The Christmas Letter

By Jamie Wendelin

I sat with the blank document on my screen. After paying the bills and balancing all the account registers I had opened Writer then, nothing

–What do I think I’m doing? I’m not a writer;I only pretend to be one online. Haven’t even done that in a while. Hell, I’m not even TG: I just wish I were. So why do I only think of TG stories to write? And why does everything end up as some weird fantasy? Stop it, just write something.

“Hey,” my wife said, as she came into the room.

I turned away from my screen. “That the mail?” I asked, glad for the interruption.

“Yeah.”

"Anything good?"

“Um… Power bill, bank statement, credit card offer, another - one for each of us - L.L. Bean, Penneys… Ah, we got a card from your Mom." She handed that to me. “And one from Sandy – her Christmas letter, I expect."

We opened our respective cards. Mom’s was a typical Hallmark winter scene, wishing us a joyous holiday season.

"What’s your sister say?" I asked.

"You wanna read it?”

“Not really," I replied. "Just tell me the high points.”

“Let’s see… um, Jack’s got a new job.”

“Again?”

“Guess so – ah…pharmaceutical sales.”

“Pushing drugs,” I muttered. She ignored me.

"Let’s see…Um, Jenny’s a Freshman at Middlebury.”

“Of course she is.”

“Well she’s smart.”

“And we’ve heard how smart, every year, since she was in diapers.”

“Oh, stop.”

“It’s true.”

“Actually… It does say how smart she looked in her cap and gown.”

“See!”

“Okay. Okay… Um, what else? Oh! Sandy had a face lift.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“She wrote that?”

“No. But look at the picture,” she said as she handed it to me

“You’re right. Doesn’t even look too bad, no eyes stretched back to the ears.”

“Be nice,” she said as she swatted my arm with the rest of the mail. Over my shoulder she saw the blank document on my monitor. “You writing?” she asked.

I glanced back at the screen. "Trying."

"What?"

“Don’t know yet. Something Christmassy, maybe.”

“You haven’t written anything in a while…”

“Yeah.”

A pause. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I evaded. She waited for more.

“I haven’t been able to start anything. I have ideas but can’t seem to start anything."

"It’s okay." She kissed me on the top of my head. "It’ll come. You’ll see," she said as she turned and left.

I returned to my screen. The blinking cursor taunted me.

My thoughts wandered, as they are wont, and drifted around to Sandy’s letter. She’s always nauseatingly…chipper - doesn’t matter that Jack drinks too much and Jenny is anorexic - Sandy’s Christmas letter is always sweetness and light.

–And what’s wrong with that? She’s supposed write about the bad stuff? It’s a freakin’ Christmas letter you idiot!

Dear Everyone,

Jack’s a lush and Jenny doesn’t eat anything…

–Right! I’d like to see that in a Christmas letter sometime. What is she thinking when she writes that thing?

I looked at Sandy’s letter and back to my screen.

–What IS she thinking?

---

A Christmas Letter

Lisa stares at the blank document on the screen, takes a deep breath and lets it out through pursed lips.

–Well this one will probably shake a few branches in the family tree.

She starts to type.

Dear Everyone,
Well here we are, wrapping up another year along with our presents.

–There! Good start. Keep it chipper.

We’ve had many changes in our family this year.

–To put it mildly.

New schools and a move to the bustling metropolis of Saint Johnsbury from the rural hinterlands of the Northeast Kingdom (as our lovely corner of Vermont is known).

Jenny graduated high school and started at the University of Vermont in September as an education and English major.

“Mom! Middlebury gave me a scholarship and everything! And I don’t want to go to UVM. Everybody goes to UVM,” Jenny had said when I finally told her I couldn’t afford Middlebury.

“Honey, I know. But it would be fifteen thousand dollars a year more to send you there. I just don’t have it and I’m already borrowing as much as I can”

“It’s not fair!”

“I know dear but…” I started; she cut me off. “You guys said if I got in I could go. Dad promised.”

Jenny glared at her mother for a moment then turned and stomped off down the hall.

“Yeah. He promised a lot of things,” Lisa muttered to the slamming bedroom door.

She doesn’t get home to the NEK as much as we’d like her to but she’s enjoying being off on her own for the first time.

“I HATE IT HERE!!!,” Jenny wrote in her first email. “I don’t know anyone in my dorm. My roommate’s from Manhattan. We don’t have anything in common. She came home DRUNK last night and THREW UP in Grammy’s sap bucket!!!” Jenny’s trash can was a sap bucket on which Lisa’s mother had painted a scene of a sugar-house in full boil. It was a prized possession. This had not seemed to bode well for the relationship with the roommate.

Those first few weeks away were hard for both mother and daughter but soon Jenny’s emails and phone calls became more positive as she established routines and made new friends. When she came home over Columbus Day weekend, her roommate came with her and they obviously were good friends.

“Mom, Tina’s not so bad after all,” Jenny had confided. “She just went kinda overboard that first weekend.” Lisa assumed the trash can incident was forgiven.

