Five paragraphs, most of them satisfactory. That’s what I saved before lunch today as a draft for a post I planned to finish tonight. After I’d eaten, while Muriel slept, I dragged the empty wire shelves from the office closet and fumbled with the cruel plastic packaging of a $3 pack of dowel pins. One was needed for the completion of the movie nook, a very minor distraction I’ll probably snap a photo of tomorrow once its shelves aren’t bare.
Then Crankenstein came home with exciting news about her job. Joe was always the first person I told about her professional triumphs, milestones, and disappointments, and he would offer great advice or jokingly congratulate me on marrying well. Not being able to share this with him was jarring. Knowing it’s just the beginning of decades of Crankenstein career updates that will pass without his smartass commentary is devastating. He is my second Margaret Jourdain and having one was painful enough. It means a lot to know he would’ve been almost as proud of Crankenstein as I am. They shared many of the same struggles and to some extent he saw her success as his own, even if it was no substitute for everything depression had cost him.
Our celebratory evening came to a halt when Muriel, who’d done better today than at any point since these latest troubles started, got too excited and overdid it. Now her movements are guarded again and she’s whimpering when she raises herself from the ground or her bed. Her annual checkup was already scheduled for next week but we’re going to touch base with the vet tomorrow in case she wants to start a steroid taper now. Needless to say, the draft remains unfinished. I don’t like sharing incomplete posts, but I also don’t want regular readers to think I’m wasting their time or making excuses, so here’s where it stands so far.
When I came out to my family in high school, my youngest sister told her kindergarten classmates that I was an alien. She had confused the word with “lesbian,” something we pieced together once she noted my extraterrestrial status to our amused parents. But it wasn’t exactly a misnomer: I’d been easily identified, within both our family and society at large, as ‘alien’ practically since birth. Neither celestial enough to qualify as otherworldly nor skeletal enough to merit Xenomorphic consideration, I was merely weird, which my parents and their respective families recognized long before I felt the isolation of it myself.
This strangeness was benignly tolerated, more or less, for the first half of my childhood. Academics weren’t a problem as I entered adolescence but social development was — and those deficits became more glaring in high school, much to my parents’ exasperation. They were quite comfortable calling me “socially retarded” by then, which Felix echoed, and if it started out as an affectionate joke (as I’m sure they’d contend it was) it didn’t stay that way for long. It came up incessantly by my late teens and early twenties, often accompanied by speculation or flat statements that I’d never marry, have children, move out of my parents’ house, or even hold someone else’s hand.
Once they had settled on “retardation” and “dislikes physical contact due to medical history” as explanations, there was minimal curiosity about why I wanted a closetful of identical clothing and to eat the same thing at every meal. My parents, stretched thin by the demands of a fledgling business and growing family, were oblivious to little things my teachers and doctors had picked up on years earlier, like difficulty making eye contact or rocking back and forth in my seat as I wrote or did schoolwork — and I was equally clueless. Though it would’ve been nice to have a better understanding of myself, and to feel less ostracized at home, I’m glad they never opened that can of worms: illness and surgery had already done a number on my self-confidence. The last thing I needed were additional reasons to feel defective.
Though Dad worried about my safety after I came out to my parents — which galled me because of their politics — he exhibited no curiosity about what it was like to be an openly gay teenager in a red state in the late ’90s and early aughts. Had my parents, who were always telling me how they felt about my awkwardness, ever asked how it affected me, I would’ve said that homophobia was a greater hindrance to my personal happiness than being odd. It wasn’t like I didn’t have friends; I just tended not to connect with my peers more than superficially. Most girls seemed outwardly ‘normal,’ even if they weren’t, and I didn’t. As we entered middle school and more of them became visibly abnormal, it was usually in ways diametrically opposed to my quirks.
They traveled in packs, leaving the scent of emotional instability and free Bath & Bodyworks lotion samples in their wake, and congregated in the same bathrooms I did my best to avoid (which wasn’t easy without a large intestine). One girl, typically the most popular, would cry at a sink as the others competed to see who could be the most empathetic whilst simultaneously encouraging the continuation or escalation of whatever petty feud had prompted her tears. Then they would brush their hair and refresh their lip gloss in unison before returning to class. I was not, and never would be one of them — crying at school and leaning on others for emotional support were verboten — which made me as foreign to my parents as my burgeoning liberal politics.
If you can tell where this is going, feel free to let me know. I know what it’s supposed to be about (I’m going to criticize Zillennials again), but if too many distractions appear during the remainder of the week it could possibly switch directions.