Departure

120

It was a Sunday evening that Daina and I parted ways. Given how much of our time together had been to share watching television shows, it seemed to make sense to end with the last new show until a span of repeats began.

Originally, I was shocked. When I told Daina of my 'situation' years earlier she had actually seemed enthusiastic about helping me research it and even lent me her car for my trips to see the specialist in Denver. But as time went on, she had become irritated and despondent and wouldn't say why. I just ended up assuming it was from the news of her mother's cancer and subsequent death. But now that I had contacted my family to let them know of my 'situation' and decision to normalize as female, the source of Daina's resentment toward me became clear: It was this decision. She wouldn't talk to me about it but finally agreed to join me to some visits with Samuel in the hopes that he could tease out the issues behind the resentments.

Daina and I sat side by side on his couch as he sat in the single chair across from us and gently prodded for what the issue might be. Finally Daina burst out that she didn't think I should be a woman as I made ''Animal Noises''. I burst out with an incredulous smile, fighting back the urge to break out laughing and fought to guess what she meant by that. Finally I did put two & two together and noted that, indeed, I sometimes would say ''meow'' to a cat, or ''woof'' to a dog, or ''moo'' to a cow, but I didn't see how that was a problem. Samuel turned to Daina and she wasn't going to explain it any further and the first of these three appointments soon came to an end with little more than Samuel getting some general information on Daina's background. Leaving his office I couldn't help myself and asked Daina, ''Animal Noises?'' She didn't want to talk about it or the session any further.

For the second visit, Daina had little to offer other than my height as to why I shouldn't choose to be a woman. That was easily addressed as I noted, because of my intersexed background, I had actually ended up a bit shorter than my mother and the same height as my sister. While in the transsexual field there had developed a race based conclusion of who should and who shouldn't change ''from a man to a woman'' based on how their height and weight fit into the idealized Caucasian norm, as I was from a mixed race background and, for that matter I was addressing an intersexed condition not a transsexual issue, that sort of gauge didn't seem relevant to me. Daina didn't have a response and the meeting was soon over without any new insights as to what was causing her irritation about my decision.

During this time I had gotten my RMT job offer and accepted it and Vocational Rehabilitation actually paid for cab fare to take me to and from the complex each day I worked for the first two weeks until I received my first paycheck and could use it as a down payment for my own a car. As a result, between dinners and Daina helping me decide on my business wear wardrobe, we would visit various used car lots in search of a car I might like. During these times it had become the rule that we were not to talk of the cause of her irritation until our next appointment with Samuel. So the irritation just persisted creating a wall between us as the weeks wore on. We finally found a car for me, but as I had only just started a new job after years of being unemployed, I couldn't get financing for it on my own and Daina finally agreed to cosign my car loan so, if for any reason I stopped making payments for it, Daina would be on the hook for the balance and the financing company would feel safe. I thanked her, but she saw my getting a car as a means of us spending less tense time together in her car.

By the third meeting the dam broke at Samuel's office:

When Daina had first met me she had been with a coworker friend, 'Rochelle', and as Rochelle was the extroverted one of the pair, she befriended me first. Given Rochelle's comely appearance and her propensity to talk of her many past boyfriends as conquests, her limited presence in my life had lead people to believe I had chosen her as a girlfriend and thus this had given me 'a reputation'. While the friendship with Rochelle didn't last long, she had then started listing me at Daina's & her workplace as one of her past boyfriends, thus giving me 'a reputation' at their school in the rumor mill as well. Daina saw this as her chance to establish her own 'reputation' as she had never had a boyfriend of her own, nor had even been on a real date for fear of ending up in a relationship like her parents had during her lifetime.

By befriending me, Daina had been leading her school friends to believe we were an intimate couple over these past few years. Then when I told her of my 'situation' Daina had come to realize that God had sent me to her. In her mind I truly was that 'perfect boyfriend for her'. We had so many interests in common and given my physical 'limitations' she would never have to worry about me wanting anything of her sexually that she was uncomfortable facing. So for me, while we had been friends these past few years and she had been helping me out as I regained my health and tried to reclaim my life, to her friends she had portrayed me as her boyfriend having fresh stories of our frequent times together doing stuff and letting her coworkers and family assume more was happening 'after hours'.

