baked cookies, and made lefse, and her apple pies were the best in the entire world. She was always prepared with activity books and other fun things for my brother and me to do whenever we saw her. She sang with us and colored with us. She reacted with enthusiasm to the news of any sort of achievement we’d managed, however small. She read us books and told us stories from her youth. She was unfailingly kind, particularly to children.

And even though my brother and I were her only biological grandchildren, I know for a fact she was a grandmother to many other people. She taught Sunday school for many years. After they retired, she and my grandfather were part of a program that brought in adults (possibly elderly adults, specifically) to help young elementary-aged children with their reading skills. They loved being Reading Buddies, and my grandmother would show off the artwork the students made for them at the end of every term.

When my grandparents moved into the senior living complex they were in for most of my life, they started women’s and men’s Bible studies. My grandmother, ever the social butterfly, made so many friends and recruited such a large group that they had to divide into two or three smaller studies in the end. She was kicked out of bingo (where the prizes were candy, which she would save to give to my brother and me) multiple times, because she won too often. Every time we went to visit them she had some new craft project from their activity time to show us.

She loved music. She played the piano quite well, and she sang. Whether it was age or simply her voice, my memory of her singing is that she was always enthusiastic, and usually a bit off-key, and it all came together to be very endearing. Even when my grandparents were in their tiny senior home apartment, she had her little electronic keyboard and her hymnal to play from.

I could talk about dementia, and how it snuck in and we all tried to laugh it away and chalk her lack of comprehension up to bad hearing. But that’s not the part of my grandmother I want to keep with me.

The last time I talked to my grandma was about nine months ago. I had called my parents one afternoon, and they were over visiting, probably for her 90th birthday, though I doubt she grasped that part. My dad insisted on putting me on speakerphone. I was terrified. I didn’t want to face my grandma not knowing who I was.

But she did. She knew my name (my birth name, anyway, because I’ve only been Alyx for two and a half years, and she’s been forgetful and distant for longer than that), and was able to track for the few minutes of the phone call when I told her I had gotten a new job. She was very excited for me.

That was one of the clearest days she’d had in a while, and was quite possibly one of the last days she was particularly lucid, according to the experiences the rest of my family have had visiting her in the months since. I feel a little guilty that I haven’t called or been to visit since then, but I know firstly that she wouldn’t remember the calls or visits, and secondly that I am grateful to have my most recent lingering memory of my grandmother be of her knowing who I was.

Saying goodbye isn’t easy, even when it feels like I’ve been doing it in stages since I was in college, and even when it’s expected. Whenever she goes, she will leave a big, grandmother-shaped hole, not only in my life, but in the lives of the many children she poured her heart into throughout her life.

Update: After a rough beginning to the night, Grandma passed away peacefully May 8, 2014, a few hours before this blog went live. She is already missed.

 

On Hurt and Helplessness and Something That Maybe Resembles Faith

/ Alyxander James / 3 Comments

I’ve been struggling to come up with something to write about for this week’s blog. The truth is that it hasn’t been the easiest week. Sad things have been happening at our church back in Minnesota, and a lot of people we really care about are hurting. And I wish there was something I could do or say to make it better, but there’s not. I feel helpless. And helplessness is not a feeling I deal with well.

The last time I attended a service at the church I grew up in, it was toward the end of my senior year of high school. I walked out just a handful of minutes into the sermon, after I listened to the pastor take a passage of scripture out of context, remove a piece of the middle of passage that further changed the meaning, and twist what remained to fit his message. Despite the fact that I went off to a small, conservative Bible college that fall, I could probably count the number of times I went to church while I was in college without using all of my fingers.

A few months after my partner and I started dating, something (I’m not really sure what it was, looking back) prompted us to look for a church together. I suggested we try the UCC near my apartment. I’d gone on my own a couple of times in college, and was impressed by how welcoming they were; I hadn’t gone back since because I just wasn’t ready to give church a try again at that point. We ended up finding a wonderful community at that church. Our experiences there slowly rebuilt my faith in the idea that church could be a nurturing place…a place of safety and acceptance. It was everything that church, in an ideal world, was supposed to be.

