Fates that Intertwine -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 6)

It is 7:30am, and I sit watching OD doze as the sounds around us tell me that the hospital is waking up.  A nurse or assistant should appear any moment at our door.  This is the morning of OD's surgery.

Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn came shortly after I finished writing my last entry.  He is every bit as gentle and understanding as I had read in the accounts of others.  His first words to OD were, "You are so beautiful."  With me as interpreter, he and OD discussed her surgery and various options that he suggested for her consideration.  He was with us for 30-45 minutes.

The Thai psychiatrist came next, a woman one year younger than OD.  For another half hour or so, I served as interpreter as OD told her life story.  I was surprised at the depth of the psychiatrist's questions.  She may only serve to put her seal on the recommendation for surgery that OD brought with her from Moldova, but it was clear she takes her work seriously.

After that I left the hospital for the first fast food dinner I have had in more months than I can remember.  I returned to find that Skype had become the order of the evening, as OD called her mother and her boyfriend multiple times.  By then I had finished connecting our little portable DVD player to the flat panel TV in this room that has become our little home.  We finished the evening by watching old Soviet comedies.  I fell asleep on the couch about halfway through Афоня (Afonya) sometime after midnight. . . .

The nurse just came by to say that she will connect OD's intravenous in a few minutes.

We may have been overwhelmed by the mechanics of checking into the hospital yesterday, but today will be different.  As OD goes for surgery, I will begin my own check-in, following in OD's path.  There should be no surprises.  I have OD's experience as a guide.

With the mechanics of the first day now understood and even as the exhaustion of a short night washes over me, I do feel the emotional memories gathering.  I remember my childhood dream, the unspoken nightly prayers to wake up as someone different, the pain of realizing by age 13 that they were just that, dreams and prayers that would not be fulfilled.  Then there was Conundrum.  How vividly I remember reading it cover-to-cover in a single sitting in the University of Virginia's Alderman Library in 1975, stunned and amazed to find that there was a way to make those dreams and prayers come true . . . if only I had the courage.  It only took another 35 years to find that courage.

I now know what Jan Morris may have felt when she went to Morocco to one of the few doctors who performed sexual reassignment surgery, as it was still usually called in those years.  I look at OD.  I look at myself.  Our paths have brought us to Phuket just as certainly as Jan Morris' took her to Morocco.

I have written of this before, but I am again struck how OD's and my paths have intertwined.  I have been a student of Russian language and of Russian and Soviet history since a young age.  It was a love I threw myself into with a passion, consciously saying to myself that it was something I could have, a socially acceptable release from the knowledge that I could never speak of what I really wanted, let alone have it.  I studied, I published, I floated in the joy of its literature and of my own increasing ability to speak and understand this language from a culture and reality so different and yet so like my own.

When the red Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin on December 31, 1991, it ended the Cold War with a finality I thought I would never during my life.  As the rest of the world rejoiced, however, a young woman from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic grieved.  Age 20, OD had gone through all the psychiatric boards of the Soviet medical system and had been approved for reassignment surgery in early 1992.  When she appeared at the hospital for check-in, she was told, "Go home, you are no longer a citizen of this country."  It nearly destroyed OD.

Like many of us who have survived, OD resurfaced months later, accepting the knowledge that surgery, so nearly within her grasp, was now an impossible dream.  She returned to the university, earned her degree, and became a respected teacher of Romanian language and literature at one of Moldova's best high schools.  

Only in 2001 did she decide that the time had come to try again.  Surgery was still out of the question, and there were no endocrinologists in Moldova who would help her.  She did it by herself, studying the medical literature and beginning hormone therapy on her own.  She was fired from her teaching position when the physical changes began to manifest themselves, this in spite of support from loving students and parents.  In 2008 OD became the first transgender person in Moldova who successfully sued for a change in her identity documents.  She has continued fighting for others ever since.  With an accepting and loving mother and an adoring boyfriend, she had achieved the impossible . . . except for surgery.

It must have been fate that brought us together in March 2011 in the city of Brasov, the location of the first-ever self-styled Romanian "transgender congress."  I was taking the first steps on my fourth lifetime attempt to set out on the transition road, all but certain that the likely outcome would be dismissal and unemployment.  I didn't yet know how much things had changed for transgender rights in only the preceding few years.  If I had not gone to Brasov on that wintry March day or if OD had stayed home in Moldova, we would never have met.