That was why Daina was against my normalizing as female as: What would she tell her friends? Her family? That nothing had been going on all along and she had been intentionally misleading them? Of course she couldn't. Daina originally thought that when I looked into my intersexed 'situation' it would result in my finding ways to become 'more of a man', but once it was clear that wasn't going to happen, Daina wanted me to remain as I had been living my life since the age of thirteen, bound and pretending to be a man as best I could, that way I would continue to ''be the man'' in her life.

I told her after so many years of already living my life that way, I definitely didn't want to spend the rest of it like that as well. Drawing from her wealth of classical readings, Daina tried to point out that ''Your life story makes such a great classical tragedy. Why would you want to give that up and have a life just like everyone else?''

I was speechless as was Samuel and when the end of the appointment came Daina made her way back to the car while Samuel held me back for a moment. He recommended I end my friendship with Daina as soon as possible...!

But I still felt we could work it out. Daina could just let it come out to her friends and coworkers that we weren't 'a couple' but 'just friends' during these years but that wasn't what Daina wanted to do. She liked the reputation she had gained in their eyes. As the subsequent weeks went on, she further explained to me that another reason she didn't want me as a 'female' friend in her life was because all of her female friends had subsequently found a boyfriend and coupled up, leaving Daina behind, forgotten. She couldn't bear the thought that I might, also, find myself a boyfriend 'afterwards' and not only would she be left behind, again, but having come from a mixed-sex background be ''more successful being a woman'' than she had been during her lifetime.

While I told her I didn't have any dating goals in mind, I also wasn't willing to swear I would never be open to them in the future. With that, Daina concluded for herself that we needed to end our friendship and while I tried to comfort and assure her it wouldn't be an issue, her slowly welling hostility toward me made it clear that the past fun of our friendship was going to disappear either way and I finally relented and agreed to the end.

After finishing our final television show for the night, I followed Daina out to her car and we chatted for a bit and then I thanked her for all of her help and support over these past many years I had known her. Given how she had fed me and helped me when my apartment had been destroyed as well as assuring I was able to go back to College and frequently provided me rides as part of it so I could complete my degree, I thanked her for ''saving my life'' as my final words to her. That seemed to coax a smile out of her for the first time in months and she got into her car and started it while I made my way back to my apartment.

I moved to my bedroom window and opened the curtains to watch her car drive by... And she was gone. I stood there for a while looking to the grassy vacant lot beyond the parking lot for a time and it dawned on me I was back to my childhood place starting out my sister's bedroom window to the hayfield beyond, waiting for the time when she would come back and see me again.

But in this case I knew Daina never would.

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Preparation

119

I think I was in bed sleeping late when it happened. After two years of sticking to a daily routine as part of attending College, once it was done I had naturally delved into the pleasure of sleeping late during my otherwise unstructured days. The phone rang, and I had learned from past experience not to answer the moment I awoke but to first shake myself and make sure my voice was clear before I responded by the next or subsequent ring. It was a representative of Rocky Mountain Telecom and they were wondering if I'd be available and interested in a job interview. I WAS.

Date and time set, I was given the instructions of what to do when I arrived at the complex and then the call was done. But I was just beginning to debate what I should wear for the appointment. Given my years of experience not getting jobs through job interviews my mind went to the only time it had worked. In all of my previous occasions, I had dutifully 'dressed-up' for the interviews in shirt and tie, but had found over those same years that doing so only made me look out of place and suspicious, as well as leaving me feeling like a cross-dresser while I engaged in the job interview itself. The one time I had successfully gotten a job from an interview was for a supermarket where I was so uninterested in having a job there, I arrived for the interview in my jeans and tee. Given that I badly wanted a job at Rocky Mountain Telecom, I decided to go with what worked in the past and not with conventional wisdom.

Spending some time in front of the mirror as I picked out which color of my cut-off sleeved sweat shirts I should pick, I settled on the medium blue one but realized I didn't know what to do with my hands. As I had been using a canvas backpack to carry my college books in school, it occurred to me to add that to my ensemble and pop some unnecessary items into it just to give it a little weight and make it look natural. My long hair I would again have in a tail at the nape of my neck and all & all I was going to show up at the job interview looking as if I was doing so between college classes. I thought that would work, even though I had been done with College for a few months by this time.

Remembering that the closest bus stop to RMT had been over a mile away, rather than make that walk and also be at the mercy of late buses and mechanical breakdowns, I told Daina of the news and asked if I could borrow her car. She was thrilled, but immediately panicked when I told her of what I was going to wear for the interview; she felt I should of course be wearing a suit & tie, otherwise in her eyes I'd be throwing this job opportunity away. I assured her I knew what I was doing and she agreed to let me borrow her car for the day.

