Day 173

I hardly slept last night. I drifted in and out of sleep, but I did manage to have two dreams, both of which I remember vividly.

In the first dream, I was sitting on the floor of my room in Queens and I was crying hysterically. And then Dad walked in, but it was Dad from twenty years ago. He was younger. He had hair. He didn’t have a goatee. As soon as I saw him, I stopped crying. I immediately felt better. The anxiety in my gut melted away.  He was there, things were going to be okay. He said down next to me and asked, “What’s wrong?” I wiped away my tears and said, “Mom is selling your house.” But the instant I said that, Mom walked in, and as soon as she appeared, Dad disappeared. I woke up crying.

In my second dream, my son and I wanted ice-cream. We patiently waited on a long self-serve line. At some point, my son disappeared. Finally, it was my turn to get ice cream. But when I got to the front of the line it had all started to melt and it was goopy. I reached for a cake cone, the only cones there, and the cone had holes — like a colander — along the sides. I reached for another, but that cone also had holes. They all did. And so I scooped the goopy ice cream, but it was too soft and it dripped through the holes. With ice cream sliding down my arm, I looked around at the other people eating the ice cream. No one else had holes in their cones. No one else was covered in melting ice cream. Everyone else was enjoying what they had gotten.

Everything I do is wrong. Mom is critical of everything. Last night at dinner, she implied that I was doing an awful job raising my son. That if I didn’t do better he’d end up committing a crime and getting shot and killed. I stormed out of the house unable to stop the tears. I called my spouse, but she was busy. Distraught, I slipped the phone into my pocket, sat down at the edge of the dirt road and sobbed until I had to dial into my taekwondo class.

Today, the realtor came to assess the house. It’s in great shape and he quoted Mom a price that pleased her. However, he said if she was willing to sell now he could get even more money for her. Apparently, people are fleeing the city for the suburbs and houses out here are rapidly increasing in value. Mom told him she had promised me the house for the next few months and that she didn’t want to sell until March. He told her to think about it.

At the beach, Mom thought about it and said she really didn’t want to sell. That she would wait to see how her finances played out. There are so many happy memories here. She doesn’t want to walk away from them.

I finished taekwondo camp. My belt will be determined by whether or not I pass my test for this cycle next week. At the very least I will be red belt decided. But I’m hoping that I pass which would make me a junior black belt.

Snapshot Rewind

When I was in grad school the first time — getting a degree in education, in order to get a job teaching, the job mom wanted me to get, the one she said I needed so that I’d have a safe and secure future —I had recently come out. It was shortly after I let Mom talk me out of my dream of becoming a travel photographer and I was still struggling to accept myself. Realizing I was queer — in the early 2000s after 13 years of Catholic school and an upbringing that believed strongly in strict gender roles — was difficult. I had no one to talk to. No one to trust. No one to make me feel as if I’d be okay. But the good thing about being back at school, at NYU, was that  I could join some of the LGBT groups on campus. I’ve never been a joiner. But it was what I needed at the time so that I didn’t feel as though everything about me was wrong. It was around that time that I stopped shaving my legs. I always hated shaving. And now that I was learning that it was okay to break gender rules, that it was okay to gender bend, I was trying to figure who I was and what made me most comfortable. While in school, I lived at home to save money. One night at dinner, Mom mentioned that she was thinking of working out and maybe going to a gym. I worked at the University gym and suggested to my Mom that she work out there. I could help her. Show her around. Teacher her how to use the equipment. She liked the idea. A few days later, she showed up. It was there that she noticed my legs weren’t shaved. She didn’t say anything but she quickly finished her workout and left. That night, Dad told me that I had embarrassed my mother. She was so mortified that she would never go back to the gym. She was ashamed of me. I cried myself to sleep and the next day I shaved my legs. I’ve never gotten over that.