Laurustina

My friend, Susanne The Scot is out of town and I am taking care of her Guniea Pig. It isn’t much of a task. I drop by once a day, top off the water bottle, refill her straw ball, clean the poop out of her cage and refresh her dinner dish. I also chat her up, though mostly she stays in her cardboard box and eyes me suspiciously. This is the second time I have been entrusted with the care of The Guniea in Susanne and Steve’s absence, and to be honest, I like it. Such a small thing. Silly, no?

Still, in my attempt to become a better kind of friend, I thought I’d leave a little Welcome Home / Happy Easter gift to surprise them upon their return, so I picked up a little straw basket for a buck-fifty, some green plastic grass for seventy-nine cents, the traditional yellow chickadee Peeps (c) and a variety of foil-wrapped chocolates. I was feelin’ good as I carried my purchases out to the car.

And then…it struck me how every Easter of my children’s childhood, I had somehow relied upon my mother for providing an appropriate Easter experience. Maybe I should explain here that an “appropriate Easter experience” in my childhood had much less to do with chocolates and bunnies than it did with starched dresses and stiff leather shoes. There were always a couple of candies made available after breakfast and before Sunday School, but Easter egg hunts and gift baskets weren’t our tradition. Not that we didn’t want them. Not that my children didn’t want them…they just weren’t how we celebrated. A lamb-shaped cake maybe. A nice ham. A Cadbury cream egg or two. But mostly, it was about The Christ and The Cross and The Palm Fronds and such.

And so, as I’m sitting there in my car this afternoon, with the makings of a proper little Easter basket in the plastic bag in the passenger seat, I find myself suddenly  in tears over all the Easters that I didn’t go overboard on with pastel-coloured egg hunts and bunny suits, all the Easter Bunny polaroids I didn’t drag my babies to the mall for. All the little suits and dresses and leather shoes they didn’t strut crosstown in.  All the holidays I blew off or didn’t fully celebrate or were simply underwhelming because Mommie was too consumed with her own shit to take the time and energy to make them as joyous as they should have been.

I look at the damn basket and fucking plastic grass in the bag beside me and all I can think of are the baskets and grasses and foil-covered chocolates that I did not surprise Mouse and Ashlie with and I hate myself deeply and furiously in that moment.  So much I did not give them. So much I considered unimportant at the time. So much I can never make up for.

I collect myself after a while, and I come home, bringing the bags inside and shoving them into a corner for the night; half intending to put together the little basket and present it to Mouse in the morning. Half convinced that doing so would be a sad, awkward attempt long after such things ceased to matter.

It is easier to try a being a better friend than it is to try being a better mother.  Especially when you have recently failed hugely and publicly and with a certain finality at the latter. At which point, the things you do TO and FOR your remaining child are all processed through the lens of loss. They seem overwrought because they ARE overwrought. They seem desperate because YOU are desperate. There is nothing else, nothing more you COULD be.

And so I sit tonight, with my cream eggs and bunny ears; not knowing if I should present them tomorrow morning to my grown son on his way to work or my Scottish friend’s guniea pig who refuses to let me nuzzle her but takes my offering of fresh spinach without recrimination. The truth is, of course, that the only person would still appreciate  such things is no longer with us to give a shit about any of it and there is not a damn thing I can do about that.

Ashlie was fierce about her pronouns and I supported her in that, knowing that every HE/HIM/HIS rolling off the tongue in casual conversation was a stab in her heart. But pronouns don’t matter anymore. Names either, for that matter. And I’ve noticed enough stalling and stammering from the well-intended in the last few days that I suppose it warrants mentioning.

I promise not to be offended if you say Gabriel as long as you promise not to be disoriented if I say Ashlie. Six weeks ago, I wrote “A year ago, we lost Gabriel and gained Ashlie. Now, we have lost Ashlie and gained nothing.” and for us, it really was that stark a split, enough so that I now think of Gabriel and Ashlie as “them”. And while I continue to grieve for the little boy lost, it is HER I miss most viscerally.

I spent this last week reading a book by a group of bereaved mothers, in which one of them wrote “If you love me, say my child’s name” and it struck a chord with me, because there is this delicate dance that people around you do when something tragic happens…they don’t know what to say, they say too much, they don’t say enough, they ask the wrong questions or don’t ask any questions at all…its not their fault. I get that. I have been on the other side of it too.