Dropping her off at the school for her work day, I then got to spend a few antsy hours at my apartment killing time until I was to hop in the car and drive to the RMT complex. As I turned onto the final road to get me there, the road ended at the complex itself and when I pulled closer I discovered that, in the two years since I had last been there, they had finished building four more wings to the complex and were in the processes of laying the foundation for the final wing. I tried not to stare at the behemoth the complex had become and concentrated on pulling around the parking lot and arriving at the 'visitor' parking slots. Parked, I took my last chance to steel my nerves, then got out of the car and walked across the round-about and into the new lobby entrance. Unlike the original entrance of the building which was somewhat cramped, they had made this new entrance large and over spacious with windows all around. I walked to the security desk and signed my name at the visitor log and told them who I was supposed to see. One guard called him on the phone while another gave me my temporary badge.

After a few minutes 'Rich Jones' came down the long flight of steps beyond the security desk and ushered me in. When he saw me a smile spread across his face, I believed from noticing I wasn't dressed like the rest of the interviewees he must have been going through during the day. He then lead me up the first flight of stairs, technically it would have qualified as two flights given the number of steps, and then we were in the cavernous 'spline' area that joined the original IBM building to the right with the many new wings attached to it on the left. In this long walking area was a giant conference room before the two entrances to the new cafeteria on either side of it. Then there was the second flight of stairs, again qualifying as two separate flights in length. We were now to the rear lobby of the building and its associated security desk whereupon there were the doors to one of the old IBM building wings and the multiple, three floored entrance for two of the new wings and the one yet to be completed. We went up a third flight of stairs, though this time not giant sized, and we had reached Rich's floor. If not for my regained health I never would have been able to have made it up all of these stairs in one go without a rest and I wondered if Rich, himself, was using this journey to assess my physical well being if he should hire me.

We entered upon a floor of hundreds of office cubicles and thankfully his was just a row or two in. Being a manager, his cubicle was half again larger than the typical space and he had me settle down as he poked his head over the edge divider and asked an underling in the next cubicle to join us. Along the grand walk Rich had engaged me in a little chit-chat about if I had ever been to the complex before, and the fact that, given the way I was dressed, I had clearly just come from College. To avoid stammering I kept my answers brief so I didn't have to reveal my stutter to him until this interview was about to commence. Fortunately, the long walk through the immense space to this point had so engulfed my mind, I didn't stutter much at all during the interview.

I then discovered this was a job interview for an IBM mainframe based job. Given my over a decade of experience with personal computers and some minicomputers, I didn't have a clue about mainframes. Still, I had taken some mainframe related computer language courses in College so when it came to the technical portion of the interview I thought I'd do fine... Only to discover with my wrong answers that the COBOL programming language had undergone a major revision since I had learned it ten years earlier. Admitting that I had no mainframe experience nor had stayed afresh of programming language changes, Rich asked me what experience I did have? I then noted my time working with the X400 messaging group two years earlier using Digital VAX machines and the 'C' programming language. He asked me the most elementary question about the 'C' program language: ''If you don't define the return value of a function what type of return value do you get?''

I didn't need to ponder this long and answered, ''An Integer.'' He seemed happy with that answer and the interview was soon over and it was left to the underling to escort me all the flights of stairs back to the front entrance of the building. Along the way was when I had the chance to ask him when the COBOL language had changed and shared a little more chit-chat about the job needs they had and how I lacked experience in them. Turning in my temporary badge and signing-out, I left the building feeling like I had blown the interview and decided that I should brush up on the programming languages I had learned in the nineteen eighties to discover how many of them had since changed. Picking up Daina at her job, we went out to eat and I told her how it had gone. She consoled me that I was sure to get another job interview sometime soon.

The following week, I was puttering around my apartment when the phone rang. It was Rich from RMT and he asked for someone whose name I didn't know. I was about to tell him he had the wrong number but, having recognized his voice, I told him who I was instead. After a moment's confusion, he explained that he had been distracted when dialing the number and lost track of who he was calling. But since he had me on the phone, he told me that I had a job and asked if I could start by the end of October. I agreed, and that was that.

