Every Mother’s Day I would always make my mom a homemade card. Usually it was a drawing of characters from the Nintendo games we would play together with Appreciative Child Boilerplate™ on the flip side. “Thanks for being the best mom ever!” “You win the Mom of the Year Award!” “I love you to the moon and back!”
I haven’t made one of those cards in a couple years. I haven’t told my mom I love her in longer. This Mother’s Day I celebrated by doing the same thing I’ve done almost every Sunday for the past year: slam a needle full of estrogen into the squishy part of my left thigh, the exact opposite of what my shitty mom wants for me.
It seems that in our collective societal unconscious being trans is forever linked with being traumatized. In the words of my friend Carta Monir, “being trans is a gift,” an undying, humbling, gratifying experience, but still when I meet new people I’m only dice rolls away from mentioning how I can’t wear certain clothes because of my shoulder dysphoria or how I don’t want to go with them to a certain bar because I don’t feel safe there or how I’m not going home for spring break because my parents don’t want me for who I am anymore. To be trans is to be reached out to, constantly asked if you’re doing okay, looked upon with pity first and foremost. You come out and you find yourself realizing that everyone around you is now wearing all black.
When the reality of the pandemic finally sank in and University of Michigan had finally cancelled classes, everyone had already made a beeline for their homes and their families in New York City, St. Louis or Boise before I even had the chance to say goodbye. I was left without roommates and cooped up in my small Ann Arbor apartment with only my girlfriend to keep me sane.
I talk to my mom about twice a year, and every time it leaves me feeling worse about our relationship than before. The day after I moved into this apartment I tried to sneak into my parent’s house with the goal of dropping off old boy clothes I no longer needed, but I was caught by my mom pulling in the driveway as I was trying to pull out. She damn near pulled me out of my driver’s seat and put on the guilty water works as she strong-armed me into giving her my new address. And like clockwork, every month or so, she would show up at my front door, knocking, pleading to talk to me.
My mother loves me, but she loves the me that disappeared almost two years ago. Old baby and First Communion pictures of me hang in the foyer of her house like a tribute to a dead toddler. When I mentioned to her I was starting to take hormones she countered with every (proven wrong) excuse in the book to dissuade me. She still calls me by my deadname, says there’s too much stuff in the house that reminds her of it. She’ll never get rid of that crap.
Seeing my friends have moms to go back home to has been tough on me. My girlfriend Sammi chose to stay near me rather than go home when the pandemic started, but after about two months her mom was itching to hug her daughter so she invited the two of us to come home. A few days before this was set to happen, my girlfriend’s bike was stolen. She called her mom while I was around and I overheard a conversation that oh don’t worry, the bike is no big deal. How did school end up finishing? Oh, yeah? That’s awesome, you’re rocking it. I’m so proud of you. I can’t wait to see you soon.
I faced away from her, holding back tears.
No one is proud of me like that anymore. There will be no one to cheer me on when I walk across the graduation stage next year. There’s no one to take me out to dinner at my favorite shitty restaurant after I got straight As the whole year. Hell, I haven’t even got an A in the past handful of classes I have taken, let alone a grade because I dropped most of them. Who’s to say I even will graduate? There’s not anything to be proud of anymore.
It all got to me the other day, and I snapped. My family, living on my own, my financial situation, my depression, anxiety, all of it; I couldn’t take it anymore. The police officers found me in my car in an isolated grade school parking lot with a belt around my neck. After my intake at the U of M hospital, I walked into the Psych ER waiting room only to see my two parents facing away from me. I had to pull the nurses back into the room to ask them to please shoo my parents away. The one okay cousin in my bigoted extended family that follows me on Twitter probably informed them of my post.
After I was discharged from the mental hospital I had to set up a GoFundMe to pay for all the expenses I was trying to avoid. It reached its goal in a day and a half, and I was floored that people still kept donating. My friend Stephen and his family donated about half a grand, and I feel forever in their debt. I wish Stephen’s mother, the kind social worker who lovingly invited me to their family’s Thanksgiving dinner last year, was my mother. I wish Sammi’s mother, who when I went to visit referred to me as her “almost daughter,” was my mother. I wish my best friend May’s mother, who went out of her way to buy snacks and drinks I liked when they invited me over to their house after the pandemic started to cool down, was my mother. Shit, I listen to Björk sing about how modern things have always existed but they’ve just been waiting in a mountain and I wish she was my mother. It hurts me when people gush about how much they love and appreciate their mothers, or when people have supportive mothers but hardly ever return the feelings. It extra hurts when Mother’s Day comes around and society expects you to call your mom and tell her you love her. I’ve learned it’s okay not to when they don’t love you back.
Cassandra Dawn || Ann Arbor, MI || June 16, 2020