Man of the House

As would be relatively obvious by a quick look at the state of my blogs of late, I've been anxious to come home after my first year at college. I've spent several months on end critiquing privilege and heteronormativity and rigid gender expectations to such an extent that every little thing my family has always done in regard to gender expectation irks me. On the way back from the airport, we went out to coffee, and my father led the way, holding my mother's hand. Approaching the door, she walked through and he stood back, lingering outside the door while my brother and I came closer. I was confused for a moment, but then realized he was waiting for me to walk in before he was allowed to. He ordered his drink last and then paid for them, drove the car, all of that. And when we got home, I had to defend my brother (who's never been as strong as me) by carrying my own suitcases when my dad seemed to expect that he'd take them. He was reprimanded for not taking chairs out onto the deck, as the "man of the house," when he and I and a friend of ours were sitting on the steps eating a snack this morning. Out of instinct and not out of principle, it seemed, I was asked to help my mother make food while my brother did other things around the kitchen. Perhaps I'm hypersensitive, but any such instance baffles me every time because I'm so used to making jokes about how absurd such expectations are.

I've legitimately been trying so hard to be the mature one, to understand that my dad, in particular, needs time and that I shouldn't push him. I understand that for some it's easy not to tell the full truth, but hiding things I care about is extremely difficult for me. When he asks me what I want to do this summer and I include that I want to read a couple books, I don't tell him that all three have to do with queer-related things. When he asks about my Honors Psych project, I gave him the method, and not the content. When he's watching American Idol and uses "queer" to describe distasteful competitors, I correct him. When my mother says, in disgusted voice, "Oh, please," walking out of the room upon reading the title of an ArielleIsHamming video over my shoulder, I don't say anything in response. I stopped playing with my brother's hair and put it back to normal when I heard her coming toward the room to say something to us, and I've stopped bringing it up every time I want to. When my parents ask me what I'm doing, I don't specify which blog I'm writing for or what I'm writing about, and leave out the word "transgender" when telling my brother about the Transgender Education Collaboration I'm beginning to guest blog for. When I'm telling them about the camping trip I went on the past few days, I don't tell them that about 50% of our conversation surrounded queer-related topics, or that we went to the town we visited one day because it's known for being so LGBT-friendly, or that the people I was with were all queer - there were probably three or four queer-related jokes I would've told them about within this single conversation had I not been censoring myself. And I have said nothing. Not out of a desire to hide myself, but out of a desire to respect my parents, and only to expose them each to the amount of LGBT-related stuff they're capable of handling.

And it's paid off. Just being able to have a few conversations with my dad has been wonderful. With the exception of privilege-related topics, he is genuinely an incredibly interesting, sincere, approachable person, and I love him very dearly. Even talking about mundane things, like how it seems strange at first that taking care of stuff when you go camping can be your job, and not parents, but sooner or later you're in charge of everything... about progressive metal and a couple good shows he went to recently, about some albums we want to listen through together... about molecular biology (which seems to be the perfect intersection of my family's interests, since my dad's an engineer, my brother's wanting to go into gene therapy, I'm interested in surgery, and my mother's a counselor/ex-nurse)... it's been delightfully civil. I love that, in those moments, the divide closes, and it's as if nothing's any different than it's ever been. It's literally been months since I've had an unstrained conversation with him, and the last time we communicated was weeks ago, where he walked out of the room upon seeing my You Are Loved shirt. I'm relieved not to find him any more distant than I expected, and I am overjoyed to see that I still have a relationship with him.

But my whole understanding of honesty and home and family and closeness is being rewritten, and I regret that a lot. There are certain things I share with my family that I will never be able to share with anyone else, but with the exception of my brother, they simply won't ever understand some of the most important things about me. That has always been true, but there has never been a time in my life where I've wanted to share things with them that I didn't think they'd understand - it's always my parents that wanted to know about stuff and would try to drag it out of me. It's been disorienting to come back home and see only a piece of my life, a piece of my identity, left here. Just sitting in my old room, here, now, the walls seem a lighter green than before, the decorations girlier and younger and more feminine than before. There are three pieces of art on the walls that were supposed to be an embodiment of my personality - one from age 12, one from age 14, and one from age 17, and I used to pride myself on the fact that I made the appearance of my room as much a reflection of my personality as possible. I feel as though I'm sitting in someone else's room - an old friend's room, perhaps an ex's room, perhaps in an old fantasy or dream. There's this strange discomfort, this emotional gap, that accompanies the frighteningly potent sense of familiarity. I know every corner of this house like the back of my hand and I have spent more time around these people and in this space than I could tell you, but somehow, my room at Calvin and the spaces I live in there have become better suited to me as I've grown out of this place. My hope is that the space here will change to suit the new elements of my personality, and that I won't simply revert to the print of my mind projected onto these walls - to the image of my personality my loved ones project onto me.