I guess that was ultimately the problem: this isn’t an ideal world. I’m not going to go into details because I don’t know or understand everything that has happened in recent months, but suffice it to say that things that have happened in the past week have gone a long way in destroying that rebuilt faith in church as a safe space. I’ve been rather abruptly brought back to the reality that there are people who claim the same religion I can’t quite let go of who think that not only is there not currently a place for me in their places of worship, but that there shouldn’t be space for me there. Those people probably exist in every denomination of every major faith…even in the ones that are normally seen as progressive. And that hurts.

Even though I have more-or-less been functionally agnostic for several years now, I have always been at least nominally Christian, and there are large pieces of the Christian faith that I want to be able to hang onto. But even though it goes against everything I personally believe about God or Christ, it’s hard for me to kick the notion that Christianity doesn’t want me around. It makes me wonder whether all the time and effort I’ve put into wrestling with what and why and how I believe has been worth it, really.

Because, see, I want to believe in a God who creates people in the image of the Divine, and that this means that all people have value simply because they are human, and humanity reflects the boundless possibility of the Universe. I want to believe in a God who is love incarnate. I want to believe in a God who is bigger than I can comprehend.

But the God I see in religious settings looks an awful lot like a bigger, meaner, more condemning version of the people who think my existence is a mistake, that my “lifestyle choices” mean that I’m bound for eternal damnation. And I just can’t believe that the power behind the universe is a bully. I won’t believe that.

If someone’s faith is reassuring them that they’re right and everyone else is wrong, that they have a place at the party when it’s all said and done and the people they don’t like will burn forever…I want to say I feel sorry for them. Because that would be the decent thing to feel.

But mostly, they make me angry.

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.

photo 4

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.

Thanks in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a bit of a nutty week getting back in the saddle after being so miserably sick for so much of last week, so I’m afraid I was remiss in my blog-planning for today. But I want to give you something, so here are five things I am particularly thankful for as I reflect back on this past week:

  1. (Relative) Health. I’m still dealing with some residual sniffles (although at this point in the shift of seasons that might be a sign that I still have some allergies), but thanks to the antibiotics acquired in last week’s clinic adventure, I feel better now than I have in months.
  2. Spring. I realize it’s only the second week of April and that, this being the Midwest, we could have snow again at any point in the next month or so, but damnit, I’m going to believe that Spring is really here. I usually don’t mind winter so much, but this last one was rough, between not enough sunlight and the whole being sick for a large portion of it thing.
  3. My Boss. Things have been hectic at work, and, people being people, the human element involved has been immensely frustrating. I am seriously lucky to have the most laid-back, supportive boss (who, it turns out, is annoyed by the same situations and people that annoy me).
  4. Friends and Chosen Family. Last weekend, my partner and I went to YarnCon here in Chicago (because we are knitters, and nerds, and why wouldn’t we go to YarnCon?) and then met up with knitting friends. This weekend, there’s a party celebrating the happiness of a friend who’s finally getting to live fully as herself, and then there’s our monthly Pathfinder game, complete with more knitting. All of these things involve our wonderful fiber-enthusiast friends, who have truly become our family here in Chicago. Since I’m the new kid in this group (my partner knew them all first, and I wouldn’t have met them without hir), I’m especially grateful for this community that has always been unquestioningly welcoming and wonderful.
  5. My Partner. The last week has involved some hard conversations (don’t worry, friends: we’re fine), and I am super proud of us for being able to communicate openly and honestly with each other and to work through the hard things together. It’s pretty incredible to have someone in my life I am so comfortable with.

Facing Fears

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long winter. I’ve had an on-again, off-again, annoying-as-fucking-hell cold for most of it. It’s never been more than an extreme annoyance, but it’s been there almost constantly for the past several months. Late last week I scheduled an appointment with my doctor for mid-April (the earliest she could see me), and crossed my fingers hoping that I could hold on that long.

And then, this past weekend, it happened: I went from mild discomfort to abject misery in a matter of hours. Saturday and Sunday I mostly stayed at home, fighting off fevers and hoping that if I could just lay low I’d be fine to go to work Monday.

No such luck. I woke up around 5am Monday morning knowing two things with absolute certainty: one, that I had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through a day of work, and two, that if I wanted to make it to any other days of work this week, I needed pharmaceutical assistance ASAP. I was a kid with allergies: I know what a sinus infection feels like, and I know they don’t go away on their own.