OD and I soon became fast friends.  As the months went on and as I found that not only would I not be dismissed but, rather, would finally live to see the day I thought could never happen, OD was more and more on her mind.  A student of Soviet history who had spent so many years researching the fate of repressed Soviet people, I came to see OD not just as a friend but as the last chapter in my personal Cold War.  I was powerless in the 1980s and 1990s to do anything other than research and publish, but in OD I had before me a human being who was herself a casualty of the Soviet system and its collapse.  I had it in my power to do something tangible, to right a wrong.  I knew I could not go to Thailand without her.

Once again to all who answered my call and donated sums big and small, you have my own undying thanks.  You need only to see the photos of OD here to know and feel how happy she is.  You have touched and helped change a life.  OD will never forget you.

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It is now nearly noon.  At 9am I walked with OD to the outer door of the operating theater, stroking her arm and speaking soothing words.  There will be at least another two hours to go in her operation followed by time in recovery.  I don't expect to see her back in our room until 4-6pm.

I have also done my own check-in, had my X-ray, and ordered what will be my last normal lunch for many days to come.  Two hours from now I will take the same laxative that OD took yesterday, and I already know what to expect from that point onward.  Excuse me as I draw inwards and my writing becomes sparse.  Just know that I am happier than words can describe.  I will see you again on the other side.

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Follow these links for more of The Exclamation Point:: 

Previous entry -- OD Checks In; Robyn Checks Out
Following entry -- Like a Natural Woman

OD Checks In; Robyn Checks Out -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 5)

Today was moving day. After staying up much too late to watch the U.S. presidential inauguration last night – President Obama was sworn in at midnight Thai time – we found ourselves turning off the lights at nearly 1am. With the alarm set for 7:30am, we woke up on our own at 7:00. Can you blame us for such a short night's sleep? We knew this would be just the first of many big days to come, and the excitement is again overpowering.

At PIAC Reception with Traces of Yesterday's Sunburn

We ate a quick breakfast and then returned to our room to collect OD's suitcase. The phone rang just before 9:30am. It was Saroj, a taxi driver and sometime tour operator who has been with Dr. Kunaporn and the Phuket International Aesthetic Institute (PIAC) for twenty years. He delivered us in comfort to the Phuket International Hospital some thirty minutes later. Both OD and I filled out admission papers at the reception desk, although in fact it is only OD who was being admitted. Today is her check-in day. I will follow her tomorrow.

From the reception desk we were taken to the office of PIAC itself, where OD signed more papers and received the hospital bracelet that she will wear for the duration of her stay. A chest X-ray followed, and then it was on to OD's room. Although we had eaten only four hours earlier, we found ourselves eating lunch just after noon. Surprisingly, we were both hungry. For OD, this will be the last solid meal for some time.

If there has been any problem today, it has been in communicating with the nurse assistants. Although I had been warned by others who have come to Thailand, it was still an eye-opener to realize that staff at this level has only a theoretical knowledge of English. After a short time, however, we came to recognize that the senior and registered nurses wear a different uniform and a nurse's cap. Their English is good, and we now know to refer all questions to them, reserving smiles and gestures for the junior staff.

Once we understood with whom we can and with whom we cannot communicate, I asked the most important question of the afternoon. That question was, simply, would I be able to spend the night with OD? The answer was "of course!" and so I phoned Saroj, who picked me up at 3pm, taking me back to our hotel so that I could check out and retrieve my own suitcases.

By 5pm I was back in the room with OD. By then she had been given a laxative followed by two one-liter bottles of water. OD says that in quick order she lost everything she has eaten since our departure from Bucharest. Her dinner at 6pm was little more than soup broth. From midnight onward, she will not drink or eat anything at all.

The day is not over. At 7pm OD will have her consultation with Dr. Kunaporn, who will give her a physical exam and set the schedule for her surgery tomorrow. A Thai psychiatrist will also visit OD to give his blessing. Both in the US and Thailand, two letters of recommendation are required for surgery in accordance with the standards of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, In Thailand, however, one of the two recommendations must come from a Thai psychiatrist.

That has been our day so far. Robyn has checked out, and OD has checked in. The preliminaries have begun for OD, and Robyn will follow suit tomorrow.