I would start out at Rocky Mountain Telecom at twice the annual income I had ever made in my life, about the same level my father had reached after decades of managing the the ski area. In another eight years I'd be making two and a half times that and worked my way up from an entry level position to Senior Software Engineer at times in charge of some of the most critical systems the company had.

Apparently, while I had been barred from the higher tier educational path in High School and all of my friends who had entered it to one day become 'Engineers' only to wash out by College, it was I who reached that professional marker. Go figure.

And with this 'dream job' I knew I would live a long and happy life!^*

Yeah, right.

(^* It's a whole other book...)

Notifying The Family

118

After three months of my resumes being out and no jobs being offered, I decided I needed to move on with my personal life. Given the success of the hormone treatments I had been having during the past two years, I decided that the best long term decision for me would be to 'normalize' my sex as female. As part of this decision, Samuel recommended I let my family members know and thus have a good measure of which ones would be supportive and which ones wouldn't be. Ultimately I had no problem with this as, since I hadn't felt a high level of support from my family over the decades, I really wasn't worried if the intermittent contact I had with them was the only victim. Of my family members, I assumed that my father and mother would cut contact with me for sure, but I saw that more as a relief than a problem, so it was a question of which of my siblings might cut contact with me, themselves.

Daina didn't like the idea at all and felt I should wait until I found a new job and saved money for a few years and then decide how to lead my personal life. As jobs weren't immediately apparent, I didn't agree with her.

I spent a week crafting a common letter for all my immediate family members. I noted my years of having 'an issue', lightly giving some of the physical details but avoiding anything that would cause someone to abruptly stop reading, and then ended the letter with my decision to live the rest of my life as female. I then took this base letter and made five variations for each member with a touch of personalization. I printed and reread them just to be sure and then added my signature to each and mailed them off by the end of September, Nineteen Ninety-Four.

As no surprise my father again disowned me, having my eldest brother call me to let me know. For his part though, my eldest brother didn't have a problem with it. My sister didn't have a problem with it either, though surprisingly my not as older brother wrote back a letter saying he felt it was a 'betrayal'. His point was that, if mother had told me to keep it a secret for all of these years, I should have continued with that. Then he noted, upon reflection and after discussing it with my eldest brother, he had decided to 'forgive me' and accept my decision.

To my shock, my mother's reaction was the most extreme: She was fully supportive.

At the time I was thrown for a loop by this as I had been planning on not having to hear from her again. But in retrospect, after being the only family member to care for her when she had fractured her pelvis, she had concluded that she had to stay on my good side and keep me available in her life in case anything else happened where she would need help. That's my interpretation of her response. But what she did was want to know the details and started to send me frequent holiday cards in the vein of 'To My Darling Daughter, --'. When a friend later saw these, he thought she was being sarcastic with the cards, but I thought she was just over compensating for all the years since she had told me to keep my 'situation' a secret.

With notifying family members out of the way, I decided to verbally notify my friends in town. Of those friends, the ones I was most fearful of losing would be the one's who had supported the anti-Gay rights 'Amendment 2' in Colorado. It turned out I didn't have to worry. All of my friends who were still in contact with me had chosen to know me given my 'personality, talents, and interests', not based on my gender. So for them they just saw this as another interesting facet of the person that was me. The one friend I feared losing the most was my long time friend in Colorado, Jeff, as a few years earlier a member of the Denver science fiction club had come out as a transsexual and Jeff soon stopped attending their meetings with her there. But when I brought it up to him, he noted that it wasn't the club member coming out as a transsexual that had lead him to leave the club, but that she had then spent the rest of her time at the subsequent club meetings as an ardent feminist, taking the club off of its focus of science fiction & fantasy interests. So Jeff's only concern was if I was going to be undergoing a 'change in personality' as well as legal sex. I assured him I wasn't. I was just going to be the same person with a different letter on my driver's license. That was fine with him.

Given that I had been out of contact with my high school friends for years, I decided not to bother tell them as I felt it would only end up as grist for High School Reunions to take place years later. Otherwise, I didn't see the point.

When I reported to Samuel of the news of notifying my family and friends and how it had gone, he was pleased and, in fact, very surprised that there hadn't been any fall out with anyone I knew and cared about. I agreed and even joked wistfully that, yes, even my mother hadn't cut contact with me!

As time went on, I did lose contact with some of these Colorado friends, but it was due to the normal drift of life interests and nothing to do with my legal change of gender. Of my Colorado friends, there was only one who I lost: Daina.

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