Tomorrow we’ll find out of our insurance is going to cover Ashlie’s hormone therapy. We’re talking the difference between a $20.00/month and the $120.00/month we’ve been paying out of pocket for the last six months. We have a tenuious-at-best relationship with this new doctor and he has a rudimentary-at-best understanding of male-to-female (MTF) transgender patients, but the fact that we found a local doctor with ANY understanding of trans issues was a stroke of great luck, and so we’re off to see the wizard tomorrow morning, fingers crossed and family finances on the line.
UPDATE: I am happy to report that the doctor and the insurance company both came through, and our monthly prescription bill just got cut by $100. 
My parents, both sets of them, made this big deal about college. I stilll remember the day my father took my sisters and I out to the cannery where he worked as a mechanic for twenty years, showed us the women on the line and told us that we should “get an education” so we didn’t end up on that line. My mother seeded in me a deep sense of compassion and an intellectual curiosity.
And yet, when I did go on to “get that education”, to draw upon that compassion and curiosity, to form new opinions and core beliefs based upon those very things, when I came home changed by that experience, I met with resistance and dismissal. In the last few weeks, this has become an even more pronounced issue, as I listen to my parents (each intensely conservative in their own way) skewer my politics and defend their own.
ANd what I can’t quite wrap my head around is when and how the very education my parents encouraged me to pursue has become, in their minds, a liability. Why a disdain for ”the liberal elite” peppers our political discussions, and how the concept of an intellectual president (as opposed to the “go with his gut” kind) is belittled by them both ad nauseum.
9:19 p.m. Ok, I just voted. And you?
I realized tonight that the world has indeed gotten smaller. I was moving back and forth between reading a novel on the back porch, cooking dinner and perusing a week’s worth of blogs. I had just commented on a blog, on a post regarding Caribou Barbie and stirred the soup before stepping outside for a cigarette before announcing that dinner was ready. As is my smoking habit, I sat down on the porch couch while smoking, and flipped open the book I am currently reading. Pretty normal stuff. Until it hit me that the book I was reading was written by the writer of the blog I’d just commented on, who I would, probably later this week, engage in an e-mail exchange with, regarding my enjoyment of the book I was in the process of devouring.
Honestly, how fucking cool is that?
Ashlie spent last night at her friend Jackie’s house and just called to ask if she could stay another night. I didn’t really have a reason to say no, besides the usual knee-jerk, so I gave her permission. The upside is that things are less stressful when she’s not home. The downside, is that I get kinda lonely, which is funny, because for the last eight months, she has been glued to my hip like a needy toddler all over again.
There’s this scene from an episode of The Family Guy in which Stewie stands beside Lois’ side of the bed and just says “Mom, mom, mom, mommie, mommie, Lois” over and over again until she freaks out completely, and that’s how much of Ashlie’s transition has felt for me. So then, when I get this break, when she is off doing her thing and Micachu is off doing his thing and Mr. J. is off doing his thing, I should be delighted to find the time and space to do my thing. Right? Only now I’m sitting here trying to remember what My Thing is.
If you remember it for me, let me know, ok?
Is it a sign of the times or my advancing age, that I await tonight’s VP debate with the baited breath once saved for a first kiss or Christmas morning?