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Follow these links for more of The Exclamation Point:: 

Previous entry -- Our Day at the Beach
Following entry -- Fates that Intertwine

Our Day at the Beach -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 4)

It is evening in Phuket after one of the most restful, relaxing days that either OD or I has had in many months.  If the view of the water and the sound of the surf are not enough to melt away the tension in even the most tightly wound person, I don't know what is.

After a late breakfast, we climbed down the path leading from the Aspasia Resort to the water.  This is Kata Beach, one of Phuket's three main beach towns, but everything about it is quiet and peaceful.  For anyone familiar with the Delmarva Peninsula in the US, let's say this is Bethany Beach, not Ocean City.

I had not been to the beach since 2005, and OD had not been since 2001.  We both melted away in the warm (not hot!) glow of the sun as we walked in the sand.  Then we took turns in the water.  Kata Beach is more of a bay than a beach that bears the full brunt of an ocean.  The waves are small, and the water is the temperature of a cool but refreshing bath.  One can walk a far distance from shore before the water is over one's head, and even there the water is such a clear azure blue that one can see one's feet on the bottom.  After one turn in the water, we each took another.  It was only the thought that we had forgotten to bring sun block cream with us that drove us back into the shade.  Even so, we both have pink shoulders as a souvenir of our hour in the sun.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on the balcony, reading, looking at the water, and dreamily floating in a state of holiday rest.  OD, hard worker that she is, had brought translation work with her and used much of the afternoon for that.  Then it was a short walk into town for dinner at a small Thai restaurant with wonderful seafood.  While there, we came to realize that one of our waitresses is herself transgender.  It was not her face that gave her away but her voice.  We wondered aloud and not for the first time why it is that many transgender women are content to leave their voices as they were when in fact it is entirely possible to retrain even a low, monotone male voice into something that approaches being acceptably female.  (See Voice:  The Acid Test.)

It is now 9pm.  Tomorrow we travel to Phuket for our consultation with Dr. Kunaporn.  Our day at the beach is coming to its end, but before it does, I plan on sitting again on the balcony, listening to the surf, and simply melting away into the night.

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Follow these links for more of The Exclamation Point:: 

Previous entry -- The Journey Begins
Following entry --  OD Checks In; Robyn Checks Out

    

The Journey Begins -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 3)

If you were looking to this post in search of elegant writing, I hereby warn that no elegance is to be found here or in the next many to come.  Not that elegance is to be found in earlier postings either, but I consider today's post and those that will come in the following days to be more quick postcards or news updates for friends and family.  The reason for this change in style is very simple.

We are in Thailand!

My Last Bike Ride . . . for Now

Yes, we have arrived!  It is Monday morning, and OD still sleeps as I write in the living room area of our accommodations at the Aspasia Resort in Phuket, Thailand.  I slept nine hours, and it is no wonder that OD is still sleeping.  She caught a 7:30am flight on Saturday morning from Chisinau to Bucharest and waited for me in the terminal.  I, meanwhile, was taking one last bike ride on the rollers, taking a shower, and having a leisurely breakfast at home.  (I wonder how long it will be before I ride a bicycle again?)  My taxi arrived at 10:45am, and I was at the airport in less than twenty minutes.  (Try that on a weekday morning in Bucharest!)  I found OD in a coffee shop with our friends Lolo and Alexandra, who had decided to surprise OD and keep her company until I arrived.  After another round of juice, tea, and coffee, we bid them goodbye and headed for the joys of security and passport control.

Our KLM flight to Amsterdam left at 1:55pm, arriving there in a bit less than three hours.  After that it was another hour and a half before our flight to Bangkok.

When we boarded the flight to Thailand, I had a surprise in store for OD:  I had purchased business class.  Knowing what it is like to sit in economy for 3-4 international flights and having read the accounts of others of what the long post-op journey home can be like, I had long ago decided that we needed business class.  Thanks to so many supporters of my appeal to help finance OD's surgery -- and thanks to one supporter in particular -- we could afford it.  I just hadn't told OD.  I took some delight in steering her towards the business class compartment.  It certainly made all the difference in letting us fly the longest leg of our trip in some comfort.

Then it was Bangkok and the long hike from one end of the airport to the other to make our connection to Phuket, where we arrived a little after 2pm local time.  We were met by a van from the Phuket International Aesthetic Center (PIAC), which drove us to the Aspasia.  We were finally opening suitcases and taking showers sometime after 3.