While the work has been hard, she likes most of her professors and feels she is doing quite well. She spent most of Thanksgiving weekend either reading or writing or both; computer on her lap and a book propped beside her. We are looking forward to her having her here over the Christmas break.

Jack is

–What do I say about Jack? How about: “Jack’s an asshole and a bigoted macho jerk!”

“You’ve coddled and spoiled him his whole life and that’s what led to this.”

“That’s not true and you know it. You don’t understand how this has torn him apart? He needs our help. He needs our support,” Lisa countered. “But you’re never here,” she added and instantly regretted.

“Don’t get started on that. You knew when I took this job I’d have to travel.”

The call was not going well. He was in Singapore doing whatever it was he did: she didn’t even know anymore, that is how bad their relationship now was. And now, when she needed him, he was either unwilling or unable to come home.

Lisa, stopped to regroup. She didn’t want to go there; that was another argument. She tried a different tack, “Doctor Jacobs says…”

Jack cut her off. “Jacobs is a quack, damn shrink, and all of his psycho-babble.”

“Jack! Our son tried to kill himself.”

Jack dismissed that. “He’s just trying to getting attention.”

“How can you say that? He took a half bottle of your Tramadol. If my appointment hadn’t been cancelled, if I hadn’t come home when I did, he would be dead. They said an hour later he’d have been dead.” She gripped the handset like she wanted to squeeze his neck, blood pounded in her ears – very slowly she said, “He was not ‘just trying to get attention’.”

“Well, you do what you want,” he replied. “You always do anyway.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Jack said something, she could not remember anymore, and she said something back and the whole thing degraded into a shouting match. Eventually she told him to go fuck himself – that she did remember – and hung up on him. When she got back from the hospital later, there two messages from him; she deleted each as soon as she heard the “Lisa, it’s Jack…”

–Stop it, it’s over.

She returns the present task:

Jack’s new job keeps him on the road. When he is not traveling he spends most of his time at company headquarters in Boston. We separated in June.

Four words to summarize the disintegration of a marriage. Should she say more? Or less? She stares at her last sentence for a moment, then adds:

He will be here for Christmas.

–There. Okay, now for the hard part.

Terry had a pretty rough first half of the year but Junior year at St. Johnsbury Academy has started out well.

Lisa sat by the bed watching and listening to Terry breathe. She wished she hadn’t had that last cup of coffee; wished she’d brought a jacket because it was cold under the air vent; wished Jenny wasn’t on that damn class trip to England, wished, for the hundredth time, none of this had happened. The same questions kept returning: Why hadn’t she seen the signs? Could she have done anything? Was Terry going to be okay? Was it finally over between her and Jack? Why can’t they turn off this damned AC?

She wondered how her world had gone so astray. She thought she knew her husband; she thought she knew her child. She’d been wrong about both.

She nodded off for a bit, in spite of the caffeine, but sat up instantly when Terry stirred. His eyes opened and he looked around the room, seeming confused, disoriented. She reached out and took his hand and he turned and tried to focus on her.

“Mom?” he whispered.

“I’m here honey.”

“Where?”

“The hospital. In Saint J.”

His forehead wrinkled as he puzzled through this. When the realization hit him he squeezed his eyes closed and the pain of it etched his face. “Terry!” she said, more sharply than she intended. He opened his eyes again but looked away from her. “Terry. Honey. It’s okay. I’m here.”

He turned back towards her. “I’m sorry mom.”

“I know.”

“I couldn’t take it anymore, they were on me all the time.” His voice trailed off, his eyes teared up, he looked away.

“Terry. Look at me.” He did. She took his hand in both of hers. She wanted to ask why he hadn’t come to her, why he hadn’t said something but knew that was not what he needed to hear. He needed her reassurance, he needed her strength, he needed “Mom”, She gave it to him: “We’ll get through this. You and me together.” Then, after she’d heard what she had just said, she added, half singing “Yes, yes,”

One week during the previous summer, the Dave Mathews song “You and Me” always seemed to come on the Lyndon State College radio station as they were cleaning after supper and they’d started singing it together. Often, they made a game of doing terrible things to the lyrics. It had been a fun summer for them both; the summer Jack had started traveling. The summer of calm before the storm? She wondered.

He looked up at her. A thin smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes touched his lips, “We cud chew anything, Bambi.” This was their favorite mangle of the lyric “We could do anything, baby.”

Then her tears came and she stood to lean over and take him in her arms as they cried together, he saying ”I’m Sorry,.“ over and over, she repeating, ”It‘s okay.“

Looking back, she sees this as the point when the healing, and the transition, began for both of them.

Her anger and guilt came later, after the visits with the psychologist, after the meetings with principal and after conversations with two of Terry’s friends. Anger at how pervasive, vicious and cruel the bullying had been; guilt at how blind she had been to Terry’s internal conflicts. She had either missed or misread the signs. Ahead would be turmoil, confusion, hardship and pain, but at that moment, beside Terry’s hospital bed, a new bond formed that would see them through it all.

