Fearfully and Wonderfully made: A Memoir by Dorothy Colleen Bellion
Author’s note. I have changed the names of the people in this story on the grounds that this is my story, not theirs, but they are based on real people. To the best of my ability to remember and reproduce it, what you are about to read is the truth. The title of this autobiography comes from Psalm 139:14 - “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Prologue: Once upon a time, a young working mother came home to find three giggling girls playing Barbies in her child’s bedroom. There was only one problem - one of the “girls” was supposed to be her son ...
This is the story of that child, and the long strange trip she went on ...
Chapter 1. “Are you sitting comfortably?”
Why would I write an autobiography? And why would you care to read it?
I’m not famous - outside of a handful of people that have read something I’ve written, nobody has heard of me.
So why do it?
I do it because I think its an interesting story, a story of transition and hope. Its the story of a very ordinary person who has dealt with some tough issues, like gender confusion and rape.
Only time will tell if you will give me a chance to prove I’m right...
I could start this with a quote from Platinum Blonde - “Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin”. Or I could quote a prologue of the poem “Under Milk Wood” - “To begin at the beginning”
But where do things begin?
You could trace events back through history, and you could see how each domino was affected by the one before, and never really get to the beginning. So we must pick a moment, and begin with that.
So let’s start with a bit of my family tree.
My maternal grandparents were farm people, but by the time I came into the picture the farm was more a hobby than an enterprise. My grandfather was a solid Alberta cowboy through and through who loved his horses, his wife, and his children’s children, and probably in that order.
I know very little about my father’s family except that he had an adopted sister who was the jewel of the house. He often apparently felt like he was less than her in his father’s eyes. This fundamental sense of unworthiness would eventually be my father’s downfall.
He went into the Air Force, and as was the tradition of the services, was forced to move often to new posts. So it came to pass while he was stationed in Chatham, New Brunswick, he became a father, three times over.
The first child didn’t last more than a couple of days, and the sense of loss and grief that caused never really left the house, even as first my brother, and then I, was born and began to try and fill the void.
My brother was first, a bundle of energy and always in motion.
And then, one summer day in 1966, I showed up and was given the name Todd.
Since my father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, it was not long after my arrival that my family moved. I spent most of my first five years shifting from place to place.
I wish I remembered this time better, because in some ways, compared to what was to come, these were the calm years...
The one memory I have of my dad was being in a sled with me in front, my brother behind me, and my father in the back. Sadly, that outing had a bit of bumpy ending, as we sledded into a chain-link fence, and I went head-first into it.
I sometimes wonder if that caused some of the problems I would have later ...
We were in what was then West Germany when the next tragedy struck our family. Most of what happened I didn’t know at the time, but this is what I pieced together...
As I said, my father had struggled with his sense of self-worth his whole life, and his choice of careers didn’t make things any easier. He worked as an air traffic controller for the Air Force, which is one of the most stressful jobs there is. And although he was highly regarded enough to be made one of the youngest Captains in Canadian history, that didn’t prevent his struggles with his self-worth.
Eventually, the strain was more than he could cope with, and he attempted suicide.
The first attempt failed and he was put on antidepressants to prevent a second attempt.
Unfortunately, they failed and while on “medical leave” he walked into a hardware store, used his military I.D. to buy a small pistol with ammo and went outside, sat on the stoop of the store and ... ended his life.
What happened next was odd, and I can only guess as to why it happened.The Air Force psychologist who had been working with my dad apparently stopped by the house the day he died, and upon finding us not at home, he hung around a bit and then left, according to our landlady, who lived in the apartment below us.
When we came home, my mom said the medication my father had been on was missing.
And the oddness didn’t stop there. Normally in those days, committing suicide would result in a dishonorable discharge from the military, but instead they gave my father a full military funeral, my mother his pension, and us kids orphan benefits until we turned 18.
But I am getting ahead of myself a little.
We were flown back to Canada, and that flight was one of my earliest clear memories - of sitting in the plane, and thinking that my dad’s body was in the cargo hold. Thinking of me looking out the window at the clouds, and him not being able to see anything.
Because he was gone.
I was five years old.
My brother and I were not allowed to attend the funeral, but I heard after that it was very moving - so much so that an officer who had been assigned as part of the escort of the coffin to the gravesite actually broke down in tears.
I never learned his name or why he cried.
My mother used part of my dad’s pension to buy a small house in the south side of Calgary, a few minute’s drive from one of her sisters who had tried to be there for her in the aftermath of my father’s death.
Unfortunately, things were about to get worse ...
*******
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made - Chapter 2 - The “dead kid”
The first two years after my father’s death were filled with a quiet sadness as we tried to move on with our lives. The only significant development was with my gender. I had apparently shown some signs even before kindergarten of being far from a typical boy, and this only accelerated as I entered elementary school.
It was sometime during this period, for example, that my mother came home to a house filled with girls playing Barbie, and her recollection is that she could not figure out which one of the “girls” was her son...
I also recall wondering why I was continually being sent to the boys’ side of playground at recess, and coming to the conclusion the adults were simply crazy...
Then my mother decided to take my brother and I to a child psychologist to help us deal with our grief over losing our dad.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be a very bad move ...
I won’t mention his name here. He may still be alive, he may be dead, but for any of his patients who haven’t come forward I will just call him “Dr. Smith.”
I don’t know for sure what he did with my brother, my brother doesn’t talk about it, and my own memories were mostly repressed for years, but this is the sequence as best as I am able to put it together ...
In my first session with the doctor I told him how I felt like a girl, that I identified with my mother and hoped I could grow up to be as pretty as her.
That turned out to be a mistake.
On my second session, the doctor gave me something that made me very relaxed, and then presented me with some female clothes.
In my drugged state, getting into them seemed like a wonderful idea.
I think he took my picture, but nothing bad happened that time.
It was on the next visit that the horror began.
For the next two and half years, I saw him once a week, becoming more and more degraded with every visit until I had almost no humanity left.
I became little more than the “toy” he wanted me to be.
There is a clinical term for what I did during these years: disassociation. I retreated from the horror, crawling inside my own head until I all but disappeared. I became, as I would put it in a fictionalized version of my life, "The dead kid."
Then my mother remarried and we moved to a new home. In the process my “sessions” stopped.
And at first I actually missed them.
I had gotten used to someone else making all my choices and I no longer knew how to make them for myself. I was a robot going through the motions while waiting for instructions.
Slowly, very slowly, I got better.
Part of what helped me recover was being able to go out to my grandparent’s farm, which was north of Edmonton. Almost every summer and Christmas holiday until we went to Colorado was spent out there, and it was pretty close to the perfect place for a kid. It had a friendly German shepherd to play with, horses to ride, and a large area to explore to play in.
Plus, it had my grandparents themselves. My grandfather was a strong, loud guy, but he made it clear that as his grandchild he would do nothing but love me, and the same was true of my grandmother.
As for dear “Dr. Smith”, I cannot say his fate certain for certain. My mother believes she heard he was arrested for child rape, but if such a case happened, I can find no record of it.
But things weren’t all rosy. My stepfather became increasingly belligerent and controlling. I approached puberty with dread and I was being beat up either at school or on my way home almost every day. One of those times involved twelve people against me.
Then there was an incident I cannot forget. I was on my way home from school when I saw some of my usual tormentors, but this time they had friends. Friends on bikes. Friends with knives, chains, and baseball bats.
I ran for my life and somehow managed to get to my door ahead of them. I called the police and then I did something rather stupid - I opened my door and told them the police were on their way.
Most of them decided to take off. Five minutes later the police showed up as the last of the gang slunk away. The policeman told me I should have stayed inside, and to just call if they attacked me again.
It wasn’t until he left that I realized he had been calling me “Miss”....
Then there was my relationship with girls. There was one girl in particular I had a crush on in elementary school - she was beautiful, confident, and a fun person to be around, so I decided to see if I could get closer to her.
I decided my strategy would be to leave notes for her, and I signed them “Little Neutrino” , after a song by the band Klaatu that my brother had gotten me into. Then, after a couple of these notes, I brought in the album for show and tell, to (I hoped) reveal myself without having to go public with my feelings.
It... didn’t work out that way.
Her best friend came up to me afterward and asked me about the song. I was so flustered to discover that this girl had shared the notes I didn’t know how to respond, so I retreated.
I didn’t send any more notes.
About the same time, I was tested in school, and the test came back with some interesting results. I was reading at a university level, but I couldn’t spell very well.
The school decided the best thing to do was allow me to have an adult library card, which allowed me to spend a lot of my time reading.
A habit I am still into even now...
Then part-way through grade seven, we moved, and life changed yet again.
****
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 ...
****
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 4: The Colorado catastrophe
My step-father relocated us to the suburb of Aurora, Colorado, which was just outside Denver, and we arrived as I was just starting grade nine. It wasnt the first time we had moved near the beginning of a school year, in fact it was the third - first we had moved when I was part-way through grade five, then again when I was part-way through grade seven. Now, once again, I was the “new kid”, trying to fit in when most of the pecking order had been established before I got there.
Needless to say, I pretty much ended up on the bottom.
As I had done in Canada, I hid in the drama room whenever I could, and just tried to survive the school, but it turned out that school was safer than home ...
My stepfather, who had struggled with drinking before, really started hitting the bottle hard. Later I would learn his job as a pilot was coming to an end, which is why he fell further into alcohol. As a result, he became more belligerent, more aggressive, and spent most of his time putting my mother, my brother, and me down.
Then things came to a head.
One night, he swung at my mother, and I snapped.
I went to the fireplace, picked up a small axe, and went after him.
God alone knows how why I didn’t, but somehow, I managed to bring myself to a stop before I swung the axe. I dropped it at his feet, said, “You’re not worth it.” and turned away from him.
He picked up the axe, and came toward me, looking like he planned to use it.
My brother drop-kicked him, and we fled the house.
We went to the nearby church we attended, in the hopes that someone might be there, but no luck. We were debating what to do when my mother drove up and asked us to come home. As we were now pretty cold (It was winter), we agreed.
My stepfather wasn't home, and when he got back there seemed to be an unspoken agreement to pretend the whole event never happened, and life went back to normal.
Of course, for me, “normal” is a very relative term ...
Most of the rest of our time in Colorado passed quietly, with one major exception. One day, on my way home from school, I found a woman’s nightgown that had been left on a fence. (Don’t have a clue how it got there, honest) I decided to take it home, and did something that was either really dumb or a subconscious way of trying to get the issue of my gender out in the open - I asked my mother for a cup of hot chocolate, slipped on the nightgown, and went to bed and covered myself with blankets up to my neck.
Of course, when my mom came in the room with the hot chocolate, she realized I was acting strangely, and demanded I pull back the blanket. When I did, she accused me of stealing the nightgown, which I disputed hotly, and asked me if I wanted a girl wardrobe to go with it.
My life would have been so different if I had only answered yes ...
Finally, our time in Colorado ran out, and we had to return to Canada. My brother had gone ahead, as he couldnt stay once he graduated high school and finished a bartending course, so it was my mother and I in one car and my stepfather in the other as we headed north.
It was almost the last trip I ever took.
My mother was suffering from a cold and had taken medicine which made her drowsy, and my stepfather refused to stop so she could rest. The result was when he pulled out of a access road because the gas station had been closed, she didnt quite manage to make the adjustment, and ended up driving sideways in a ditch, with a barbed wire fence all between us and flipping right over ...
But I guess it wasn’t my time to die, so we safely managed to get back to Canada.
But not everything was roses ...
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 5: High school low
Author's note: With the site back up, I'm gonna continue posting my autobiography here. Its a short chapter so I'll post another tomorrow Please Comment!
When we came back to Canada, we had a small problem - the house we had left behind was rented out. So we first went to as series motels before finding a place to rent on the north-east corner of the city until our house was available again. This made going to school challenging, to say the least ...
Three other factors made it even more challenging.
First, for the fourth (and thankfully the last) time, we had arrived after the school year started, so that was strike one, as it were.
Second, the high school had several of the student I had gone to Junior high with, including the girl who had spread the rumor about me dancing with another guy, so that was strike two.
Third strike was that my brother had attended before we went to Colorado, and apparently had had left an impression, to say the least. Rather than struggle to fit in, he reveled in being an outsider, deliberately poking fun at the norms by his clothing and his attitude, which resulted in him getting a nickname.
“Spaz”
Which resulted in me being hung with the label of “Spaz’s little brother” on the day I arrived at school ....
Despite these handicaps, I did make some progress.
I joined the Christian club, the Drama club, I participated in a mock U.N., basically I tried my best to fit in wherever I could.
But I still had struggles. For example, the drama teacher decided to put on “Tartuffe”, a french play from the 1600’s. So when I got a minor role I was instructed to go get a pair of bright tights to wear under my costume , which had a pair of pants that ended at the knees, and also to buy a pair of ballet slippers. For someone like me, you’d think this would be heaven - given permission to wear something rather feminine, but I agonized over the whole thing. Then I made things worse by buying a pair of bright yellow tights instead of the traditional white, which led to me given a role as a clown who played a kazoo badly during a wedding. All things considered, it went better than I feared, but it still resulted in me being much more “visible” than I wanted to be ...
And the whole girl thing hung over my head like the Sword of Damocles, and no matter what good thing was going on, I could never forget my internal struggle. I cross-dressed on occasion, but mostly held on to the hope that prayer and love could cure me of this need to be a girl.
Neither one really worked well. In fact, on the prayer front I ended feeling so despondent I took a bottle of pills to my room and counted out what I thought would be enough to end my life. I sat there, looking at the pile of pills on my bed, trying to imagine taking them.
Finally, I put the pills back in the bottle, and went to sleep with tears in my eyes.
Around the same time, I saw the movie “The wall”, and it had impacted me deeply. I decided to pray to have my walls removed, which turned out to be a serious mistake.
Because it actually happened.
Unfortunately, it turned out I didn’t just have a wall between me and the world. I had a wall between me and my past, and I was far from ready to confront it.
I think I went insane for a couple of days, fighting this internal darkness while my body kept on autopilot.
I came back to myself, and time past ...
****
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 6: The Bellion rebellion
From the outside, grade 11 would have looked like a good year for me. I had become part of several clubs, I had participated in a couple of musicals, and I attended church on a regular basis.
But I was no closer to a solution to my gender problems, and it was wearing on me greatly.
I became frantic to find a way to bolster my masculinity, and I held out hope that finding a girlfriend would be a major step forward in that fight.
As if in answer to my need, a young woman who I will call here Katherine decided she wanted company to go to a Seven-Eleven store across the street, and seeing me hanging around, grabbed my hand and made me her escort.
Through her, I got to know more of several members of the Drama club, and at the same time I started hanging around some girls from the Dungeons and Dragons group I had joined the previous year.
I dont remember if I ever actually asked any of these girls out. My preferred method of trying to get them to date me consisted of me hanging around and listening, apparently in the hope that by sheer availability I would move up the list of eligible boys.
Most of the girls responded to this tactic by sharing with me the stories of their relationships with other boys, and two of the girls I had met through Dungeons and Dragons showed me quite thoroughly that I simply wasn’t seen as boyfriend material when one hot day while we were sitting a basement together they decided to take off their tops and pants and hung around in their underwear, and talked me into doing the same.
The fact that I didn’t do anything but blush probably should have been a clue to me about certain things, but nobody will ever say I’m a quick learner ...
The other development on the gender front came about through Alan Kiev .
He had been a friend of my brothers before we went to Colorado, even sending him cassette tapes with messages from Calgary. (I know, it sounds so stone-age compared to e-mail and instant messaging, but hey, it was still the 80’s.)
I met him in person when we got settled in our old house, and he was the one who got me into Dungeons and Dragons which led me to the encounters I have already described. He was an odd person, who often looked to shock people. One example was his name, as he had gone from his birth name to one that used a Russian town as his new last name ...
Then when I was in grade eleven, he shared a secret with me after I confessed to struggling with my gender.
He told me he was a cross-dresser.
He even went out to events dressed, and he had a collection of crossdressing magazines which he gave to me to look at.
It was a mixed experience. On the one hand, it comforted me a little to know I wasn’t totally alone in struggling with being a male. On the other, it became quickly clear to me that whatever I was, I wasn’t like the guys in the mags. They seemed to be focused on sexual experiences, whereas I didn’t get terribly aroused by dressing as a girl.
Meanwhile, the school year continued, and then a very interesting opportunity came my way. I discovered that there was going to be an election for student body president, and at that point there was only one candidate for the office.
Not liking that lack of democracy, I decided to throw my hat into the ring. And for some reason, the idea of me being in the race inspired people. One person made posters with the slogan “The Bellion Rebellion”, and soon my name was everywhere.
I did better than I figured was possible.
They actually had to do a recount, it was that close.
And in losing the election I managed to put a positive image of me in the minds of a large body of my classmates.
Which didn’t make as much as a difference as I could have hoped ...
******
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 7: The last hurrah
From the outside, as I began grade 12, it might have looked like I had finally gotten my act together, and that my life was looking up. . I belonged to several groups, I had a certain amount of popularity within my school, and at home screaming and violence had been replaced by silence and long absences.
Unfortunately, I resembled an iceberg - all the really dangerous stuff was happening below the surface ...
The two unaddressed issues - my gender and my abuse - were like weights that dragged me down even on good days.
It didn’t matter what I was doing - continuing my steady if unspectacular academic studies, participating in the school musical, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or hanging out with friends, I was never allowed to forget I just wasn’t like other boys.
Perhaps nothing showed this more clearly than my almost laughable attempts to get girls to think of me as a potential boyfriend.
Perhaps none of these was as bad as one little drama that took most of my high school life to play out ...
It had started in Grade 10.
As I have said before, my strategy when it came to girls was to hang around in the hopes that my sheer availability would make me attractive to them. In one case, that plan actually seemed to be working - one girl and I had conversations that included the topic of love.
I mentioned the idea of using “One-four-three” as a way of saying “I love you” when you couldn’t actually say the words, and at the end of grade ten she signed my yearbook with those three numbers, making me think that come September I was going to actually have a girlfriend.
But in September she changed her mind, and tried to gloss over her use of the numbers, which left me feeling very confused and angry.
To this day, I am not sure what happened between her signing the book and the start of the new school year, but the fact remained that I felt like a vision of a oasis had turned out to be a mirage.
By the end of grade eleven, I had started to get over the hurt, and in grade twelve we managed to re-connect as friends, but it was never as good as what we had in grade ten.
Still, she was as close as I would come to getting a girlfriend while in high school, which considering how things went for me for a long while afterward, maybe that was for the best ...
Time wore on, and I came to the end of my high school experience, but before it was over I had two last memorable moments. The first was the grad dinner and dance. I hadn’t been looking forward to it, as they had set things up so we sat at tables of eight - four couples. I ended up at a table with some of the other drama people, but as I didn’t have a date, the first part of the night was extremely awkward as I sat with an empty chair to my right I tried a sad joke about dating the Invisible Woman, but it was a hard meal to get through, in all honesty.
The dancing that followed was just as awkward, as I lacked the courage or social skills to ask any girl to dance, and I found myself standing against a wall, wishing I knew how to make myself fit in better.
But as the event wore down, the two girls from Dungeons and Dragons who i had shared a day in our underwear with decided they had enough, and talked me into walking home with them. So as I like to point out, I may have come without a date, but I left with a girl on each arm ...
Then it was graduation day. I remember clearly my struggle that day, especially after I learned we would be wearing gowns over our clothes. The idea of wearing a skirt under the gown, of opening it up after I got my diploma and showing the world who I really was gnawed at my brain, leaving me feeling both guilty for wanting to do it and guilty for not having to courage to go through with the idea ...
Then the day came, and my name was called, and the whole place went bonkers. Nobody, not even the valedictorian, got the level of applause I got. To this day, I am not entirely sure why it happened ...
The best way I can describe how I felt was ... lifted up on the waves of appreciation. It was strong enough to lift me past my guilt, past my fears, for one shining moment I thought I saw a possibility for a life.
It would be a long time for that feeling to return ...
*****
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 8 - The boy in the box
The summer after I graduated was spent “putting away childish things” as the saying goes. I moved out of my parent’s home and into a small apartment, and had a couple of other big moments as well. The first was my baptism at my church. Despite my struggles with my gender, I sincerely believed (and in fact I still believe) in my faith, and so getting baptized was a pretty big deal for me. Plus, because my church wouldn't baptize “children “ which they considered anyone not an adult, it was in a lot of ways my official ceremony into adulthood.
The other thing I did that summer was less of a success, however.
I attempted to get a job as a performer at an amusement park outside of Calgary, using as my audition piece a dance set to the song “Fat” by Weird Al Yankovick.
I didn’t just bomb, I nuked.
I was bad. I mean, really, really, really bad.
The best thing you could say about the experience is that it cured me of any idea of a life as an actor.
So I tried to find the next best thing, and applied to a local college for a course in Radio and Television Arts, which was to train me in the technical stuff that goes on behind the scenes.
Looking at the course now, I wonder how the others who took the class fared in the field, especially with the changes in technology.
Let me give you an example. They had us purchase a couple of singles on vinyl to learn how to switch between records. I bought “People are People” by Depeche Mode and “Boy in the Box” by Corey Hart.
Considering how vinyl was already being replaced with cassettes, and then cassettes were replaced with compact disks, and then all of the above has been replaced with downloads, I can only imagine how hard it would have been to keep up.
But that isnt a problem I have to deal with, as I failed miserably in the course.
And so, less than six months after the high of applause at my graduation, I was as low as I could go.
Or so I thought ...
I wasn’t the only one in my family going through some serious changes that year.
My mother finally reached her breaking point, and left my stepfather, fleeing Calgary in the process and establishing herself in Edmonton.
The reason why she picked Edmonton is that my brother had gone there some time earlier, but as it turned out he kept a reason to keep coming down to Calgary anyway, as he had started dating a young woman who I had gone to school with. As things turned out, he’s still with her today ...
As for me, once I had grieved for a while over my failure, I applied to the University of Alberta in Edmonton for the Education program. I figured if I couldn’t do, maybe I could teach ...
But even worse things were to come ...
****
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 9 - “Black Friday” and other disasters
Things actually started off well.
In fact by the summer break I was fully confident in my ability to finish the course and become a teacher. I went back to Calgary for the summer, staying at a friends house while working a series of odd jobs through a student employment program.
Then after I came back to their house one summer day, and the city of Edmonton had been devastated by a tornado in a day they called “Black Friday.”
I spent the next couple of days trying to get a hold of my mother or brother, but at first the lines were down, and then they were overloaded with people trying to do the same thing.
As things turned out, my brother had literally escaped drowning in his car in a tunnel locally called “the rat hole” , and my mother had also managed to escape harm.
The thing I most remember of the tornado was coming back to Edmonton and going out with my mom, and finding a train engine tossed into a field like a tinker toy.
Then I returned to school, and that’s when I met Toni. She was a librarian at one of the libraries on the University campus, and from the first time I saw her, I was impressed with her. Despite having to be in a wheelchair, she had a radiant smile and a positive outlook that attracted me.
I managed to work up the courage, and asked her out, and to my shock, she actually said yes.
Soon, we were an item, and I had more hope than ever that in finding her, I would also find a solution to my gender issue as well.
I even wrote a poem to ask her to marry me.
She turned me down.
Despite this, we kept seeing each other. She was there to comfort me on the day I finally went and saw my father’s grave. She even allowed me to move in with her, although we had separate bedrooms and no intimate contact.
Not long after that, the schooling thing went off the rails - I started struggling to pass classes, and reached a point where they wouldn’t let me take the last practical class. At the same time Toni developed cancer and lost part of her tongue and the remainder of her mobility, forcing her into an apartment built to help disabled people, and she needed me more than ever, even if she didn’t want to marry me.
For me, it was like I was in the worst of both worlds - I was involved with her too much to actually try and get a girlfriend, but I was never going to be more to Toni than the person who helped her do her daily tasks.
But rather than confronting her on this, I just let the relationship wither.
It wasn’t all bad. Thanks to her, I participated in wheelchair square dancing, which was certainly interesting. For example, I was drafted to be a dancer because the club was short, and we did demonstrations in shopping centers. During one demonstration, I decided to not get out of the spare wheelchair I borrowed for dancing, and I learned first-hand how the disabled are treated. The best way I can put it is that a lot of people assumed that being in a chair lowered my I.Q. by at least fifty points. We even took a couple trips to the United States to meet other wheelchair square dance groups. On one of these trips we were late leaving Edmonton because of a snowstorm, and as a result had to draft every available able-bodied worker in Vancouver's airport to transfer the disabled members of the club from one plane to another.
Finally, one Easter, we had gone to her parent’s house for the holiday, and I heard her parents tell my little niece to “not be a Todd”, and I realized not only was I not loved by her, I was held in contempt by her parents.
I picked up my things, drove out of their driveway, went home, called my brother to help me, packed up my stuff, and left.
So there I was, no relationship, no schooling, and back living with my mother.
The next few years are a painful blur - I went from bad job to worse job, basically drifting without a purpose in my life. You’d think the gender issue would get worse under those circumstances, but you’d be wrong - it stayed at a steady, drip-by-drip-till-the bucket-overflows pace, with pretty close to the same number of good days and bad days.
Then things changed again ...
*****
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 10 - “I will love thee better still”
One of my uncles decided that maybe he could give me a break, and hired me to work at the parkade of the international airport as a maintenance person, which I gratefully accepted, when I had a chance encounter that would change my life.
Because I could come in during breaks, I spent some time with the cashiers, and then one of them upon hearing me complain about being lonely said she knew of someone who might be perfect for me, if I wanted to go out on a blind date and find out.
So I went to a restaurant in a local mall, wondering what the heck I was getting myself in for.
Shelia found me, and we had a nice dinner, and then I walked her back to where she was staying. As we walked, we sang “amazing grace” together, and I walked home filled with hope that I had at last found what I was looking for.
At the same time I started dating her, I sought out a pastor to talk to about my gender issues, and he recommended that I marry. He said I could then give my femininity to my wife, and all my problems in that area would be solved.
So six months after our first date, i asked her to marry me.
It was an amazing ceremony. An uncle covered some of the costs, and my brother wrote and performed a song as a wedding march. So instead of the traditional “here comes the bride”, Sheila came down the aisle to the sound of my brother on guitar and singing “I will love thee better still”.
It felt like a fairytale brought to life.
Sadly, the fairytale didn’t even survive the honeymoon. I tried to tell my new bride about my gender struggles, but all I accomplished was make our honeymoon awkward. Then once we came home, she quickly kicked me out of the master bedroom, saying that my nightmares, snoring, and general movement when I slept all made me not someone she could sleep beside.
As if to emphasize our lack of intimacy, a couple of weeks into our marriage I had a cold, and she kicked me out of the house, telling me to stay at my mother’s until I was recovered.
Despite this inauspicious start, I sincerely wanted to make this work, so when she asked me to consummate our marriage, I tried my best.
Not long after, Shelia had two things to tell me. The first was that she was pregnant. The second was that she was in the country illegally. We would end up spending most of the next decade, not to mention thousands of dollars, to try and solve the second problem. As for the first situation, well, I think that deserves a new chapter ...
****
Chapter 11 - A child is born
Sheila had a difficult pregnancy. In fact, when she was about seven months pregnant, she went for an appointment, and the doctor told her that the baby was dead.
She was devastated, but she decided to go back a couple of days later when her regular doctor would be in, and he said there was nothing wrong with the baby. We never found out why the first doctor said the baby was dead ...
Finally, one March day, I was sleeping as I worked nights, but my sleep was interrupted when my wife’s best friend, the one who had set us up on our blind date, showed up at my door, and told me to “get your butt to the hospital.”
“You’re a father.”
So I got dressed, and went to the hospital, where I found that Sheila had almost died during the labor from high blood pressure, and so my daughter arrived via C-section and was in an incubator while she was sleeping the experience off.
As I result, I saw my child before she did ...
We named her Sabrina.
To me, she was perfect, but we would learn she had some ... difficulties ahead of her. She couldn’t have tags on her clothes, she was beyond hyper, she would have troubles with hand coordination ...
Despite these problems, she was (and is) a wonderful girl, and I’m glad she exists.
Not long after she was born, on the urging of Sheila , I bought a mortgage on a house. I was also able to go back to school, this time to be a Licensed Practical Nurse, and it seemed like I had “arrived”, as it were.
But we have come to the part of my journey that’s the hardest for me to relate, even harder than talking about my abuse.
Because what happened next was entirely my fault.
The downward spiral started with me failing the course, but I was able to get work as a Nurse’s Aid, which kept me going for a while. But the unaddressed problems I had - the gender issue, the rape, and top it off a manic-depressive episode - combined to erode what little foundation I had, and I collapsed into myself.
Basically, I shut down, like I had done as a kid.
But now, there were consequences ...
I stopped being able to pay the bills, especially the mortgage, and I only “woke up” when my brother called me to tell me the mortgage people had contacted him because he had been a co-signer on the mortgage.
The mask I had been trying to build was torn away, and what was underneath wasn’t pretty.
My brother arranged to pay back the money we owed, and basically bought us out of the house, giving Sheila the money. She took the money and put the down payment on a new place, and my brother sold the house basically just getting enough to cover what he had paid for it.
As for me, I can hardly describe how horrible I felt. I had badly hurt my brother and had put my family at risk of being homeless.
So when Sharon asked me to leave, I didn’t fight her.
I went to live with my mother, who was taking care of my grandmother in a place in the north side of Edmonton.
And that’s where things changed again ...
****
Fearfully and Wonderfully made Chapter 12 - “Daily Strength”
I was in pretty rough shape when I moved back in with my mother after the destruction of my marriage.
I had let down and hurt the people who loved me, and I really didn’t have a place to put the feeling that produced.
But in several ways moving back in with my mother (and grandmother) was a good decision.
I had been able to transfer my job to a small facility walking distance away, and they had set me up in the basement in such a way that I only had to come upstairs for meals if I wished.
But best of all, I was with two women who loved me unquestionably, even if they were saddened about the mess I had made.
Bolstered by their support, and with my brother forgiving me enough to help get me into Christian counseling, I spent some time on a couple of projects that I hoped would help me get back on track.
One of these was to re-read the bible, but I didn’t just want to read it. I wanted to do more, so I found a pamphlet that went through the whole bible over the course of a year, and to make it even more effective I wrote a page of notes each day on what I read that day. The next year, I was to do this again, only this time instead of notes I would write down a prayer based on what I read that day.
The other project was designed to help me learn better focus and concentration, and it involved a craft called latch-hooking. Its a little like rug hooking, and I would spend hours over the next couple of years carefully hooking threads into place, until I had made several items. One was a horse that I gave to my grandmother, one was a cat I made for my mom, one was a cross with the words “bless this house” that I gave to my brother, and the last one was a picture of Jesus that I gave to Sheila .
I saw this last project especially as an act of faith, and I found myself coming up with parallels between the portrait I was making and the “portrait” that was my life - that from one side, all you could really see was knots, and it isn’t until you look from the other side that you see the true image, and I began to see the difficult times in my life as just threads, and the full picture was yet to be made.
Between my projects and work, I spent time with my grandmother, and was even to spend time with my daughter on occasion, even taking her to my work and letting her meet my patients.
Unfortunately, this quiet time couldn’t last, and after a couple of years my grandmother’s condition got bad enough that she needed hospitalization, and as the only reason my mother and I were living in that place was to look after her, we soon found ourselves looking for a new place to live.
To add to the difficulty, we had acquired a small dog as company, and of course we wanted to be sure that wherever we went, the dog would be welcome.
At the same time, my stress caused a depression that got noticed at work, and I soon found myself being put on indefinite leave, which shortly became permanent.
I eventually found other employment, we found a small apartment, and I hoped I could start moving forward again. Sadly, neither worked out, but I had something going for me I had not had before - I had a support system online.
I had taken to the internet in the hopes of finding a cure for my gender issues, and I had found a support site called “Daily Strength”, but instead found myself looking at the gender struggle as something other than a curse or an addiction to be cured.
And for the first time, I gave that female part of myself a name - Dorothy, although I originally intended that to just be a pseudonym for writing stories.
But, let’s save that for the last chapter, shall we?
Chapter 13 - “A gift from God”
Giving myself a female name marked a huge turn-around in my attitude towards my drive toward the feminine.
Up until that point, when I thought about it at all, I referred to this ... girl thing ... as “She” or “Her” and it usually was with a shudder. As I stated, I originally wanted the female name for writing, something I had thought about doing on and off since I was a teen. I found a place online to publish stories and poetry, a site called “Big Closet”, and began to write a little story called “The Saga of E-Girl”.
It wasn’t much, just based on an idea floating around in my head from reading too many comics as a kid - “what if, you could gain superpowers, but you had to change genders to do it?”
To my great surprise, it was really well received.
So I wrote more.
I wrote poems, and stories, and eventually began to share my life story and struggles with the readers of the site, just as I was with the readers on “Daily Strength”.
I spoke frankly about my struggle with my gender, and especially with feeling afraid of being rejected by family, friends, strangers, and worst of all, by God.
Meanwhile, I was in the middle of my last attempt to repress my feminine side, taking anti-depressants, seeing a councilor, and trying everything I could think of.
I even went to a gender specialist, hoping to be told that of course it was all in my head, that with the right treatment I’d be a man and like it.
Didn’t go that way.
In fact, after our conversation he recommended I begin a transition, and even gave me a prescription for a testosterone blocker.
I panicked a bit, and sought help for my rape instead.
But it seemed like I could no longer shut the door on the girl within, and I agonized about what to do.
Then someone from “Daily Strength” recommended I pray as Dorothy, and see what happened.
That prayer eventually became a poem that I have read in public, called “Dear God.”
And it felt like I got an answer to that prayer in the form of a vision - a vision of myself as a girl, being held and swung around by a man who I believe was God himself.
But I had one last crisis to deal with before things could finally start to get better.
I had a reaction to the antidepressants, and actually came very close to suicide.
I was at work, and someone left a birthday cake with a large knife beside it, and before I even knew what I was doing, I had the knife at my wrist, ready to cut.
Somehow, I gathered enough strength to drop the knife, but the incident scared me enough to make me realize I could no longer hold my feminine side in check.
I went back to the gender specialist, took the prescription, and began to make steps toward a transition. My first step was coming out of the closet to my family, and I went into that series of conversations fearing the worst. My mother’s reaction was to tell me “It makes sense” and not long after bought me a birthday card - “From a mother to her daughter”.
And even though my brother and sister-in-law had (and continue to have) doubts about what I’m doing, they are supporting me the best they can.
And even though my ex objects to a transition on religious grounds, she has continued to let me see my daughter.
For a while after taking these steps, I hesitated to go further. I felt sure I would never pass, and so I agonized what I could do about my situation.
Finally, I could stand it no longer, so I took the next scary step, to start going out in public as a woman, so I went to a thrift shop and picked out a skirt, shoes, and blouse to wear, as well as panties, bra, and hose.
After a false start, I went out for gas dressed.
And the lady at the gas station called me “miss”.
Then I went to a bottle depot to return my empty bottles and cans for a refund.
And when my bag spilled, a young man said “Let me help ma’am.”
So the next time I saw the gender specialist, I got what’s called a “carry letter”, basically telling whoever reads it that I have begun a real-life test as part of my transition, and that they should treat me as a woman.
This letter is often called “the bathroom letter”, as it seems that bathrooms are one place people struggle with having someone like me around.
Except when I went to use a ladies room in a mall after getting the letter, I didn’t need it. Nobody seemed to pay me any attention whatsoever.
The next step in my journey was to see if I could find a job that would be okay with me transitioning, so I applied for a job at a call center. Basically the job was cold-calling businesses and asking if they wanted to advertise in this little magazine that was made available for free in doctor’s offices and medical clinics.
They didn’t have any objections to me coming to work as a woman, and to my surprise the other women who worked there totally accepted me, even letting me come with them on their lunch runs.
Unfortunately, I really sucked at the actual job.
So after three days, I was let go.
So I went looking for a job I might actually be able to do.
I went to an agency that was supposed to help people having trouble finding work, and was all set to start some serious training with them when I got a call from Wal-mart, who I had applied to online.
I went to the interview in my skirt, and remarkably, they hired me anyway.
And once again, the tolerance of my fellow workers surprised me. Not only did they seem to accept me as a woman, I was told by one “I can’t even imagine you as a tomboy.”
Then once I had been working the required three months, I was able to get some of my prescriptions covered by the company, and as a result, I was able to start estrogen.
And eventually, I started seeing results, and the more feminine I started to look, the more ... relaxed I became.
Which I think is a pretty good hint I was heading in a good direction.
I also had been able to use techniques I had learned in rape counseling to help make serious progress in dealing with what happened to me, and the other thing that was helping me with that was some of my writing.
Meanwhile I was actually doing well at work, and after working at a store outside of town for a year, I was able to transfer to a location closer to my home.
Then I went hunting for a church to attend as Dorothy, and lucked into a United church downtown that practiced what they called “affirming”, which meant they accepted me as a woman.
It was at this church that one Sunday I read “Dear God”, and afterward several people approached me to tell me they wept at what I had written.
Which brings me to now.
My journey isn’t over yet, or at least I hope it isn’t.
Its my hope to become what’s promised in the name I have chosen - Dorothy - A gift from God.
But We’ll just have to see where my journey goes from here together, won’t we?
End.