Did we run straight for the beach?  No, business class aside, we were exhausted.  I had been on the road for nearly 24 hours, and OD had been on her way for over 30.  Moreover, neither of us had slept much in the preceding nights due to last minute preparations and excitement.  On Wednesday of last week, I had had to contend with a mild case of food poisoning that did not exactly add to my energy level. 

View from our Balcony

After showers, OD and I sat on the balcony and watched as the sun set.  Our dinner was the complimentary fruit bowl and some crackers and nuts from the mini-bar.  OD still had some cheese from Moldova.  We talked until neither of us could keep our eyes open any longer.  I slept nine hours, waking just after the sun had come up.  As I write, I think I hear OD beginning to stir.

This is our rest day.  Today we will take that walk on the beach and explore the area.  Tomorrow we will be off to Phuket City, where OD will be admitted to the Phuket International Hospital.  Her surgery is scheduled for Wednesday, and I will follow a day later on Thursday.

That, dear friends, is the news up to the moment.  OD and I have arrived in Thailand.  The journey has begun.

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Follow these links for more of The Exclamation Point:: 

Previous entry -- So You Want to Be in Pictures?
Following entry -- Our Day at the Beach

So You Want to Be in Pictures? -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 2)

"Pictures?  Does this mean that yours truly, only a week away from flying to Thailand for gender confirmation surgery, is about to give us a review of holiday season movies?"

Well, not quite, although I did like Argo and Anna Karenina but would suggest steering clear of The Hobbit unless you enjoy seeing the fantasy of your mind’s eye blown out of proportion on a 3D screen.

Going to the movies has been a fun way to spend the quiet days of the holiday season.  The U.S. Embassy in Bucharest followed the Romanian holidays, giving us all but Thursday and Friday of Christmas week as days off.  The same was true of New Year’s week.  It felt as though we had been given a two week vacation.  Much of the time I kept my eye on the calendar, counting down the days until OD and I fly to Thailand on January 19.

Rupert Minds the Bicycles

The holiday was not entirely a movie-going experience.  On New Year’s Eve, Rupert took me on a bicycle excursion to a part of Bucharest I would never have discovered on my own.  After making our way down icy dirt roads between abandoned factories in a wasteland landscape, we came to a ruined eighteenth century cathedral that had been burned by the Ottomans but that continued to stand through the centuries.  With walls that look more than five feet thick, it’s no wonder that the structure withstood wars and Communism.  Today there is a steel fence around it to protect it from the curious, but Rupert says there was not even that when he first came upon the cathedral many months ago.  It was somehow a comfort on New Year’s Eve to stand before a monument that had withstood the test of time.

New Year’s Eve was a repeat of my Thanksgiving open house.   Guests began arriving at 9pm, numbering 25 or more in the end.   The stereo volume went up and the bottles were opened.  I set up the telescope outdoors for anyone who wanted to look at the Moon or Jupiter.  At midnight we all went outside to pop the champagne corks and hug each other as the Bucharest sky burst forth in a blaze of fireworks.  What a contrast it was to my lonely New Year’s Eve of two years ago when I stood at the threshold of full transition.   (See The Education of a Transgender Rip Van Winkle.)  Only at 4am did the party start to ebb, a few friends staying to watch movies.  I left them on the couch sometime after 5am.  When I woke up hours later, I was delighted to see that those who had stayed had already done much to clear up the evidence of an all-night party.

Movies and pictures were a part of my holidays in another way.   Just before Christmas I received a DVD that took me by surprise.  I had nearly forgotten that in 2007 I had been discovered by a small film crew that wanted to make a documentary based on the research that Alina Eremeeva and I had done on the 1936-37 purge of astronomers in the Soviet Union.  (See My Great Purge.)  No, it wasn’t National Geographic or the Museum of Natural History that had come knocking at our door.  The group that had discovered us came from an institution I had never heard of before, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California.  I was somewhat nervous as I put the DVD in the player, wondering what a movie produced by a museum specializing in Jurassic technology might look like.   Indeed, the hour-long documentary is stylized, but factually it follows Alina’s and my published works closely.  The filmmakers had traveled widely, filming on-site at Pulkovo Observatory, in St. Petersburg, and in Uzbekistan.  Once I saw that the facts had been preserved, I sat back and began to enjoy the stylized and somber presentation that includes poetry appropriate to the tragedy that befell Soviet astronomy in the 1930s.   (The film is called The Great Soviet Eclipse.  You can find a short on-line excerpt here.)

