my paper for my writing class

Well, here is a copy of my paper for my writing class. The assignment was to write a descriptive essay about "home," which I realized to most people means the place you grew up. It got me thinking about the fact that I feel strange referring to the place where I grew up as "home" for a number of reasons. I also became panicky about the assignment initially because I don't really have a lot of heavily detailed memories about my growing up. What surprised me was that some of those memories improved while I was working on this assignment. That part wasn't always fun. Anyway, here it is. I turn it in tomorrow.


Home Like No Place

The specific details of my childhood are scarce. I don't have vivid memories of birthdays, schoolroom teachers, or childhood friends. I can't describe the scent of the home I was raised in, but I would wager that I'd be able to recognize it instantly. I can tell you that I am from Topeka, Kansas, that I grew up on Gray Street in a small yellow house with stucco exterior walls, that I lived with my mom and dad, that I was an only child and spent most of my childhood alone and lonely, and that my parent's child-rearing philosophies consisted of a blend of traditional Mexican values deeply rooted in Catholicism, expectation, and guilt. My tangible, detailed memories however are few and far between. My memories are like that word that's on the tip of your tongue, a word that you know is somewhere in your memory bank but you are continually denied access. They are two dimensional and aqueous and I long for the texture of my childhood but the longer I am away from that place, the more those memories fade until they no longer even seem like mine.
I'm unsure if my “home” is the town where I grew up in Kansas, the town where I felt so alienated for most of my childhood or if my home is here, in Portland, the place where I've been for almost ten years, the place where my chosen family is, where I feel happier than I've ever been. “Home” is defined as 1)a place of residence, refuge, or retreat, 2)an environment offering security or happiness, and/or 3)your place of origin. Portland satisfies two out of three of these definitions but Kansas will always be my place of origin. I've not been “allowed” back to Kansas for almost ten years, so when I hear my friends talk about “going home for the holidays,” the concept feels foreign. I get a little jealous about it. I want to see Kansas through my adult eyes, I want to be able to feel the Kansas air fill my lungs and touch the dirt my child hands touched. I want to hang clothes on the clothesline with my mother once again, letting the sunshine warm them and coax out the scent of synthetic lemon from the cheap detergent she uses. I want to sit in the bed of my dad's pickup truck, drinking sun tea as sweet as the sound of the country music coming off the radio and wave at neighbors as they drive past. They will return my greeting with a wave of their hand and occasionally, a short honk of their horn. I want to be able to build a new relationship with this place, one based on love and appreciation for what and who inhabits the space rather than a resentment and a longing to leave.
Gender differences and expectations were brought to my attention when I was four years old. Until then, it was perfectly acceptable, or at least tolerated, that I would rough and tumble with the boys outside, run around with my shirt off, come home with a dirty face and grass stained hands, and insist on a pair of overalls “like Daddy's” when we went to Sears. Suddenly, overnight it seemed, these behaviors went from “cute” to threatening and had to be stopped before it was “too late,” as my aunties warned my mother. She heeded their warnings and became vigilant about forcing me to wear skirts and dresses despite all my protests and never allowing me to cut off my long, black, curly hair that I despised.
I never quite knew where I fit in growing up, not with my family, not with other kids at school, not even in my own body. Spanish was my first language and was stolen from me by parents as a result of their determination to assimilate me into a midwest American culture. There were several other Mexican families in our town, many of whom came to work in the factories or the for the railroad company. My parents became aware of the racist treatment of Mexican kids who primarily spoke Spanish or spoke fractured English with heavy accents. They didn't want this to happen to me so at age two, they refused to let me speak Spanish and would only allow me to speak English. This alienated me from the other Mexican kids who would accuse me of “trying to be white” while the white kids in school would continue to greet me with racial slurs. Meanwhile, at home, my parents continued their crusade to cement me into the role of the dutiful girl-child of their dreams.
I became a quiet, introverted child, not because it was how little girls were expected to act, but because it seemed that if I was quiet and kept to myself, I was more likely to be left alone. I began my affair with books and reading on my first expedition to the library with my first grade class. I'd been reading since I was two but had never seen so many books in one place and was excited that I was granted access to “grown up books,” books without pictures, books with chapters. I picked “Ramona the Pest” for my first library book even though the librarian looked at me skeptically, suggesting that it was probably too hard for me and that I might have better luck with “The Cat in the Hat.” I was insistent and she finally relented. I finally found a world I could escape to, a world were I could be a boy or a girl or neither or both, a world where I could be dark and where I could be fat. A world where I could just be. I started thinking of Topeka as a temporary place of habitation, beginning to create distance even before I left, mirroring the distance I already felt from my family, a distance that began when I was four, a distance that increased over the years, especially with my father.