Only…I don’t like doctors’ offices at the best of times. Part of that comes from the fact that I worked in a hospital for nearly five years and became very disillusioned with medical institutions in general. Part of it comes from the fact that I am trans and my legal name doesn’t match my presentation. When I’m sick, I like the thought of going to the doctor even less: I don’t have the energy to advocate for myself. It’s scary.

But there was no getting around it. I was getting worse, not better, and I knew I didn’t have enough sick time or PTO to cover more than the one day off from work. So I poked around on the internet and found a Minute Clinic near home, emailed my bosses to tell them I’d be out for the day, and tried to get a bit more sleep before facing my fears.

I dragged myself out the door and onto the train before I really had time to process what I was doing. By the time I got to the sign-in kiosk at the clinic, I was feeling pretty delirious. I grimaced as I typed in my legal name and gender, wishing I was at my usual clinic where I don’t need to deal with those questions anymore. I tried to smile when the nurse practitioner came out and called my back, thankful there was no one else around to hear her call my name.

She asked about prescriptions. I listed my psych meds, and left off the hormones. And then she asked about when I had my last menstrual period, and I realized I couldn’t dodge that bullet, so I backpedaled and disclosed the fact that I am transitioning and on testosterone. To my surprise, the nurse said she wondered, but didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want to offend me either way.

The exam itself was painless enough, and quick; she concluded that yes, I did have a sinus infection, and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. And then she asked if I had a different name that I went by, added a note to my file saying I used the name Alyx, and then told me that if I ever come back, I can check in under whatever name I want and just tell whoever’s working that I’m in the system under a different name. While I don’t know if her coworkers are as understanding, I was impressed and grateful.

(A side note: the pharmacist was not so understanding, and more or less shouted my legal first name when my prescription was ready, which was totally unnecessary as I was sitting RIGHT THERE. But oh well. Clearly, I can’t win them all.)

It made me think about the fact that so many trans people (including, at times, myself) go without medical care rather than dealing with the pain and shame and frustration that we often find attached to medical settings, and how lucky I was that things went well. Of course, this mostly just made me angry, because I shouldn’t have to think about how lucky I am that I was treated like a human being. That shouldn’t make me lucky. That should be commonplace. I’m all for gratitude, but I shouldn’t be overwhelmed by it simply because a medical professional treated me humanely: this is something I should be able to expect. I don’t know how to make the medical community a safer space for my trans siblings. I am encouraged by the progress I’ve seen, but it’s not enough. The entire healthcare system in the US is broken, and as we work to fix it, this is something we need to be aware of and work toward.

(To end on a happy note: the antibiotics are working, and I feel much more human now. Hopefully I’m done being sick for a very long time.)

One Rule

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Technology is a fascinating thing. Thanks to the power of the internet, I’m not only able to put part of my life out in words for public scrutiny on a weekly basis, but I’m able to see who my audience is — at least, I can see what countries/states you’re coming from. It’s a regular reminder for me that the world is both vast and yet small enough to be this interconnected.

A couple of days ago I had a website stats first: I was able to see the search terms someone put in that led them to my little corner of the interwebs. The query? What do I do if I’m transmasculine. Well, honey, I don’t know if what you found here was helpful, or if you’ll ever be back, and that is a loaded and nuanced question if I ever saw one, but I’m going to give you the simplest answer I have:

You do what you need to do to stay alive.

If that means staying in the closet because you’re not in a safe space, then that’s okay. If it means tearing down the walls and being out and loud and proud, that’s okay, too. Educate yourself. Find your options. Find ways to be more comfortable in your skin and your brain. But mostly, stay alive. (Are you familiar with Kate Bornstein? She is fabulous, really into this idea of staying alive, has written some wonderful things about ways to do it, and has started a #stayalive hashtag movement on Twitter.)

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you might believe about yourself, know that I believe that your life has value. And maybe in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t make a difference to you. But maybe it does, and that’s reason enough to say it. You, yes, you, my friend, are valuable. Your mere existence is revolutionary. People will try to tell you otherwise, but I promise they’re wrong.

I don’t believe that the “it gets better” rhetoric is actually helpful at all. Because sometimes, it doesn’t ever really get better to the extent that we want it to. But someday, even if things aren’t the best you can imagine, they might be better than they are now. And sometimes that hope makes holding on a little easier.

Hang in there, kiddo.