Alina’s and my research was the star of this documentary, but I also now find myself at the center of a film on transgender issues that the young Bucharest filmmaker Alexandra Carastoian is making.  Alexandra is associated with the Romanian LGBT rights organization ACCEPT, and she has made a number of short films for ACCEPT.  She first approached me about her idea for a film over a year ago, but it took six months before my involvement was approved through the appropriate channels both at our Embassy and in Washington.  Since then Alexandra has come periodically to film an interview with me as well as some candid day-to-day scenes from my life.  Her latest film session was last Saturday, and it turned into a mini-party as we began with breakfast, moved to filming, and then continued with dinner.  OD had come from Moldova and also became a part of the film.

Alexandra says her favorite part of making a film comes in the cutting room as she puts it all together.  I have full trust in Alexandra who by now has also become a good friend, but I am sure that it will be with some nervousness that I view the finished product for the first time.  It was one thing to see a DVD based on my research.  What will it be like to see a film in which it is not my research but the living me who is on the screen?  

Now we come to the movie that is my life.  I’m sure a few readers have struggled through the paragraphs above, wondering when I would finally get to what has been happening day-to-day as the Thailand clock counts down.

The nuts and bolts are that all monies have been transferred to the Phuket International Hospital.  OD spent several days with me last week in order to go to the Thai Embassy to apply for her visa.   There is no embassy in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, so anyone from Moldova who wishes to go to Thailand must come to Bucharest for a visa.  Our surgeon, Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn, has received and approved the letters that OD’s and my counselors wrote as justification for our surgeries.

Over a week ago, as required by Dr. Kunaporn, I ceased taking my daily dosage of estradiol as well as aspirin and vitamin supplements.   Dr. Kunaporn allows his patients to continue on anti-androgen medication right up until surgery, so at least I am not experiencing any sudden testosterone explosion.  I do, however, feel the decrease in estrogen level.   I feel more on edge, quicker to react to anything that is not going according to plan. Insomnia of the wake-in-the-middle-of-the-night variety has returned, encouraged by the anti-androgen-induced bathroom trips together with my increased excitement as the imminence of my journey to Thailand becomes ever more palpable.

What are my greatest worries today?  At the top of my list is getting sick.  Coming down with a cold or flu over the coming week would be the greatest catastrophe I can think of.  Fortunately, I was dragged down for days by a severe cold in the first half of December, and I hope that has given me some immunity that will last me through the week to come.

Almost there.  The journey to Thailand may just be an exclamation point in this life journey, but it is the answer to my childhood dream and prayer.  In the evenings I am rediscovering old episodes of the Twilight Zone that I first saw as a child in the 1960s, remembering the promise of a mysterious magic that might transform my life before I woke the next morning.  That morning finally comes in little over a week.  It is not the Twilight Zone with Rod Serling standing off camera.  Instead, it is the reality of a life transformed through hard work, suffering experienced and suffering caused, and the love of friends and family, a drama that Rod Serling himself could not have conceived of.

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The link below is to Alexandra Carastoian's short film Vreau sa stiu cum e that she made for Pride Month 2012.

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Follow these links for more of The Exclamation Point:: 

Previous entry -- My White Romanian Christmas 

Following entry --  The Journey Begins

My White Romanian Christmas -- or -- The Exclamation Point (Part 1)

Winter came early to Bucharest this year.  The first snow fell over two weeks ago.  I stayed off the bicycle for one day and then another, thinking it would melt, but within a week I had removed the panniers and set up my bicycle rollers in the hallway.  I am a bus commuter again, the snow and ice clearly here to stay.

There is a wondrous beauty to Bucharest and its parks in the winter.  Snow sticks to the trees and branches, and the Christmas lights of the city shine all through the center.  My young friend Oana and I took a long walk last night from Victoria Square to Unirii Square just to see the lights and here the Christmas sounds.  A large outdoor Christmas market is set up at University Square, where the night was bright and warm with holiday sounds and smells.

