Porch Talks

After my move back down to Atlanta in January of 2007 my mom and I started having some pretty amazing conversations. To the best of my recollection it started not long after a particularly difficult break up.

“You want a cigarette?” she asked. That was a definite affirmative. I did want a cigarette very much. So we stepped outside to sit at our porch table and we talked until close to one in the morning. Not about anything in particular, just talked.

My mom has always been really open with me sometimes to the point of a flaw. Revealing too much information at one time. Such a time often sent me into shock or allowed me far to much of a look at her own sex life or something else that might have been far too much for any other kid to take. I am not scarred. Well, not badly anyway.

Our talks on the porch became very frequent until they were a nightly ritual. We would clear off the table, put the food away, clean the kitchen and maybe watch some TV until it was bedtime for the little sisters and then we would go outside and just talk.

Our talks ranged from what happened that day to just about anything else you could possibly think of. Aliens, the Pope, poetry to heavier subjects like her relationship with my dad to nasty break ups to gender. Gender, that was an interesting one.

Mom and dad and my sisters had all been out of the house for some reason that I can’t remember. They probably went up to see my grandmother or something. In any case I had the house to myself and when such is the case I usually at least check to see what’s on LOGO, our one gay channel in our cable package. There was a show that was following the lives of three gender queer people. By this time I had been identifying as gender queer for some time so it obviously caught my attention. People just like me on the television. I was all over that like shit on Velcro. So I watched and these people were all in various stages of coming out to various loved ones.

Coming out as gender queer hadn’t ever really struck me as something that I needed to tell people. I just was. If someone asked me if I was a girl or a boy my response was usually, “Yes, I am.” However, watching these people made me very aware that if I didn’t come out then I was really likely to be mistaken for trans-gendered when the issue finally presented itself.

So I thought about this throughout the entire day and because I was dwelling on it in such an intense way I got “coming-out” paranoia all over again. I was positive that my mom would really not be able to get her head around it. This was a silly thing to think since mom was the person who introduced me to quantum physics and quantum mechanics through the movie “What The Bleep Do We Know?” and had been the first family member that I came out to, to which she pretty much responded with “Well, DUH! I’ve known since you were, like, eight.”

They got home while I was in my room posting on my blog. They had been gone for a long time and it was pretty late as it goes for a house of people who usually have to be up pretty early. My sisters went almost immediately to bed, dad found something interesting on TV and mom and I stepped out onto the porch for our nightly chat. It all came rushing out of me at that point. I was so scared and felt so pent up. She looked at me for a minute and said, “I think you just came out to me all over again but say it all again, slower this time please.” Well of course she wasn’t going to be all weird about it. Duh.

So I ran it by her again. I told her about how some days I feel more masculine than others. Some days I feel like I really need to bind my chest down in order to feel comfortable with my body and some days I am really pleased with the fact that I am a biological female which does not necessarily mean that I will be feminine since I never really have been in the first place. I told her all about how you have to be able to look at gender as a continuum and not two boxes. There are women and men and trans-folk and then there are other people who don’t really fit into any of that. People like me.

We ended up having a pretty long discussion about what exactly it meant to be gender queer. What the difference was between being gender queer and being trans and as I figured tat was a pretty good-sized portion of the conversation. Thank a higher being that my mom is a smart, open-minded person. The conclusion that we eventually came to is that there isn’t a specific group of people that can be labeled as gender queer but that it’s kind of a relative thing. It doesn’t have anything to do with your sexuality or sex but it has everything to do with what you are comfortable with.


!@ $ & * # ! ^ $ @ * & !

During another one of our nightly talks we got onto the subject of how kids do some really stupid shit. Mom was regaling me with one of my all time favorite stories. She and her two little sisters had gone with their mom, my grandma, to run some random errands throughout the day and had been out for a long time. My grandma decided to take them to a place, now pretty much forgotten, called Farrel’s. They placed their orders and mom had something equivalent to a smoothie or a milkshake. While they were having their snacks mom’s little sisters were being big pains in the butt and my mom was being very sweet and refined. Their mom pointed this out with something like, “Now see how nice your sister is being, she is behaving so well,” which is a line that often leads to disaster especially when young children are involved. Sure enough my mom’s head swelled up to the size of a hot air balloon and as she went to take another sip of her treat she missed her mark and stuck the straw directly up her nose. The result of this, as you might well imagine, was two younger siblings and a mother who nearly died in fits of laughter.

The immediate thought that came to my mind was, “Gah, I don’t remember ever doing anything so stupid,” which was quickly followed by another thought, “Oh wait, yes I do.” As I went on thinking about what was easily the most embarrassing moment of my life I inevitably started to laugh.

“Geez, the story can’t be that funny after all the times that you’ve heard it,” mom said, looking a little confused.

“No, it’s not that. I just realized hat I’ve got you beat out,” I managed through fits of giggles. So I told her my story, which I have modified for your reading pleasure.

This takes place when I was five or so. We were living in a different house. It was a nice ranch-style house with a good-sized front yard. There was little walk way that went along the front of the house to this little side yard that had a lattice fence that separated it from the front yard and that was my favorite place to play because there was a crazy lady who lived next door to us who had four or five dogs and a llama or three. I was frequently over in the little side yard trying to get the dogs to eat worms. Not in a mean way you understand, I just wanted to see if they would. Anyway, it was a warm day when said embarrassing moment took place. I was walking out to the side yard to play when I noticed that there was a head and about and inch and a half of nail sticking out of one of the posts of the charming little lattice fence. I stood there for a while contemplating the existence of the nail and whether or not I could reasonably fit one of my nostrils over it. I decided that I could probably do it without causing myself any harm so I gave it a try. It fit. Who knew?

So there I am with my young, stupid little self attached to a fence post with the head of a nail stuck up my nose and damn it I was proud. I had calculated correctly, it did fit and I didn’t hurt myself. I slid my nose off of the nail and I was fine. I wasn’t stuck, there was no need for firemen or police there wasn’t any blood. Blood. There was suddenly blood everywhere. I had just induced a horrible nosebleed. Now, I was pretty prone to nosebleeds when I was younger and therefore used to them so I immediately cupped both of my hands under my nose. This was more blood than I was used to. I walked to the front door so as not to splatter any blood from my nose/faucet onto my clothes. I got to the screen door, removed one hand from underneath my nose and wiped it as best I could on the side of the house before opening the door and slipping inside.

“Mom?” I inquired, “MOM?”

My mom looked up from the dishes saw me and my bloody hands and face and came over to me with a wet rag. As she walked over to me this thought alone ran through my terrified little head. “She can never, never know how this happened.” She didn’t find out until March of 2007 I believe but when she did she too almost died in a fit of uncontrolled laughter. For at least a week afterwards she couldn’t look at me without smirking, though I don’t think she knew she was doing it.