On this, my 75th birthday, I want to thank my mom for my life.

It hasn’t always been a blessing

(or even wanted at times)

but, from this vantage point, I’m glad I have it!

 

At about 8:45 last night I was remembering the reality that 75 years ago during those last long, hard, final several hours (I was born just after midnight on March 5th), Mom was in labor with me. So, in my mind, today should be more about her than about me.

 

I remember her telling me that all three times she was in labor, she kept telling herself, “I know what causes this! Why am I here?! NEVER AGAIN!!!”

 

LOL!

Mom was born more than a decade after her five or six siblings were, so she got stuck with babysitting their babies and toddlers whenever they went out on the town or had appointments.

 

As a result of her experiences with other sibling’s babies, Mom said she didn’t want kids and had there been birth control, she probably wouldn’t have had any.

 

That confession hit me hard (momentarily) until she added that as soon as she had her own, “all those years of babysitting my snot-nosed, dirty bottom cousins that my brothers and sisters kept having faded away and suddenly my own babies’ snotty noses were cute and their dirty butts weren’t so bad!”   (I’ll take her word on that.)

 

I guess your own grow on you.  (I’ll never know, because the only “children”/dependents I ever wanted were my books and the animals I shared my life with.)

 

Mom’s kids grew on her after they left her womb, for sure.  She was a wonderful mom. She let us grow up, and expected us to grow up, so she let us explore, fall down, make mistakes, and learn from them.

 

I wish she had known I was transgender

 

(Heck, I wish I had known that there was a name for what I was back then!)

 

She would have been delighted. She always wanted a boy, and she let me grow up like one.

 

I got train sets and plastic horses and Roy Rogers outfits and cowboy boots and hats.  That’s why I was so stinkin’ confused when I got a period at age 9 and was told I was turning into a woman.  A woman?!!!  WTH!!!

 

Although I had to wear skirts and dresses to school and church — those were required — as soon as I got home, I was out of them and into jeans or pedal pushers.  I was “portraying” cisgender normality in public, but my sense of self was just plain “boy” to me!

 

This was in the 1950’s, before people even spoke about intersex or transgender individuals. If you’ve read my book WOMB MAN: How I Survived Growing Up in a Booby-Trapped World, you know the whole story  — at least until 2016; I eventually got chest masculinization surgery, too.

 

As an undiagnosed trans kid, I survived numerous bouts of months’-long depression as a teenager, wishing I could just go to sleep one night and not wake up the next day. I was never suicidal (actively) but I was desperately unhappy being expected to grow into a woman and do what all women were supposed to do back then (before women’s lib in 1972); become a wife and mommy or a nurse, teacher or secretary. Those were the choices presented to me by Mr. Olson, a Mormon teacher with five sons at Cle Elum High!

 

In sharp contrast, I had envisioned myself (as a kid) as a cowboy, a horse wrangler, a rough, tough son of a gun who wouldn’t take any guff and who would treat ladies like ladies and gentlemen like gentlemen (a DeForest Kelley kind of guy, more or less) and later as a writer and/or actor. I had plans for my life that didn’t include makeup, husbands, children or any other straitjackets that male patriarchy had established for female human beings.

 

I was — am — a stubborn so-and-so!

 

So, I just started doing it my way.  Peer pressure was never a thing for me because I felt I didn’t have any peers — there was no one like me (a trans alien) that I knew of!  So, going it alone seemed the only choice. I surely wasn’t about to announce to the world that I felt like an anomaly that would not/could not be understood. So, I just stayed quiet and rolled the way I rolled.  Alone.

 

And it worked!

 

I attracted and developed friendships with people who “got me” — whether they knew what it was they were getting or not.  Some later acknowledged that I seemed “a little odd/different” until I told them I was trans about 15 years ago, but then it all fell into place and they agreed, “That’s it exactly! You’re a guy!”

 

So, see?  Mom didn’t ruin me. She would have loved knowing I’m trans.  She always wanted a son, so she let me be the kid I was: her “sunshine.”  

 

 

 

(Explanation: As a teenager, we had a school assignment that required us to ask our mothers what song reminded them of us. Mom responded, “You Are My Sunshine.” I have this shower curtain, which I got after Mom died, to remind myself of that very surprising-to-me answer!!!)

 

Mom, you were my sunshine, too.  Thank you for bringing me up to be myself, no matter who that turned out to be.

 

I do hope you have already come back as one of my pets (as you said you wanted to!) so I could shower you with all the love and care that you so richly deserved in life. I owe you BIG TIME!!!