This is my third Christmas in Bucharest.  Two years ago it was a warm December, but inside it was cold as I spent my holiday weeks deeply enmeshed in post-divorce litigation.  Last year was cold but snowless as I glowed in the warmth of my first post-transition Christmas.  I wrote then of the joy of receiving new passports and other documents in my new name and gender and of other firsts in my new life.  For this, my third Christmas, I have it all.  The winter beauty of cold and snow surround me, and I live in the warm certainty that my life now is simply my life, transformed as I had always wanted.  More than anything, I am warmed by the feeling of family surrounding me.  I spoke yesterday for nearly an hour with my son in the US, and tomorrow I will talk with my sisters, nephews, and nieces as they gather around their tree.  In Bucharest I have yet another family that has embraced me.

I am choosing to make this a quiet holiday.  After a ten-hour party for Thanksgiving, I am expecting just a few close friends for Christmas.  (To anyone who is reading this and is in the neighborhood, please do drop by!)  I'm still doing all the holiday baking, but most will go to these same friends and others.  The Embassy is closed for a full five days for Christmas.  Then we reopen for a two day break from the holiday, after which we close for another five days.  Twelve days with only two days of work feels more like a vacation than a holiday, and I will use it to rest to the full.

This is the quiet first posting in a new mini-saga.  Less than four weeks from now, on January 19, OD and I will fly to Phuket, Thailand, for our GCS/SRS surgeries.  When did I enter countdown mode?  In some sense I've been there ever since I made the decision last August to go with Dr. Kunaporn in Phuket.  I entered the final count for real sometime after Thanksgiving when I began to realize that with the long holiday coming soon, I needed to begin winding down a number of work projects, either completing them or getting them to a state where they could safely be put on hold for a month or more.  When the Embassy reopens after the New Year, I know that OD and I will be in a whirlwind of final activity.  We will be in much of it together, as OD will be coming to Bucharest to apply for her visa, something she can not do in Moldova where there is no Thai Embassy.

Why The Exclamation Point?  It is my response to those who marvel at the immensity of this impending surgical step.  I have heard a few comments such as, "Well, I only hope you will have no regrets."  Just from the questions, their tone, and the expressions on well-intentioned faces, it is clear that my well-wishers have never had a transgender feeling or thought in their lives.  Rather than a life-altering event of immense magnitude, I look at gender confirmation surgery (GCS), Spa therapy if you will, as the exclamation point that comes at the end of a very long sentence, a process that has been my life.  The immense life-altering event took place over a year ago on November 10, 2011, with the public announcement of my transition and the full-time beginning of my new life.  GCS is just the exclamation point.

So why GCS at all?  Indeed, many transgender persons never have GCS.  For those who are transitioning FtM, the reason often is the technical one that phalloplasty is not perfected and can cost up to a year's U.S. salary or more for a very imperfect result.  Cost also is often a factor for those who, like me, are transitioning MtF.  If not for those many people who responded to my appeal, GCS would have remained an impossible dream for OD.  Thank you to all who responded and, together, covered nearly the full cost of OD's journey of a lifetime.

For those who can afford GCS but choose not to have it, the reasons are varied.  At its core the explanation for many is one I agree with entirely.  This road is a question of gender, not sex or sexual orientation.  It is a matter of the heart and head that has nothing to do with what is between a person's legs.  It is a matter of who one wakes up as in the morning and how one is perceived by the largely binary gender world that surrounds us.

For me, however, GCS has been a dream ever since my youngest years when I would try to make my penis disappear between my legs, when I would go to bed at night with a silent prayer that it be gone when I woke in the morning.  I never wanted it and never enjoyed using it sexually even as I must acknowledge that without it I could never have experienced the life joy of being a parent.  In the end I found this organ to have only one positive virtue:  it allowed me greater ease on hiking and camping trips, particularly in cold weather.

GCS will also open up doors to new possibilities.  How real my chances are I don't know, but as the reality of GCS approaches, the thought of discovering sex for the first time in my life, sex as I always wanted it but could never have it, has taken form.  In dreams and in my gaze as I look at friends, I find myself wondering, "What will it be like?"

Those are the joys and dreams of this Christmas as I prepare to return to my holiday baking.  The tree is up in the living room with gifts surrounding it from and for my extended family of loved ones and friends.  It is again a very, very Merry Christmas in Bucharest.  To my family and friends and to all who have found their way to these notes, may your Christmas be a merry as mine, full of warmth, love, and happiness.

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Follow these links for more of The Exclamation Point:: 

Following entry --  So You Want to Be in Pictures?

Hamlet and Healing

The time is out of joint:  O cursed spite,

That I was ever born to set it right.

