2004...

I feel a need to summarise the big events in my life in 2004 before it's gone. Mmmm....! OK...

1) Sex Reassignment surgery - about thirty years too late...but hey!... better late than never. I think having some little measure of maturity and strength (sadly lacking during most of my life) has and is certainly helping me to not make a total balls-up (ha! ha!) of being the woman I am.

2) Getting to change my birth certificate to "Female".

3) Falling utterly, deeply in love (I think Kurt Vonnegut would call us a karass) with the dearest man in the known universe (well, that's my opinion and I'm sticking with it!) aka Alex!!! Now that's been an ongoing process over the last two and a half years but certainly entered a new phase with his wonderful support of me during the operation and the long recovery period afterwards. Moving in with him only deepened that process. Achieving sex has been a wonderful boost to our love, too! Mmm! Very wonderful! A girl could write poetry about it...oh! she has! check earlier blog!

4) Reconciliation with Mum. Mum was initially supportive of me after my final marriage break-up (she gave me a roof over my head!!) but became increasingly anxious and upset as I moved into full-time living as a woman. Yep! Transition and the whole world transitions with you! Whether they like it or not! So I left her home and we didn't speak or see each other for two years. That was sad 'cause mum has been a kindred spirit and friend ever since we emerged from that mother-child teenage/leaving the nest/how could you do this angst.

Anyway guess what? Mum suddenly decided she would come and visit me in hospital and we had a lovely mother and daughter visit. She brought me a Robert Goddard novel and some of my favorite (Alex's too, now!) home-made lemon fork biscuits. We talked grandchildren and nephews and nieces. Mum told my sister later that the TV show I'd done earlier on SBS "If Only..." about regrets (guess what mine was?!) had changed her mind. I guess, maybe, hearing me talk about desperately (literally I didn't have any hope - not for 50 years!) wanting to be a girl since I was 4 or 5 helped. Maybe, too, it helped her to realise it wasn't anything she'd done or not done. And, hey! she got to see Paula on screen in public and at work - and the world didn't come to an end.

We've been good mates ever since - just like old times. She's going to meet me in the new year and we're going to do the new Westfield's shopping centre at Bondi junction.

5) Reconciliation with my sister. She'd been going thru' a real tough, dark time trying to retain custody of her child against the world's biggest slimeball dickhead psychopath. She also was enamoured of Germaine Greer (not noted for her love of transsexual or intersexual women). So it was no surprise that she found it hard to deal with losing a beloved brother (we'd often referred to ourselves as sisters but having it come literally true was a bit much I guess!).

Anyway guess what? She turned up just before I went to hospital with a support kit of girlie books and herbal tea and amethyst crystals and other healing goodies.

Being real sisters is real wonderful - not that we don't have our rough patches! There was a barrier before. You know, when you've got a man's body it's real hard to convince people you're a woman - even your soul sister.

We're good mates too, now. I love her deeply. Big sis, li'l sis.

6) The continuing and deepening relationship with my daughter-in-law and my (step) grandaughters. Of course, I miss desperately being an almost primary carer; miss reading through a ginormous stack of books in bed in the morning and doing each other's hair and nails and playing Barbies and having thrm run squealing through the house after their baths and sensing their dear sweet little (snuffly!) bodies in bed with us (I'd wake up in the night and find one of my grandaughters fast asleep twirling my hair around her fingers!)...oh! and did I mention fights about getting dressed in the morning? "I'm not wearing that I'll look UGLY."!!!

My daughter-in-law's put the girls interests and welfare first everytime. She's wonderfully level-headed, perceptive and pragmatic. But she's made sure that as long as the girls wanted me in their lives I'd be there. I admire and love her tremendously. She is actually the only one who's stuck by me from the beginning. I couldn't ask for a better daughter.

Well the girls are growing up fast and my eldest is already becoming a young woman. They remain their adorable loving ingenuous good-hearted selves. (OK! I know that's easy for me to say!)

7) Reconciliation with a very dear friend whom I once betrayed and hurt. I feared I had lost forever the particular warmth, richness and challenge of her unique beauty and wisdom. I am blessed, aren't I?

8) Plumbing the extraordinary depths of friendship. I guess I first began to form -shakily - the first real friendships of my life back in 2002 but I think this year has seen me really experience the incredible richness and life changing capacity of honest, open, reciprocal friendships.

