When my father planned this vacation, he announced it by saying that, with the inclusion of my sister Kathy, he would "finally have taken all my children to Germany." In his mind, I am sure that is true. In the real world, though...not so much. There is one of his children whom he has not taken and will never take. There is one of his children with whom he severed ties for years and, though he pretends nothing is wrong when he sees her these days, it is one of the facades he has been so good at keeping up since the days when he was having an affair with a neighbor woman while we all went about our family business, oblivious. There is one of his children he likes to pretend no longer exists, no longer matters.
Because that child is transsexual.
Before I came out to my father, we had a good relationship. Despite the fact that he had broken my mother's heart, I thought it important to keep him in my children's lives, so we visited him in Florida every year. His vitriolic and hypocritical reaction to my revelation, though, made it clear that things were going to change.
"When you have children," he yelled at me in the parking lot next to his condo, "you put aside your own needs. I did not love your mother the last ten years of our marriage, but I had brought kids into the world and I needed to raise them."
Yeah, I wanted to say, you just walked down the street and got it on secretly with Mrs. ---. I don't exactly have that kind of option. I can't just be a woman when I feel like it. It doesn't work that way.
For years we did not speak. When we did, and since then, he made it a study to act as if nothing at all has changed, nothing at all is unusual, nothing at all ever happened between us. He also has never once acknowledged me as his daughter. My children? They do not know him; he has made no effort whatsoever to keep them in his life, and he wanted nothing to do with me. I think it is terribly sad: he is a living grandfather that they simply do not know.
And he is a living father that I no longer know.
The Facebook pictures keep flooding in: all of them sitting around a great table in a restaurant, enjoying a meal, walking down a quaint German street, enjoying each other's company once again as stories are formed that I will not be part of. I have not been part of family stories since I left for college, but I've only been excluded from them since I transitioned. I do not begrudge my sisters this experience: I hope they are enjoying themselves; it is indeed something to be enjoyed. But I feel more and more another thing that is terribly sad--horribly, awfully, frighteningly sad. I started feeling it years ago, but as time passes it becomes more inevitably true, more irretrievably horrendous to say. It is this:
I will not feel any pain or loss when this man dies. And I cannot even imagine attending his funeral; I could not stand to hear my siblings praise him. There is certainly considerable time until then, but the way things are going and have gone these last sixteen years, I doubt that anything will happen to change things.
Meanwhile, I'll settle for my brother's wedding for family memories. At least I'll be there for that. So will my father, who will be perfectly civil to me.
As if nothing at all is wrong.
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