Talking Too Much

37

One thing was clear after I'd told mom of my 'situation', regular visits to the doctor came to a halt. To be honest I might have found that a good thing as much as my mother had felt it necessary. By the end of the school year, it was quite clear to me that what was happening to my body must be puberty related, just not in anyway I'd come to expect. And yet, what if my mother took me to see the doctor after my thirteenth birthday revelation? What would he have made of 'the situation'? What would have been his recommendations? Being thirteen, those choices would have been whatever mother would have wanted, I wouldn't have found any say in the matter. By keeping things a secret, while it was a disconcerting situation to be in, it allowed me time to slowly consider it and what this meant to me while holding onto the semblance of normality and continuity that school provided.

Lying in bed at night, I'd think about this and what the likely fall out was. I concluded I'd never be able to have any children, then what would be the point of getting married? Beyond wanting to be an astronaut, I had never planned out my future of marriage and kids and the like. I had just assumed that these things would come into my life when they found me. As a result, losing marriage and kids as options didn't have a big emotional impact on me, it just became a fact for me. Some might say there was always adoption, but at that time in history even mixed race couples were having problems being allowed to adopt, how could someone with my 'situation' be allowed?

After learning research skills for the eighth grade term paper, I spent the final quarter of eighth grade in the library applying those skills to find out anything I could about my 'situation'. Unfortunately the school library didn't have any information on any such thing, the closest I could find was information on Renée Richards. A Navy man transsexual who became a woman professional tennis player, information on her was, oddly enough, available at the school's library as they carried back issues of Sports Illustrated magazine. But the more I read about her, the less it seemed to have to do with me.

As with the previous years, I continued inviting friends over for the Friday night to Saturday sleep overs. When on the camping trip with Pete's family in the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Four, Pete and I had shared a tent and after getting into our own sleeping bags, we chatted for a while before going to sleep. With the sleep overs at the apartment, we'd kept up the tradition and one of these nights, early into the school year, I had brought up the subject of how girls and boys were different. What would it be like versus being a man? I doubt Pete suspected why I was pondering these questions, though by the following morning I concluded that had been a dumb thing to have brought up and made sure I didn't make that error again.

By this time, mother had taken up hitting me. The first time it happened was a school morning in the Fall when I was getting ready for school and my mother for work. I entered the kitchen to go to a cabinet and get something for breakfast, she was there and abruptly hit me in the face. Stunned, I asked what that had been for, what had I done? But she was silent and continued getting ready for work as if nothing had happened. Then a couple days later it happened again, another hit completely out of the blue, this time a punch to the shoulder blade. Again, no reason was given, my mother didn't say a thing, just kept on as if deaf to my questions. Christ! As I type this it occurs to me this was where I had gotten my tactic from when I pulled the 'Intro To Algebra' card at the end of eighth grade. When the adviser told me to put it back and followed me for a bit demanding that, I had just gone on with what I was doing as if he wasn't there and as such he didn't know what to do. The lesson was, the easiest way not to get into an argument with someone is simply not to respond to them.

Anyway, from my mother hitting me without explanation, I eventually concluded that it was due to my 'situation' and this was my punishment for it happening. By Winter, as there was no way of stopping these randomly timed hits, I instead learned methods of avoiding them. Rather than sit at the end of the couch near the end of the stairs and other chair, I'd start sitting at the end that was in a corner, and pulled in the coffee table to effectively act as a wall between me and any passer by. I stopped ever walking in front of her and instead stayed behind as she then couldn't see me to aim a blow. When in the passenger seat of the car, I would sit on the outside edge of the seat with my back against the door, thus keeping my mother's hands in view, allowing me to fend off any budding blow. By the end of the school year, I'd taken up no longer riding with her to the branch store and just always walked to the bus stop behind the town hall. I'd stay in my bedroom until she left for work in the morning, then rush down, grab a bit for breakfast and walk quickly to the bus stop all the way from the apartment.

Yet, with all of these tricks, she would still find moments to hit me when I wasn't expecting it. By the start of my Freshman year of High School, I had realized that the best way to handle her blows was to recoil my body at the first touch, thus if she was aiming for the face, I would start to turn my head making her hit glance off. If I felt a touch to my shoulder, I would immediately sink it in to reduce the impact of the presumed blow. By the winter break of my Freshman year, this had developed into a full-on tick where, whenever she moved her hands, I would start to recoil only to notice she was reaching for something on a near by table. One day it was the salt at a restaurant and my mother demanded I stop it. How? These new demands that I stop flinching whenever she moved her hands or came close to me meant nothing as I would just end up in her blows once again resulting in red marks and bruises. By the following Spring my mother had figured out what she had to do to stop my flinching and that was to stop hitting me. While this made the most difference, even to this day if I get an unexpected touch, or a hand moves quickly into my field of vision, I find I will still flinch or recoil sometimes, resulting in an awkward moment between me and the innocent person moving their hands or patting me on the back.

Toward the end of the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Eight, I found a new friend who had moved into a near by apartment complex with his family. 'Ed', a year older than me, had already finished his Freshman year of High School and as I was heading there in just a few weeks, he became my fount of wisdom. He was the one with the sister he described as being 'big-boned'. Once High School commenced, he decided to show me the skills he had learned in his first year of High School and asked me what I wanted to be. An astronaut of course. I had stumped him as he had learned how to look up college courses based on a chosen profession, but there was no college course to become an astronaut at the time. But in this case, I knew that astronauts had most all started out as pilots for the military and thus I was aiming to go to the Air Force Academy and, if I didn't get in there, my back-up plan was to join the regular Air Force. This worked as a point of reference and he took me to the library to pull out the encyclopedias and look both of those up. In the case of the Air Force Academy, one would have to get a letter of recommendation from a Senator, but not so for just the Air Force. While Ed thought that would be the hardest hurdle for me to pass, my eyes got stuck on the fact that either option required first passing a physical examination by a doctor.

Given my 'situation': How the Hell was I going to do that...?

 

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