My antipathy towards men has been especially acute
today. Even I have been troubled by the
things I’ve been saying today about all the unfortunate victims of testosterone
poisoning . But I realized I was
channeling my mother.
My mother was very attractive and incredibly intelligent. She was also very troubled. She was a paranoid schizophrenic and was committed
twice for it. Yet the courts decided
that it was a good idea to let her raise my sister and me alone. It was at times like being raised by
Caligula. But there were some advantages
to it. Being raised in two different
realities (Mom's and everyone else's) you become an expert on passing between
worlds. You have to in order to
survive.
My mother’s hatred of men was legendary. My father told me once that during the short
time that he and my mother were together, he felt like a stud. She only tolerated his presence when she was
fertile and as soon as she got the babies she wanted from him, he was out. She never remarried and preferred to live in
the dark the rest of her days like Mrs. Havisham from Great Expectations. Until the end of her life she blamed my
father for ruining her life, even though she hadn’t had any communication with
him for forty years.
She never understood my being trans and insisted that I
was gay. In her defense, she was always
very supportive of her gay son and even tried to set me up with male nurses
from the hospital. “Mom,” I would say, “why are you doing
this? I’m not gay. I’m a transsexual.”
“Sweetie,” (she
always called me “Sweetie”,) “how could you possibly be a transsexual and not
be gay?”
“Because I’m a lesbian?”
“Jimmy, you aren’t
a lesbian. Just because you haven’t
like any of the boys I’ve picked out for you…that doesn’t mean you’re a
lesbian. It just means I haven’t found
the right boy for you.”
I suppose that technically speaking I was gay.
I just wasn’t gay the way she thought I was gay.
She never attended any of my marriages and always thought
I was wasn’t being true to myself (since I obviously liked guys.) After 20 years of marriage, my mother still
had not learned my wife’s name. She was
always “that girl I married.” Even went
I presented her with grandchildren, her response was, “they’re gorgeous. But tell me, Sweetie. Who’s the father?” She
did adore those kids, though, in her own peculiar way.
We were not close when I grew up. Every time I tried to reach out to her,
things would go well for a time.
Eventually, though, she would start talking about the teams of people that
followed her whenever she left her apartment or the woman that called her up
every year on her birthday to say that she was going to kill her. I
tried to be patient, but I knew that eventually she would start to accuse me of
conspiring with her enemies. That’s when
the arguing would start anew.
My mother died seven years ago. My sister said that she died only when she
ran out of people to torment. She said
she wanted to be cremated and to have her ashes spread out at the second hand store
which was her favorite place in the world.
She didn’t want any sort of memorial and wanted her ashes distributed in
secret because she wanted all traces of her existence erased from the
world.
I didn’t cry at her
very small funeral, but I would give almost anything to sit and listen to her
paranoid ranting just one more time.