9) "Celebrity" status 1: Channel 9 films my surgery - the first time Sex Reassignment Surgery has been shown on Australian public television. The show aired in July and got a lot of attention. I've had heaps of people of all ages and socio-demographics come up and talk to me in the street. All positive. "I think what you've done is wondeful - you are very brave, I wish you all the best." being typical. Hey! I was just me doing what I had to do to salvage my life at the eleventh hour and survive. I do think, tho', that I've made people aware of some of the reality of what experiencing transsexualism means for a person and the extraordinary things we have to do to be ordinary (and, I hope, broken through some of the ignorance and stereotyping)

10) "Celebrity" status 2: my friend and acclaimed photographer, Belinda Mason-Lovering produces the "Becoming Woman" photographic essay which portrays various moments throughout my transition: catching the bus to work, afternoon tea with friends, electrolysis, surgery - before and after and vaginal dilation. I have a black georgette full-length dress made for the occasion and get to play celeb at opening night. I also get to "man" (ha! ha! again) the gallery and talk to the visitors ("Oh! This is you, isn't it!").

I love Belinda, too. It has been the greatest privilege and joy to work with her and count her as friend.

Here's her website, she does wonderful work in the area of social commentary photography. She attempts to give voice to the silenced, make visible those who have been made invisible...
http://www.intimate-encounters.com.au

11) Moving in with Alex. Not easy considering I was still weak and tired from the operation. But we did it! Our flat took AGES to be renovated and we had to camp out in his old bedroom in the main house and live out of stripey bags but it was worth it (see 2) above!). Our little flat is slowly becoming our home. We're filling it with ourselves. We want it to be a place where people want to come back to. A sanctuary of good food and good company and good music and lot's of Pre-Raphaelite and romantic art - under the overarching boughs of the olive tree.

This is a very spiritual place here. I feel the presence of Goddess most tangibly. Under the olive tree, in the bright clear air, in the calling of magpies and currawongs, in the cries of gulls and in the pounding of the waves.

12) Finding my metier at work doing workplace training, coaching and mentoring, assessing, presenting and facilitating and producing documents and websites. I guess I'm a megalomanic trapped in the body of a middle-aged woman!

Had some great interstate trips doing seminars and presentations. I'm lucky to work with wonderful people! My counterparts in the other states are precious friends. God(dess)! I love ballsy women (is that another ha! ha!?).

13) A lovely Christmas with Alex, my mum, my sister and my nephew (and their dog Cleo).

14) Oh! Just so you don't think my life is totally rosy...glaucoma! Yep! Can't forget that one can we? 18 months of experimentation and we still can't get my pressure levels down below 15. Too much longer and statistically I'll suffer more optic nerve damage. And we can SEE where that's going can't we!!! I've just finished a course of laser on my worst eye. If that works I'm in the clear for a while anyway. If not...mmmm! I've told myself I'm allowed to panic on the 27th January - that's when I find out if the laser worked. Oh! well! As a maddeningly wise friend says, "It's just another problem to be solved", in buddhist terms a seed of great virtue to be found in the midst of life's poison.

Trouble is I do panic well. Oh, and I'm pretty good at drama too, in fact I'm the queen of drama...ummm, drama-queen?

Roll on 2005...give me all you've got! Not that I've got much of a say in that!

At Work 

Paula as matriarch of Mount street. 

Husbandry

Husband,
You farm me
Till fallow then fertile
I bear bountiful
Our harvest of love

Husband,
You plough me
Your penis prow
Furrowing
My flesh
Seeding me with promise.

Pregnant with tomorrow
I rise to the occasion.

Water Way Woman

I am the water way woman
Flowing into the loose loveable lines
Of your face
Bending low in thinking
Deep as the well-springing
Of our destiny.

Outside the rain
Softly shushushes
Among the wet black trunks
Of unruly lemons and lonely olives
Patter-ning a pewter grey day
With poignancy and memory.

I am the water way woman
Flowing into the bony promontories
And fleshy bends
Of your body banks
As we lie, arm in arm
Entwined, entwinned
In our rumpled river-bed.

Where do you come from?
Why am I here?
Draping my mothering
Lovingly, like a shawl
Across the bow
Of your bent back
Climbing with strenuous steps
The way of the cross
To the dark lonely tower
Of your soul.

