7:50 a.m. - Monday, Jun. 16, 2003
A visit from Fortunate Son
I like to cross stitch. It�s a great tension reducer.

I got the computer working well enough to copy some of my CDs and learn to make and use a playlist. I moped around for a couple of days, doing laundry and then cross stitching. Loading the dishwasher and the cross stitching. In the process, I started losing weight� again, and so that helped me feel a bit more human too.

Fortunate Son gets a lot of credit for the way he dealt with seeing his father as a woman for the very first time. That had to be rough, though he barely showed it.

I think he rather expected me to be pretty much the same guy he has always known, except wearing a dress. If he did, it�s my fault. I�ve told him before that I wasn�t a different person, I was just a more complete person.. the complete me. That�s true. I didn�t lie. But what I forgot to consider is the fact that he has lived with my impersonation of a man and a father. He had no idea what the complete me really is.

We did quite a bit of driving the first two days; First to the bluegrass festival in Wiggins and then to Laura�s house in Baton Rouge. On the second day, on the way home from Baton Rouge, he mentioned that I drive like a woman. Looking back on that, I wonder if he thought I was trying to drive like a woman.

I still hold my commercial driver�s license. Theoretically, I could climb in and drive one of the big rigs. Theoretically. The fact is, I can�t imagine myself driving a big truck any more than I can imagine myself piloting the space shuttle. My driving habits and abilities have evolved over the last half dozen years. Now I drive in a way that makes me feel most comfortable. I do a lot of things these days in ways that make me most comfortable. I wonder if that�s why I no longer have 13 ulcers.

Later, at home, he decided that my old grimy computer should have some love and an updated operating system. We went to Office Max and purchased the Windows XP upgrade and came home so he could do the �simple� procedure to upgrade from Windows 98. Oh�. There�s that word again: Theoretically.

In the case of my computer, he ran into a real buzz saw. Like a termite-ridden house held together only by its paint, my computer apparently disintegrated the moment he disturbed it. The simple upgrade turned into forty-eight hours of frustration and insomnia for him. It turned into a new computer, one piece at a time, for me. With Windows XP.

It was during all the frustration that I was made aware of FS�s feelings. I wanted to help. I wanted to be involved. But I had a hard time getting answers from him. He acted the same way I used to act.. or maybe still do sometimes� when I was working and my mom, or ann, or my wife was asking questions and trying to be involved. He assumed that I knew more than I did. I asked questions and then lost interest when he went into detailed explanations. Finally, he had enough.

He told me he felt that I was putting on an act, and that it�s OK to be a capable, intelligent woman. I thought I was pretty capable and intelligent. I just forget everything I know as soon as I don�t need it anymore. When I need it again, I have to re-learn it. No problem. I know how to find the information again, usually. But he really let me have both barrels for the way I had been behaving over the last few days.

I�ve tried to emphasize the importance of honesty for my sons. Since I value honesty so highly, I can�t allow myself to be offended or hurt when someone is being honest with me. I was glad Fortunate Son could finally open up and share his feelings with me, even though they were fairly critical. I wasn�t offended, but I was sure surprised. I didn�t feel like I was acting at all. In fact, I felt like I was being truly myself. I wasn�t protecting myself, nor was I protecting him from being exposed to the actual me. I was confused that he seemed to relate to me as he would to a woman, and then was frustrated because I related to my world.. including him� as a woman. And I was really surprised to realize that he considered me to be very different from the person he had grown up with.

Suddenly, I realized that I had done a near-perfect job of keeping from him the true level of my misery and despair during the time that he lived in my home. He really did want that person back, because he had never really known this person at all. That made me cry.

He thought I was crying because he had hurt my feelings. That wasn�t true at all. I was glad to hear him talk. I was just shocked that he had never had a clue to how I felt all those years.

Later, I gained some insight from him when he explained how this all felt from his perspective. He explained that he felt as if his father had really died. But instead of the closure that comes from a funeral and a burial, he is left with this new person who KNEW his father. This person can tell him things his father would have said, and can talk about some of the memories, but could never take the place of the missing father.

From MY perspective this is all wrong. I was never that person. I was just this person wrapped up in unsmiling misery. But from HIS perspective, I have to admit it makes sense. He never knew me. He knew an image of me, and now that image is taken from him� without his consent. In his place, I think I might be angry at the �new� person who claimed to be the old person I thought I had know all my life.

So I need to try to keep in mind how it all appears to Fortunate Son.. and most likely to my non-speaking son as well. It�s just one more thing for me to be sorry for. But one more thing I can�t really control.

If I act like a woman, if I drive like one, if I ask the wrong questions at the wrong time and then can�t really relate to the answers, it�s because I�m unlearning a lot of stuff I had to learn to pull off my act. This is me. That was everything except me. I�m sorry now that I didn�t learn a long time ago that I have a right to be me.. whatever me is. I would have pulled the plug on that life a lot sooner. As it turns out, that would have saved everyone a great deal of pain.

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