The truth is, when someone asks me “how are you?”, I refuse to give them the polite answer because I am lightyears beyond polite. I am devistated. gutted. irrevocably changed. shattered to the core. I answer this way, knowing that the question may well have been rhetorical, or that the questioner really DID mean to inquire about my well-being.

What I mean to say, after all the rambling is this; please don’t ask me general questions to which you could guess my response, and please please don’t be afraid to ask specific ones, or to say my child names. Either one. They are both, at this moment, the only music I can stand to hear.

 Just so you know;

She cursed like a sailor.

Her favorite color was pink. Obsessively so.

She beat every version of Hitman multiple times.

She believed in Sasquatch but not in a benevolent god.

She smoked menthol Camels when she thought I wasn’t looking.

She self-identified as a lesbian but occasionally crushed on FTM boys.

She hated novels but loved books on history, science and medicine.

She told everyone that she was 5’6” even after a growth spurt shot her up to 5’10”.

She smelled like a mix of Victoria’s Secret’s “Pure Seduction” and Aqua Net hairspray.

She got angry fast and over it fast. Words were her favorite weapons and with them she was fierce.

She wore scrubs or desert camo BDUs for pajamas every night, but only those she was really close to ever saw her in such comfy casual clothes.

Her MySpace page still lingers out there, frozen in cyberspace. Her last status update, from February 14^th reads: You’re so fucking special. I wish I was special.

She preferred $5 French Tip glue-on nails to $25 acrylics, a fact that would have been handy to have learned $200-some-odd dollars sooner than we did.

Her favorite way to brush off my concerns, admonishments and questions when I voiced them was “Don’t trip”. My favorite response was, “I’m your mother. Its my job to trip.”

She watched Dexter, Scrubs, House, Top Gear (a British show about cars) and Skins religiously. She also loved Smallville, Arrested Development and pretty much anything on the History channel.

Hanging on her wall for months before her death was a quote from an episode of the BBC show Skins, which read: You’re going to have to be quick. I’ve taken a lot of pills. It troubled me then. It haunts me now.

She was the bravest kid I’ve ever known except when it came to other teenage girls, of whom she became mostly terrified during the last year because they could clock her (recognize her as transgender) from across the room.

She listened mostly to Lil Wayne, Gwen Stefani, Pink Floyd and Crystal Castles, but her favorite song was Moonlight Sonata and she went to sleep most nights listening to one of those Natural Sounds CDs titled Thunderstorm.

Her closest friends in this last year were Brianna, a skinny black lesbian girl with a mohawk and a permanently startled expression, Jackie, a 50-year-old trans woman who drove an old Crown Victoria police unit, her jr. high girlfriend Amanda and her old friend James from Santa Cruz who she spent much of her Soldier Boy time in Capitola with and whose whole family accepted her unconditionally.

She spent the last conscious night of her life with her support group friends, having a late dinner at Applebee’s and crashing out on Jackie’s couch around 3 a.m.

In the hours before her death, sixteen of us attended her bedside, held her hand, tucked the blanket over her toes, combed her hair, whispered into her ear, swept pale pink shadow on her eyelids, adorned her with rings and bracelets, covered her with kisses and tears.

We donated her heart and liver through the California Transplant Network. Her heart didn’t survive the process, but her liver was successfully transplanted and gave a second chance at life to a father of four.

I pushed myself too hard today. It didn’t seem like much at the time; going out to the library, listening to music in the car, picking up groceries, roasting a chicken, paying some bills and reading the first few chapters of a book for bereaved parents, but by 9:00 p.m. I was completely undone. A bath helped some. Laying on the bed for an hour and staring at the wall helped a little more. Still, I feel raw and exhausted.  Around 10:30, I forced myself to get out of bed again, come out into the living room and socialize with Mr. J. and Micachu while they played video games but the last song i was listening to in the car is still in my head and I laughed, wondering if anyone noticed or thought it was strange to see a lunatic middle-aged woman crying while driving and blasting I Am X-Ray’s “Pretty Rave Girl” as loud as the thanks-to-Ashlie blasted-out speakers could go.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll go easier on myself.

“Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief, long as you make room for something else”

- Bubbles, The Wire; Season Five finale