Every year at about this time I like to watch the Kenneth Branagh film version of Hamlet.  I don't remember quite when this tradition started, but for at least five years now I do find myself watching the story of the handsome but troubled prince who, knowing what he needs to do, hesitates.  Through those hesitations, questionings, and self-recriminations, eight people including Hamlet himself end up dead on stage.  Make that nine if we count Hamlet's father.

My ex-spouse and I shared a love of the theater, and more than all others we loved the Washington Shakespeare Theatre.  It all started in the 1990s when we went to one of the free performances the theater company would put on each summer in Rock Creek Park's Carter Barron Amphitheatre.  The first free performance we saw was Measure for Measure in 1996, and we were back the next year for Henry V.  In the winter of 1999-2000, I bought tickets for the two of us and our son to see the Shakespeare Theatre's production of Corolianus.  We sat in the orchestra section, and I remember how our son, then age 11, jumped with the first on-stage explosion.  I don't know if he understood the play at that age, but he was hooked by the theater experience.  The next year I bought a subscription for the three of us, and one of the highlights of our troubled lives was to drop everything for our Saturday matinee performances.  We had a box seat that we began to think of as our own property.  We would enter our box, arrange our coats and bags in whatever way we wished, and wait to be enthralled.  I watched as our son came to love Shakespeare by seeing the plays where they were intended to be seen, on the stage, not as words on a page in a high school English class.  

All of that is in the past, but I know my ex-spouse and son continue to share that love for the Washington Shakespeare Theatre.  I think they may still have subscription tickets to this day.

I have written very little about my ex-spouse in this journal out of respect for her privacy and also in the knowledge that her thoughts towards me may not be kind.  I can not really blame her for that.  Like it or not, I was the one who deceived by marrying her in 1982 without a word about my troubled inner thoughts and feelings.  I can explain to no end why it would have taken a much stronger person than me to say those words aloud in 1982, but that does not change the fact.  When she learned the truth in 1990, she was devastated.  In long, drawn-out scenes of explanation and recrimination both in 1990 and again in 2000-02, I ended by promising to bottle up whatever was inside me and, as best I could, make it go away.  

When I finally put divorce on the table in 2007, I don't think my spouse believed it at first.  After 25 years of giving in, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to see myself through to the other side of a divorce.  When it finally dawned on my spouse that I might finally have gathered the strength to do just than, I believe her disbelief was replaced by anger.  How else can one explain divorce and post-divorce litigation that cost me a year's salary in fees to my attorney alone?  Given that our son was already in the university, this should have been an easy negotiation, but instead we ended up with expensive attorneys who were the only financial winners in the process.  I no longer have any home other than a tumble-down cabin in Maine, and the most of my life savings are gone.  I have no clear idea how I will live when mandatory retirement comes knocking on my door in 2019.  Although my ex-spouse fared better in the financial and property settlements, I cannot imagine that her situation is an enviable one.

There is something very Shakespearean about our marriage and divorce.  I look back and clearly see the Hamlet syndrome at work in me.  I knew in 1982 that marriage had not "cured" me, but it took me until 1990 to say anything outside the depths of my own soul.  Even then I was easily talked back into a closet, and much of the talk that put me there was my own.  

"The time is out of joint:  O cursed spite, that I was ever born to set it right."  How apt those words are for many of us who come face to face with the question of gender transition.  We know the truth about ourselves, but we know that others will think us mad if we act.  In our dark moments, we are inclined to agree with them.

It took more than five decades for me to get there, but I am now happily on the other side of the transition question.  Any anger that I felt from 2007 through 2011 as litigation dragged on seemingly without end has evaporated in the light of a much happier day.  I look at the calendar and see that it will soon by December 11, my ex-spouse's birthday.  I wonder if for her, also, the anger might not be giving way.  Could it not be that one day we will meet for a family event, perhaps our son's wedding, and give each other a faint smile of healing?  In the end, this Hamlet did act no matter what the pain.  The two main characters are both still alive and on-stage, free to live their lives now that the curtain has come down on a long and troubled marriage.  The time is no longer out of joint.  Imperfectly but to the best of my ability, I have set it right.

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There is very little that is Shakespearean about this song by Gordon Lightfoot, but anyone who knew us in the early days of our marriage will recognize it.  It is a birthday card to my ex-spouse with the hope for healing as we both move on while sharing a past that included a beautiful son, the Shakespeare Theatre, and much else that was good amidst the pain.