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A couple of days ago I received the news that my mother had passed away.
I think I was stunned for a little while, and then, nothing.
My mum has been dying for at least the last ten years.
This time it wasn't a false alarm.
She had taken a turn for the worse a week prior to her actual passing, but then appeared to improve. This has become such a common occurrence that this time, my sister, who has to handle these things due to my being 5000 miles away, didn't inform me until after our mum had started to improve.
Another false alarm.
And then, 4th of July morning, the first morning I'm waking up at D's house because the night before L and I got into it, and I realized I can't live there anymore, packed my bags and moved out for good, and I have a cup of tea in my hand, I get a call and this time it's not a false alarm.
The news takes me by surprise, and for a bit I don't know what to do, except, nothing.
In the past month, my wife and I have decided to get divorced.
July 3rd marks the point when I realize I'm walking away from the business I've put 6 years and $45k+ into, and then as a direct result of this decision, get into a fight that results in my moving out in suitcases.
And now my mother has died.
And I don't feel anything.
Ten years of putting my emotions on hold seem to have resulted in me forgetting where the pause button is located.
In 9 days I'll be on a flight back to England and, as ever, it seems trips home are either for weddings or funerals.
I realize that I have no idea who my mother was.
She became disabled as a result of cancer when I was five and I distanced myself from her then.
In the end she never got to see who I became either.
I've been wondering recently what our relationship would have been like had I been born XX bodied.
I've never really seen my father in my features, and prior to starting HRT, I hadn't seen my mother in them either, but now I keep seeing her in the mirror and I want to know who she was.
It struck me the other day that I my father couldn't tell me anything helpful about who my mother was as a woman either.
My parents relationship was so vastly dysfunctional.
My earliest memories are of hiding from their fights and then, after cancer, the fighting stopped.
I feel like my mother became less than a whole person from that point on. It infuriated me how easily she accepted her disabilities, living vicariously through my father.
I'm struggling to recall how I felt about my mother as I grew up.
Right now, at this moment I'm trying to recall the emotional memory of her and I simply can't.
I've spent the last few days trying to feel some sort of emotional reaction to my memories (I have so few memories, it's almost to the point of amnesia now) and I can't feel anything.
That seems so wrong, like I'm failing in my duty as a daughter (a word I use, fully aware of the absurdity, but finding any other word inadequate). What are memories worth without feelings?
It's like looking through someone else's family albums.
Almost my whole life, up until the point of my transition, now seems to lack any emotional context.
Stimulus,
Feeling,
Emotional response to feeling,
conscious rationalization of emotional response.
Our emotions always precede rational though, they're existence demanding a story by which to explain them.
The undeniable truth of emotional experience is what makes these stories not just believable, but REAL to us.
"It must be so, for I have felt it"
But what happens to the truth of those stories when we no longer feel them?
In some way's I feel that, emotionally, the girl who was to become the woman I am now, was left at home while the boy the world saw went off and lived her experiences. Reporting them back later when he returned home so that while she heard all the stories, they weren't her stories. They lacked her emotional truth, the that anchors them in the mind.
I remember the abstract sense of place far better than I recall relationships with other people.
The feeling of the woods in spring, all blue around the ankles and a green that screams I am alive above my head.
Midges drifting in dizzy clouds through moats of sunlight over the rivers surface.
Emotionally what I recall are those serendipities that saw me as I saw myself.
Not so much my life lived in sight of other people.
