I was in limbo: couldn’t be a dancer, refused to be a teacher or nurse because, even at that early age, I knew I didn’t like kids and I hated the sight of blood. So, what to do? I would get married (children in other countries married young) and I would marry my cousin who was so handsome and funny. Another wrong choice and when I tried to explain that I was sure I had been adopted and my real mother was a nun who got pregnant and couldn’t keep me so my cousin wasn’t really related to me. The adoption story didn’t go over very well with my aunt – the mother of that so-called cousin – so I tried it out at school and then again with the Parish Priest after Mass one Sunday. The more I told the story, the more I believed it and couldn’t understand why no one felt sorry for me or wanted to comfort me during this life-altering crisis. When that story had lost its audience, I introduced another tale: I had been a twin and my Mother didn’t want two children so my sister had been given up for adoption and my mother often wondered if she had given up the wrong baby. Looking back on all this, it’s no wonder that my Mother and I never seemed to be on the same path and were more often at loggerheads.

I made it through high school but not without some commotion. Because my father had never given my Mother any child support, we moved from RI to CA since most of my Mother’s siblings, like lemmings, had moved there and she needed at least emotional support. At this same time my grandparents were changing their lives and would move closer to the mother of my un-cousin, one of their two daughters, so it all worked out. It was difficult leaving both of them. My Jr. and Sr. years were spent at Pasadena H.S. where I absolutely did not fit in – except with some of the other girls who were also a little odd (today they are called nerds).

My Mother had found employment and we lived in a house next door to an apartment building with 13 apartments and 26 gay guys who seemed to rotate their roommates. Of course I didn’t know they were gay, I didn’t even know that some boys liked boys and some girls liked girls. I just assumed that if you were a boy and you liked another boy, you would follow the Christine Jorgensen route and have an operation to replace the “thing” which male’s had. I was almost 18 and still a Late Bloomer.

My Mother hired one of the boys, who never seemed to go to a real job, and had him cut the grass and weed the flower garden. When he showed up in high-heeled white leather thongs and a pair of old, soft denim Levi’s, with the legs cut off so short that the crotch was not much more than the double-stitched seam, she sent him home but not before I saw him. She didn’t volunteer any information and I didn’t ask because I was afraid it might have to do with his “thing” and something I really didn’t want to know any more about. (Somewhere along the way I had stopped using the term ‘wee wee’ since it didn’t seem appropriate at such an advanced age but I hadn’t found a word to replace it and p_nis was just too awful to even think about and I certainly couldn’t say it.)