You may not have heard, but Terry is now living full time as a girl. This past summer we came to understand her true nature.

“Mom?”

Lisa was sitting on the couch reading a couple of days after they came home from the hospital. She looked up to see Terry at the door. Now, she sensed, would be “the talk”. A couple of times she was going to start a conversation with him but had chickened out – kicking herself for that: wasn’t she the one who had said “you and me together?” She put down her magazine. There would be no backing out this time.

“Terry?”

“Can we talk?”

“Sure honey, come, sit down.”

Terry came in and sat at the other end of the couch. Lisa drew a foot up under herself and turned to face her child.

“Whatcha reading?”

Lisa looked down at the magazine that lay, cover up between them. “Last week’s Newsweek,” she answered. “I didn’t get a chance with… everything that happened.” Her voice trailed off as realized what she was saying.

Both were stalling and knew it. The pause drew on.

Terry took a deep breath and finally said, “Mom, I think I’m a girl.”

There it was. Lisa knew it would be coming after meeting with the counselor at the hospital, but hearing Terry say it… She felt an adrenaline rush of panic for a moment, then relief that it was out, then at a lost as to how she should respond.

Terry watched her, obviously trying to gauge her reaction, Lisa could see the tension. She tried to keep her voice neutral, “Okay? Why do you think that?” It sounded inane, she knew, but it was all she had. She had played this conversation out in her mind numerous times over the past couple of days. Now that it was happening, she could not remember all those things that she had planned to say.

“I don’t know… I mean ever since I was a kid I wanted to be like you…and Jenny. You’re always so strong and loving, even when your mad at me. I never feel like you’re angry at me; just mad at me being, doing something stupid. And Dad’s so… well he treats me like I’m somehow – defective – if I don’t do something his way.”

Lisa knew what Terry meant: Jack treated everyone that way. Unless, of course, he was trying to sell them something. She shook that thought off and returned to the present. “But honey, that doesn’t mean you’re a girl. It’s not just a female thing. There are lots of loving, caring men.”

“Yeah, right. Name me one,” Terry asked.

She drew a blank. Okay, wrong approach she thought to herself. As she was about to ask for more reasons, Terry continued.

“Mom, it’s more than wanting to be like you and not wanting to be like Dad: it’s like…”

“Yes?,” Lisa prompted when Terry paused for too long.

“It’s like my body is wrong, like it’s not mine, that I’m just wearing it like a costume. Like it’s growing out in the wrong places. Mom, I look at girls… breasts, and curves and I want them – I mean, I don’t want a penis, it’s… it’s not right. And hair everywhere like Dad.”

Jack was hairy – something that Lisa had to admit, attracted her.

“Mom, I don’t want to grow up like that.”

“Is that why you… took Dad’s pills?” she asked.

“Partly.”

“And the bullying?”

Terry looked up to her and nodded. “It was awful Mom, all the time, and I couldn’t see any other way. I’m sorry, Mom, but I didn’t know what else to do and I couldn’t take any more.” This last was forced out though a sob. Lisa slid down the couch to take Terry in her arms. To comfort and soothe her son – for that is how she still thought of Terry then.

Even now, as she looks at the last couple of sentences of her letter, she wonders if her son is truly gone. But she shakes that thought off – she will support her new daughter, even if that means she has to mourn her son. She will do… must do whatever is needed: she will not let Terry sink into that abyss again.

–Come on girl finish the letter.

Terry and I moved to Saint J in August and she has made a fresh start at the Academy and is very active in the Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Transgender support group.

–Go ahead, as long as you’re shocking everyone, might as well rub their faces in it.

She remembers an overcast, windy Saturday in November, she and Jenny listening as Terry addresses the rally at the Statehouse in Montpelier.

“I tried to be one of those whom we mourn today,” Terry had said. “I felt lost and alone and could see no way out. I felt surrounded by darkness and could see no light. I did not know that there were others out there just like me; just like us. I was very lucky and am very thankful that my Mom found me and saved me. Saved me in more ways than one. We need, all of us, to work so that there are not more to mourn at next year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance.”

Terry’s transformation not just to living female but also to almost militant transgender activist continues to astound Lisa. In spite of missing her son, she is in awe of the strength that Terry has found within herself.

We three wish you all the joy and peace that this season represents. May your days be merry and bright, your Christmases white and may your 2011 be full of love, health and prosperity.

Lisa & Jenny & Terry

–There. Done. I’ll wait until next to tell them about my chemo…

---

“Cancer?” my wife asked after reading the story. “You can’t give her cancer! Who is she, Job?”

“But it fits with the rest of the story,” I offered.

“Forget it. She’s suffered enough. Either leave it on a high note or don’t say anything after the letter.”

“Okay. I’ll take that out. What about the rest; do you like it?”

“Well, it’s kind of a tearjerker but, yeah, I do. I like that Lisa is ambivalent but still trying to be a good mother and support Terry.” She turned back a page to reread something. “But is that what you think, that you’re wearing the wrong body?”

©2010 JLW

Dave Mathews Band performing "You & Me"

The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont