Sputterpub's Blog

The cascade of their insistence and my defiance only got worse over the next 10 years. She pummeled me with epithets like lazy, and he restricted my choices owing to what he saw as my lack of commitment and common sense. My parents tried to govern what I ate, how I dressed, when I slept, how I felt. I wasn’t even allowed to be sick unless they agreed (Mom sent me to school sick to my stomach, and only picked me up after I threw up across several desks, because she had determined that my stomachache was “in my head,” even though we’d been out to dinner the night before with her father, where they made me eat rich food I didn’t like. And I’m sure my bout of daily headaches that same year (fifth grade) would have been much shorter if Dad hadn’t decided my squinting was an affectation and they’d had my eyes examined).

By the time I entered adolescence, their insensitivity had achieved epic proportions. Dad continued to demand that I spend one weekend day with the family (Saturday humiliation, when all I craved was some time with my friends in the public library). Mom developed ever more specific and elaborate ideas about the ensembles I should be wearing. Her response to my (normal!) complaints about my hair was to drag me to beauty colleges for brutal haircuts and primitive straightening solutions (bad as the seventh grade frizz was to my eyes, it was far worse when the straightener made my hair break off at my brow hairline; the dark brown bristle that then grew in was impossible to mask behind my bangs).

My friends had clothing allowances but I had to shop with my mother. That not only meant missing out on the mall culture (an experience more important to Mom than to me), but it also included explicit humiliations when she yelled from outside my dressing room for “a bathing suit with a bigger bottom” or otherwise broadcast what we now call TMI to staff and customers. Mom longed for me to be what she considered a normal girl – into makeup and peroxide and shrieking with the other girls – but then she restricted my ability to interact with the girls she would have me befriend. That was similar to the way she ran my “diets;” telling me not to eat sweets during the day and then offering an ice cream reward, after dinner and with her, if I had what she taught me to call a “good” day.

And every time she got mad at me, which was pretty often, she resorted to the “no common sense” and “lazy” accusations, now elaborated with the theory that my undesirable behavior was the product of a friend’s influence (the friend being whomever I wanted to be with at the time).

She was a push-me-pull-you and Dad was kind/cruel. I think his interest and affection were sincere. But he had expectations that were impossible for me to meet. He wanted me to be petite and delicate. I had inherited his medium-large frame and big features. He expected my hair to shine with young health and he acted like I prevented that by applying lotions and conditioners. But I had curls like his, humidity-tightened into frizz, and there’s no way to get our type of hair to shine. When he gave me jewelry (which happened on big occasions like my 13th and 16th birthdays), the piece was simple and classy and way too small for me to wear well (a single cultured pearl on a thin gold chain disappeared on me). The experience was painful, and that had nothing to do with the chain.

They wouldn’t let me walk alone at night, even when I was 15. They wouldn’t let me walk at night with a friend. They didn’t take my guitar-love seriously and wouldn’t help me acquire one, because Dad said that I was fickle and wouldn’t stick with it. And it wasn’t something I could take care of myself; my parents didn’t let me work till I was a senior in high school, and they set my allowance unrealistically low. As it happened, I acquired a sick used acoustic guitar with holiday/birthday money. To the extent it had any tone, I ruined it by refinishing its water-damaged body.

In similar fashion, when my eyesight (which kept getting worse till I was full-grown), had me in coke-bottle spectacles and I lusted for contact lenses, my father made me wait years, because “it takes a lot of determination to adjust to them.” (No it didn’t, I learned without surprise, when I was 18 and in college and finally allowed them).

That’s just some of it. I won’t lengthen this complaint by describing his attempts to pop my pimples or hers to govern my sex life. But I will insist on this: I did NOTHING to deserve all their shit.

I had to get married before they let me be. Not the best reason to wed. And I was by then so full of fight – not sweet or petite or shining – that I was anything but a successful wife. My parents were sad about the divorce, but not all that surprised – they’d already pegged me as difficult, and the marital result was just one more bit of evidence.

But time passes. Dad died two years ago. I promised him then I’d care for Mom. And she has become gentler as she fades. Within weeks I’ll be an old orphan. Soon I’ll have time to be sweet.

Sweet? Sweet? I’ll be damned if I’ll be sweet. That’s all my parents wanted of me, as early as I can remember. So it’s the last thing I’ll give them.

For the longest time I found no fault with them. I was unhappy and frustrated but everyone could see they were doing nothing wrong. They doted on me. I was their sun and moon. The problem had to be me.

For the longest time. Oh I had some complaints as a child and my share of angst as a teen, but that was all normal, to be expected, nobody’s fault at all. That’s what it takes to grow up and be a separate individual, everyone said.

But eventually I learned that it’s up to the victim to define abuse. I am the victim. I was abused.

They didn’t beat me. There were some complaints about my laziness and lack of common sense, but I don’t think anyone would have categorized their statements as verbal abuse. I was fed, clothed, sheltered, guided, loved.

I was abused.

My first days were lived in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The year was 1950 and the protocols were peculiar. Back then the doctors thought they were in charge of childbirth. They thought nothing of knocking out a laboring woman and extracting the baby from her. Then the nurses took over. Swaddling was a procedural issue. Feeding was by clock and of chemicals. The idea was that the experts – doctors, nurses, and then the nurse-taught mothers – had to train the baby to eat, sleep, and even shit on schedule.

When we came home we brought the baby nurse with us. Of course I have no memory of her. And yet I know she was older, rigid, Germanic in attitude. Dressed in white clothes and ugly shoes. I know that as much attention was paid to sterilization of all the bottle equipment as to me.

My parents loved me, but they didn’t hold me enough. Too often they arranged me in my crib, clean-diapered and clad in adorable pajamas amid sheets, blankets and bumpers that matched, and left me alone there, to figure out my path through tears to sleep.

They fed me when I wasn’t hungry and withheld the bottle when I was. Mom gave me gloppy “solid” food before I wanted it, and then was quite insistent about me swallowing it. She put me in the dresses she wanted me to wear. Carted me to places she wanted to go (that would have been okay, within reason, but the woman was a compulsive shopper, and she never had the time or interest for cartoons or playgrounds or mud). Mom even decided, months too early, when I should be done with diapers, and then took steps that included shame, bribery, and an enema, to bend my colon to her purposes.

I objected before I had language. By the time I was three I was articulating some complaints. But my objections and opinions were classified as willfulness, stubbornness, selfishness. A cascade of misunderstanding developed.

Dad laid down rules from on high. He often said the ship of our household was NOT a democracy. Mom jabbed with petulant demands: “I just want it that way,” or “because I said so,” or “Just do it, dammit!” were typical of her responses to my questions. She also had a tendency to lash out when frustrated (“aggravated” was her word), slapping with her right hand or poking with whatever kitchen implement she happened to be holding. It was up to me, alone, to form my bottom-up, grass-roots campaign for personal freedom.

There was a time-line of parental mistakes. The toilet-training debacle was triggered by the birth of my baby brother. Mom was as confident with this infant as she’d been insecure with me; he was the light of her life, and I could “damn-well walk on my own” as long as she had him in her arms. I was suddenly a big girl expected to do much for myself, alone.

I already had some contempt for her then. Her maternal shyness had put me off, had made me turn toward my doting besotted father. But this was in the early years of their marriages, when they fought a lot and he acted parental toward her. So I witnessed him treating her with disdain and disapproval. Of course I mimicked him to the extent I could. Of course that didn’t improve the mother-daughter relationship.

Next up was the tonsillectomy. I was five, the hospital stay was overnight, my parents didn’t tell me what was going to happen. They turned me over to smarmy or cold medical people, and left me to deal with them on my own. As it happened, my parents returned for me the next day. But I don’t remember anyone telling me that they’d be back for me, and by the time they showed up, I was an altered me. I’d learned not to count on them. I didn’t see them as demons – I knew they still loved me and I depended on them to keep the food and shelter coming – but I no longer viewed them as gods.

That experience made me a little more difficult for them. Definitely more willful and stubborn. And my more adamant attitude led her to increase the “no common sense” accusations and him to engage in some head-to-head disagreements which, when he didn’t prevail, “forced” him (his word) to restrict my activities or withhold from me things I coveted. Then I started diversifying my desires, in an attempt to find some that were attainable. Dad’s response to that was to conclude that I was spoiled and didn’t know what I wanted, and to make me wait longer for whatever, ostensibly to give me time to REALLY decide I wanted it.

Then Merle became agitated under a strong impulse. It began when she read a news story about the Marshall Islands. Although many have chosen to disbelieve the calculations about global warming, those small Central Pacific islands are already becoming tinier as the ocean rises. Sixty thousand people will lose their country over the next century. Merle clucked over that report. She said it was pretty dumb to settle on islands that were only six feet above sea level, but still… and then she put her palms on the table and her eyes on me. “We have to visit the ocean,” she said. She pushed herself to a stand. “I’m sorry. That was abrupt. But it just hit me. I’ve been antsy and unsettled lately. Something has been lurking in the back right corner of my brain, my blind spot. Reading about the Marshall Islanders, I just visualized the ocean and it all came clear. We have to go there. Right now. I need to think by the ocean.”

There wasn’t any good reason not to do it. Oz wanted to come along. We cranked down all our systems and got into the Jeep. But first, we cruised the Internet for accommodations. We weren’t in an exploring mood; we wanted to settle into an ocean home. Sea Ranch had all the listings so we went with it. We took a big place perched above the northernmost cove. It’s so large that we each have a suite of rooms. I sketch and write these memoirs from the north end upstairs; my room is lit with afternoon reflected off cypress-framed ocean. Oz is at the other end of the house, also upstairs; when he isn’t working on the verse play with Merle, I think he’s tinkering with some electronic models. Merle has taken over the whole downstairs. She moves around a lot lately, arranging items or pacing. She sometimes visits me up here, or invites me to walk outside, and we all get together in the big room for meals and evenings. This place is strange to us and very lovely, but it’s eerie the way it seems to be inhabited with none but gray-hairs. There are no children, no stores or businesses. Everyone walks along the coast and admires the flowers in the same way. It’s fabulously monotonous, as if it were cast under a spell.

We have gray hair. Merle has a dozen strands. Oz’s brown curls are salt and pepper now. I color my hair regularly. But the other folk here are old and automatic. They move like zombies. Luckily there aren’t many of them, especially during the week.

And the drivers are obnoxious. We’re too close to the Bay Area to be away from that.

I think it’s time to get out of this place. If not back to Nevada, I want to propose that we move farther north. I’ll suggest it to Merle.

(Some memoirs. I just reread these pages and they seem more a journal to me.)

(Some big love. I just listened to Merle and got my heart shattered.)

She’s pregnant.

By Oz.

She agrees it’s time to leave here. She has completed what she came for. She has decided to let the pregnancy continue.

I may be a woman, but my first feeling is that of a man. I want to kill both of them.  With my hands. I can feel that passion dissipate even as I describe it.

Right. Merle at 48 and Oz at 49. He of the tiny dick. He has the smallest penis I’ve ever seen on an adult. Oz is only about five foot eight himself, so his dick ought to look big no matter what size. But it doesn’t. And Merle told me it didn’t work for her, back when she and Oz friendly-fucked in 1968.

Then again, gorilla dicks are only an inch and a half, and that’s sufficient to impregnate lady gorillas. The proof is in the pregnancy I guess.

Right. Merle who always wanted to be Minerva, sprung from her father’s brain without a mother, therefore just, that Merle is now choosing to be a mother? And what for me? Godmother/father? Probably…

I didn’t know what to say to her at first. “Sure,” is the sound that came out of my mouth, followed by “Aren’t you the one who pointed out that women can’t complain about men as long as mothers are the ones who raise the boys?”

But Merle doesn’t particularly complain about men. She complains about people. Anyway, she tells me she’s carrying a daughter. She says the challenge is to raise her without an eating disorder.

Merle is nauseated and chagrined. But she’s not confused any more. She’s beginning to search out a perfect name.

At least the ride isn’t boring…

I’ve known women who didn’t want children because they’d been the oldest of a large brood; they’d already done the job. And I’ve known a pathetic few who had such a toxic relationship with their own mothers that they wouldn’t risk initiating another mother-child relationship no matter who was going to be the mom. But Merle refused motherhood on principle.

Merle is mad at God. She thinks our species is too flawed to survive. She doesn’t want to participate in a game we’re doomed to lose. She’s brilliant, my Merle, but like any person she tends to repeat the phrases which mean the most to her. I can close my eyes and see her oration: she is standing, green eyes rounded and shining, face emphatic, dark hair moving with her head, right index finger extended at the end of a bent arm angled 45° away from her body, punctuating every other syllable. “Read the Bible,” she commands. “If it’s the book of God, then it’s the journal of a mean, jealous, violent being. Read 1 Samuel 5 and 6, and convince me that any one else is reading the damn book.” Or: “God’s best skill is irony,” she’ll declare. “And face it: irony is just a divine form of sarcasm. We all know sarcasm is the cheapest form of wit. You do the math.” She gets herself so worked up that her body trembles a bit. Her nipples stiffen. Only her orations and cold will do that.

She says motherhood is insidious and overglorified. Pretty much any female can do it. We talked about it the other day. We took a walk along the edge of the headlands and we stopped at the cove overlook, to watch the sea lions. It took us awhile to conclude that the red flag-like material floating in a tide pool was afterbirth. We saw the adult and pup in the pool, but we didn’t recognize the placenta for what it was until they left the pool for their first swim together, mother nose-nudging her child into the waves, and the sea gulls landed to pull the afterbirth like taffy.

“See?” Merle argued after her natural awe subsided. “It’s work more than it is pain. That’s why it’s called ‘labor.’ And don’t let anyone tell you it’s different for people than it is for other animals. They’re delusional. It’s like the folks who maintain that their dogs don’t feel cold, living outside in northern California. Hah! Dogs feel cold; they just don’t complain.” Merle speaks with such authority that my first impulse is to believe her. She was born a woman, so even though she hasn’t had any children, maybe she knows more than I? But I doubt it. I’m very empathetic, and I have a twin sister. I think even in utero I was learning to feel like a woman does. And my sister and I have always understood each other. No: I think Merle may know just because Merle somehow knows. Maybe she’s psychic. Maybe it’s her genius. But she seems to get ideas differently than other people. Her startling statements often turn out to be right. We tend to go with her strong impulses.

That’s why we’re sojourning at Sea Ranch. I thought everything was going well in our little Nevada hide-away. After Oz joined us, we three settled into a comfortable routine, with me as usual maintaining our domestic systems, Merle writing and performing her bits of consulting magic which contributed (at this point unnecessarily) to our income, and Oz recovering from the last five stressful years of his personal and business life. I thought Merle was enjoying the reconnection with Oz; I know they spent hours together composing collaborative poetry.

Merle makes a big deal about everyone’s name but her own. She finds significance in Oz, she lectures on Lazlo, she validates Vyvyan. But she never tells her full name if she can avoid it, and she always says that she hasn’t yet learned her own true appellation.

Her mother named her for the movie star. She sent the Certificate of Birth in to the New York City Board of Health, with the names Merle Oberon Morgan printed on line one. “My full name makes me gag.” That’s what Merle said to me 30 years ago, after I finally heard her middle name. “I’d change it in a minute if I could figure what to change it to.”

I was Sigmund then. I wasn’t much stronger than Merle, but I didn’t hesitate to act stronger. I had to wrestle and tease her into giving me Oberon. And I laughed at it.

But for at least ten years now, I’ve thought the names suit her well. Merle means blackbird, and the lady is small, dark, and quick. Oberon was king of the faeries, and my love acts more like a king than a queen.

She has the strongest soul I’ve ever known. Not that I really know souls, but I’ve been as intimate as possible with her for a third of a century and in a variety of ways. King Merle has a grounded, adamantine ego. She’s also profoundly objective; she acts because of reason instead of feelings, even in situations where most people are governed by emotion. For example, she and her best friend ran away from their homes in high school. They only left for a couple of days. Neither of them was unhappy at home. They did it because they felt their childhoods would be incomplete without the experience. Merle told me they shoplifted, too. Not for need and not to keep: in fact, the only time they got caught they were returning some flatware they’d stolen the day before. No, they thought shoplifting was a necessary skill to be learned on the way to adulthood.

That’s a rare way to make decisions, but I tend to do it too. I spent the first 39 years of my life male and then switched to the woman I am now, and I didn’t do that because I was trapped in the wrong body… I did it because I wanted to experience life as both genders. I figure men have it over women in sexual matters for the first 25 or 35 years, but then the pendulum swings. A woman’s supposed to hit her sexual prime at 40 or so, and I didn’t want to miss that.

Funny. I started the switch earlier, but I didn’t feel female till the final operation. When I met Merle in 1967 I was Sigmund. I was a few years ahead of her at Cal, and I changed my name to Vyvyan the following year, when I graduated. I meant the male version of the name – that spelling had never been used by a woman – but looking back now, I can’t deny something was happening. I got into cross-dressing when I was 30, and once I started shaving my body hair I never wanted to stop. But it took actual dick removal for me to become who I am now.

So it would have been easy for us to have a kid, except obviously Merle would have to carry the child. She refused. Firmly, freely and finally. I even froze sperm before my operation, but she hasn’t consented to receive it.