I'm crying right now and it's Cindy Martin's fault. She approached me just a little while ago in an e-mail message, soliciting some input from me for TG Forum. I kind of shined her on, because quite frankly, I'm here in China right now, I'm working, I'm isolated, and I had gotten comfortable with not having any emotions for a while. It has gotten to be a tolerable habit to just put in my 10 hours working on a soulless computer in a Chinese refinery, go eat supper amidst folks who don't look at all like me or talk like me, and then go back to a small hotel room and escape into a book for several hours. It has been convenient to put my emotions on hold - I have been thinking, but I haven't been feeling.
Why am I crying? I'm crying because Cindy made me start to feel again, and what I'm mostly feeling now is sad. I'm sad for several reasons, not the least of which is that my mother died about 2 months ago, and I miss her. My mother and I didn't always see eye-to-eye about a lot of things. We were even estranged for a period of several years, but in the end, she and I were not just parent and child, we were friends. When a very wise, very good friend lost her father several years back while my mother and I were not speaking, she convinced me that while I might not like my mother very much at that point in time, my mother was still my by-God, one-and-only mother. She didn't choose to have a child as strange as me, any more than I chose to have a mother as emotionally immature as her.
So, I got to know my mother again, this time as an adult and not as just her child. I knew that our relationship was going to be all right when I told her of my gender nomadism and her reply was, "What took you so long to tell me? I've known since you were 12, but didn't want to push you." I got a lot of things from my mother, both good and bad. She gave me her sense of humor and her slender build; she also graced me with big feet and thin hair. But more than anything, she gave me the world, and I can never thank her enough for that. She always got a kick out of my calling her from someplace new, and now that I'm in China, I can't call her and tell her where I am. I miss her, and I am still mourning the hole in my life that she used to fit into.
I am also sad because I am mourning the death of another member of my immediate family who was also a dear friend. The day I arrived here in China, I learned of the death of our dog, Charlie. He had been with us for almost 12 years and was as beloved as any family member might have been. Charlie was a chow-chow, a breed native to China, and I find it sadly ironic that he would die on the day that I arrived in this country. He was an extremely intelligent, beautiful, and devoted dog, and I'm finding it very hard to accept the fact that he won't be there to greet me when I finally do get home. Who's going to keep the boogey man out of our bedroom now that he's not sleeping at the foot of our bed? I know that there are those who will say Charlie was just a dog and not worth all this grief, but my reply is that while he was certainly a dog, he was never JUST a dog. He was a constant, a part of what "home" meant to me, that won't be there anymore. Because of that, home won't ever quite be the place that I left.
And finally, I'm sad because I miss my spouse and our 11-month old son. Just one of them being absent for 3 to 4 weeks I might be able to handle, but missing both of them is almost too much for me now. At this stage of my son's life, every day brings new revelations and giant leaps, and I'm missing his discovery of the world. I've always enjoyed learning, and I especially enjoy seeing him learn, too. I'm also missing being able to talk to the other part of my self - the half of my heart that I leave behind anytime we are separated. After over 26 years together, we really are two halves of a whole that is greater than either of us. By myself, I feel diminished. And finally, I am missing skin. I am a very touch-oriented person, and it is very hard for me to go without personal, skin-to-skin contact with other people. I get immense pleasure just from feeling my skin touch someone else's. I don't like sleeping by myself without skin to touch, I want a hug and a kiss, and I want to hold hands. Simply put, then, I'm sad and I'm lonely.
So, now I'm feeling things, and those things aren't pleasant, which is why I'm crying, and I'm blaming Cindy for that. I'm blaming her, and I'm thanking her for reminding me that I am much more than a carbon-based appendage to a computer. If she hadn't asked me to write something with words to the effect of "Anything is fine" I wouldn't have started thinking about anything other than work, and I wouldn't have ended up crying.
"Is that it?," you ask. This is a real bummer piece and that's all there is? Maybe. The world is, after all, sometimes a real bummer place. But I also realize, now that I'm feeling things, that the world is also the place that contains all my friends and all the other beautiful things that bring me joy. No, maybe I'm not plugged into those friends as directly right now, but they're still there. Maybe I'll never hear my mother's voice again or Charlie's bark, but I have the memory of them both in my mind and in my heart, along with my love of my family. The moral of my tears, then, is that while it's perfectly normal, and sometimes even preferable, to experience them from sadness, remember that there are other emotions that can bring them about, too.
As much as I might weep now, I know that I will also cry when I finally walk off that airplane and see my loved ones there to greet me. If you shut off your emotions because of the bad things, you are shutting off the good things, too. And that ain't good.
Copyright © 1996 Jami Ward