GENRE: Gay / Transgender Romance
LENGTH: 4,072 words
RATING:

Not everything is always as meets the eye. Sometimes that older man you see might not be a man, at all. And his actions and reactions may differ from what you would expect.

Alan Twiling isn’t the man he appears to be. Nor is he the kidnapper or pervert the crowd thought he might be when he grabs a child to save her. Who is he, exactly?

EXCERPT:

The reason I had come here was always in my mind, and that part was not interested in the cops and bustle and misunderstanding. It was still reliving the recent past, the past that included that part of me I’d thought was long dead and buried. I sure tried hard enough. My then spouse was the one who wanted out and didn’t care who it hurt, whom, whatever, me, the kids, as long as he ... got his new girlfriend -- she gave good head, according to him. Since then I’ve walked through hell bringing up the kids on my own, never having enough money, falling in love out of necessity in order to have help -- and financial help -- to bring up former spouse’s A.K.A. asshole’s kids, and then having another with, wait for it, this one.

And then asshole number two died and I moved back home with the youngest kid, the older two having been pushed out the nest, ready or not. That old truism: I did the best I could (with the knowledge and funds available to me at the time) was true.

So when that kid left, I woke up knowing it was time to be me; time to make the old switcheroo, now there were groups online about transgender matters and therapists who sort of knew about it, and I had to do it, or kill myself. I’d known since I was six years old that being a girl was not right for me, and at puberty oh boy, the shit really hit the fan.

I looked at the musician wishing I could tell him everything that was going through my mind and heart, wondering how he would react if I were to dump all this shit on his head so to speak; he was a musician after all, maybe he’d write a song about it. Nah, too maudlin for rock and roll. He’d have to be country, and then I wouldn’t have stopped to listen.

But he smiled. I started feeling that creepy itch of tears getting ready to, well, rock and roll down my face.

Arms around me; that was what my body needed; it was my body that retained all the old feelings, after all; I mean hey, I could remember knowing, no, feeling, I was male as young as age six when I had to wear a fancy dress for ballet! I hated that! Body memory. And I’m not the type of person to love/hate/love/hate on a dime. Just because we didn’t live together and I didn’t rely on asshole or expect anything back, didn’t mean my heart did not still love. Hey, it’s in there, like the spaghetti sauce commercial used to say. I had to give it up. It was part of the old life, but hey, whose life was it before I was me? Think it’s confusing? Try being trans yourself.

It's in there. But boy was it coming out now.

Having lived as a straight female until age fifty-ish, I had a lot of sex as a woman. Now I find it cast a long and painful shadow that I, finding myself a gay man, am having trouble getting rid of and not toting it around as having been raped or abused for decades. Masturbating brings these feelings up. I was hoping to become a whole being, assimilating both parts of who I am and have been, but that doesn't seem to be working well anymore. The whole reason I was here was to get away from my adult kids. All three of them had decided I was the Evil One personified. Why? Why not? I never got the How to be a Mom book that I guessed most cis women got. I really had no clue.

All they would tell me was that I had spread lies about one of them, that they had done something horrible. Four people had rushed to tell them I had said these things. Yeah, that’s what you do when you love someone, tell them all the bad stuff you hear gossiped about them, right?

I had certainly made mistakes and I had done bad things, like slapping one of my sons once in public for some stupid, small infraction. But why in hell the kids aren’t mad at me for all my mistakes, but had to go ape shit over one I don’t even remember, is beyond me. The worst I used to say was there’s an awful lot of their other parent in them.

We won’t even get into how it makes me feel about doing my best as a woman, while knowing it was wrong for me, for forty years. Gratitude? I have never once heard a word of thanks from any of them. And they have turned the grandchildren against me as well. Except I know a secret: one confided in me that they, too, are in the LGBT spectrum. And I will never tell which one it is.

Pride? I hate Pride day celebrations. Just since this came up, of course, but I don’t even understand why. I had actually started to try to blend my two lives together, and then this happened, and I just can’t.

But anyway, all this brought me to this moment, sitting being grilled by cops and pseudo cops about me grabbing a little girl. I don’t even know if I care about myself enough to explain. I feel very alone. The cute musician will never look at me again, except maybe my mug shot in tomorrow’s paper.