Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 3 - Moving on up

Author's note: Sorry this chapter is so short. I'll post the next chapter tomorrow to make up for it.

Part-way through grade seven we moved to a new house in a different neighborhood. The new house had an unfinished back yard, but my stepfather didn’t mind, as he had two kids to act as free labor in turning it into what he wanted. That being said, he relaxed somewhat after we moved in, perhaps because this house meant he had “arrived,” that we were in the upper class.

The neighborhood literally looked down on the city from a hill, and there was a definite feel of money in the air everywhere. One of our neighbors had not one but two Lamborghini cars parked in his driveway, each of them worth more than a quarter-million dollars ...

The summer we moved into the house my mom decided she needed us to go away for a bit, and signed us both up for a week long camp sponsored by a Baptist church.

I have no idea why she chose this particular camp. My mother was a lapsed Catholic who never talked about God or church or faith, and my stepfather was a serious atheist who hated all religions. But regardless,she decided that my brother would go for a week, then there would be a week wait, and then it would be my turn.

My brother came home from the camp a totally changed person.

As this is my story and not his, all I will mention about his life up to that point is that it had left him filled with anger. When he came home from the camp, the anger was gone.

He had become a Christian, he told me, and he urged me to look at the faith myself when I went.

So I went to the camp filled with curiosity about this dramatic change, and wondered if the faith could do the same for me.

After listening to the councilors talk about Christ for a couple of days, I felt sure that the faith had what I needed, and I asked about becoming a Christian. The councilor warned me that I could become an outcast in this world.

I laughed and told him I already was.

He walked me through the process and I became a Christian.

I wish I could say I heard angels singing, or immediately felt different, but I didn’t, not really. But I did feel a little better about myself, and for the rest of the week a gentle presence seemed to be around me, comforting me.

My brother was happy for me when I came home, and he got us a bible we could share.

Unfortunately, that Bible didn’t last long. When my stepfather found us reading it he snatched away and threw it in the fireplace.
My brother’s response was to bring home two more, one for each of us.

We periodically attended a Baptist church that had sponsored the camp, but it was a long walk to it, so we didn’t go regularly. This meant that we were left to our own devices when it came to learning about the faith, and mostly we just read the bible and tried to figure stuff out on without a lot of help.

Meanwhile, things were only getting worse for me on the gender front. As I entered puberty, I felt myself going further and further away from the feminine, physically, while psychologically I was feeling split in two - one part of me weeping over the woman I wasn’t becoming, the other part desperately trying to bury any signs of femininity as deeply as possible.

But such attempts were failures, often spectacularly so.

When I started getting facial hair, for example, I let it grow as much as it would until I had a full beard before finally giving up on it. Then I tried sports, but I was horrible at them. I broke my arm trying to do hurdles, and that was pretty much the end of my athletic career. That was an odd experience, as it didn’t really hurt right away. I mostly felt numb and unable to use my hand. But the next night I attended a school dance and must have loosened the bone a little, as i suddenly felt terrible pain, so bad I actually passed out, and the vice principal of my school drove me home.

I also tried socializing. I had no social skills, so that was also a failure. I went to another dance, but did not have the courage to ask any of the girls, so I got very frustrated. I had been sort-of invited by a girl, not as her date but just encouraged to go, and so near the end of the dance when the band had played “Three dressed up as a nine” I found her and told her this was her song.

I paid for that, as she spread a rumor that I had danced with a boy, which only made more people aware there was something not quite masculine about me ...

Then the Canadian government created the National Energy Program (look it up), collapsing the Alberta economy, and we soon found ourselves joining my stepfather’s company in fleeing the country and heading for the United States ...

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