Reconciliation

Your gate was rickety, rusty,
Difficult to open.
It always was.
Pushing,
I scraped through –
Just.
Followed the winding path,
Flanked by banks
Of bittersweet memories.
Brown-edged blooms,
Faded and falling,
To stand at the foot of your stairs.

Your steps were freshly painted –
Like blood
But the cracks still showed through.
I came empty-handed
But for a bunch
Of last year’s betrayal
Already wilted in the sear of the irrevocable,
Unrevived by your tears or mine.

Up above me you waited on the verandah,
A suburban Venus of Willendorf.
Against your rightful ownership of flesh
My reconstructed femininity was a stick
Sharp at the edges,
And prone to splinter.
Your greeting was guarded,
Like a spear.
I tasted vinegar.

I followed you into the hallway,
Dark, dim, cool.
It was hung with wanted posters
But I was found wanting,
Not wanted.
I peered into its dark recesses
Looking for scraps of old sins:
Illegitimate permissions and
Deceitful omissions.
But I found only the dust
Where you hadn’t vacuumed.

In your kitchen
I begged for strong hot coffee
And cool, sweet water
But in your cupboard
You could find only the jar of
Half-empty ambivalence.


So we sat and sipped
Tea tepid with caution.
Exchanged pleasantries for the unpleasant.
In my handbag I carried a script
For reconciliation and forgiveness.
Its lines went unread,
Nothing was said.
Bright morning faded,
Slipping through my fingers
Into dull afternoon.

Turning to go,
I found your arms outstretched,
Hands empty and bloodied.
Your heart wooden,
Mine broken.

Gathering up skirts of sorrow
I stumbled to the other side of the street,
Never looking back,
Ever!

Poetry Reading at Mars
Hill Cafe 2003

We...

They have moved in.
They have taken up residence for good.
The voices I mean
And the shadows.
Oh! Yes! and the wool,
The heavy wool that weighs down
My thoughts,
Dulls my joy.
Unwanted lodgers in the house of the head.

Whisperings in walls
Of mortality,
Fatal; feelings
Of fragility,
Tangible, terrible;
Pervasive, invasive.

Dark shadows of
Degenerative diseases
Stalk insidious
The bare corridors
Of my meagre resources.

A weak sun appears
Then fades
Behind a cloud of knowing,
All too well.

Voices clamouring
In the night of my days.
Leaving no room,
Allowing no repose.

Soldiering on,
I go,
Heaving a heavy pack
Full of faint hope fading
And the trembling of trepidation.

When you come...

We will be waiting.

Alex at the Paragon
Cafe Katoomba 2004

Some thoughts on meagre resources

Oh! Dear! I have become a lapsed blogger it seems!

Well, I plead my old excuse of meagre resources. Is that true? I don't know but I must say that I have always felt painfully thin, wraith-like. Oh! Not so much physically but rather of stamina and endurance. Like a frail wisp of a thing who was easily knocked down by even small waves and so kept herself to the shallows. Why was...is that? My mother reports 9 months of morning sickness while bearing me; living on dry cornflakes and lemonade. Perhaps that's why...foetal malnutrition. Then again, looking back, both my mother and father seemed to be shy of big waves. So perhaps it's that too...inheritance.

But if I inherited some frailty of qi then I think I also inherited some resilience of deep spirit. You know, the spirit at one's innermost core; the one that keeps you getting up after each wave knocks you down. The one that keeps you tacking by slow, slow degrees into fierce winds, through high seas to one's eventual safe harbour.

Safe harbour...is there such a thing?

Not out there I don't think; not around some wave-smashed jagged edge of rock into still waters, not through dark cloud into light air. But there is safe harbour...it dwells within; is a little pilot light of calmness in the midst of storm, of hope in the midst of despair, of endurance in the midst of exhaustion.

We, as we become ourselves, our true selves, our authentic, integral, responsible, committed, brave, vulnerable, disciplined, brutally honest selves become our own safe harbour. We carry that safe harbour within us, we are that safe harbour, through all our rocky passages.

A safe harbour we can then share with those we love.

Thanks be! Blessed be!

My darling Alex & myself at Bronte Beach
during Stormy Weather 2004