When I was very young, I wanted to be just like my father, or so I thought. I would try to convince him to take me fishing or let me work on the car with him on Saturday mornings, but he refused, constantly pushing me away, pushing me to participate in activities with my mother, activities that I had no interest in as a kid because the mostly consisted of staying inside and not getting dirty. As time went on, I started seeing my father differently. I began noticing how demeaning he was to my mother, constantly putting her down for being overweight and undereducated, even though he never attended school. I heard the rumors in our town about his affairs, rumors that, many years later, proved to be true. At twelve, I knew for sure there was something different about me, that maybe I was gay or something, knew that my future included more than what this small town could offer and that I had to leave as soon as possible.
Despite feelings of alienation, sadness, and longing that dominated my childhood, there are things about that midwestern town that I miss, things that I didn't appreciate while I was there. The longing to leave blinded me to the beauty that could be found there, the wild and wonder that was at my fingertips the entire time but the narrowmindedness that prevailed in my own front yard left me constantly searching for a way out. Still, maybe there is some truth to that saying about absence making the heart grow fonder, as I long to sit on the porch of my parent's house at the end of a long, hot summer day and witness the kind of thunderstorm that is so common there, the kind with large raindrops that are comforting despite the flash of lightening cutting across open skies, skies that have changed from blue to gray to purple, skies that rumble and pulsate with the bellow of thunder and the threat of a tornado always on the horizon. I would gaze across the flat, open land, squinting at the approaching storm practically hoping to spot a funnel cloud in the distance. These storms were exciting and dangerous and I welcomed them because they broke up the monotony and the water falling from the sky brought a temporary respite from the humidity of those sweltering summer days. I truly was an unhappy child and adolescent, so am I simply romanticizing parts of my Kansas upbringing? Am I trying too hard to scrounge up memories as a way to maintain my connection with my past, with my roots? Or have I finally had enough time and distance that I can now recognize the good things that can occur, even in the most oppressive of environments?
My most recent memory of being in Topeka is almost a decade old. At the end of a fifty-two hour bus trip, the Greyhound I was riding pulled off of I-70 and onto the run down streets of downtown Topeka. I couldn't wait to get off of that bus and clear my nostrils of stale french fries and cheap convenience store coffee that boarded in the clenched hands of anonymous passengers at various rest stops along the way. At that point, I hadn't been back in a couple of years and the town looked smaller, more dilapidated, grayer, than I remembered. It was a cloudy mid-September day and fall had already settled in Portland, but Topeka was still muggy and hot. Stifling. As the bus pulled into the station a familiar sense of strangulation began to settle in and I took a few deep breaths to avoid passing out from a panic attack. It was the last time I would see my parents, only they didn't know this. In my heart, I did.
The bus had arrived earlier than scheduled and my parents were not yet there to pick me up. I sat on the stone staircase outside the station to roll a cigarette and wait. It was somewhat jarring to be back in this place, the place of my birth and childhood, but the place I never quite felt was home. As I waited, the clouds rolled east, revealing the sun that had been hiding but somehow, the grayness lingered. Maybe I was just projecting.
My parents pulled up in my mom's burgundy minivan. I took a deep breath and stood up as they got out. They, like the town, looked smaller and more grey than I remembered. Despite the less than ideal relationship we had, I was happy to see them. We drove down familiar streets past unfamiliar faces and boarded up buildings. My mom told me that Topeka was growing on the west side of town and that our side, the east side where the poor people and the small number of non-white people lived, had been forgotten, like the rest of the town hoped we'd eventually just disappear altogether.
Turning into the driveway of my parents house, the house where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, it looked the same as the day I left only now I was seeing it through unfamiliar eyes. The visit was surreal, knowing that once I told my parents that I identified as transgender and was going to start a physical transition, I would no longer be welcome back. I wish I had paid more attention to the little details during this trip, had taken more pictures of the places that were comforting to me as a kid like my aunt Teresa's farm or my great-grandpa's garden filled with ripe tomatoes and grape vines that wound around the arboretum I used to sit under and read as he'd sing songs in Spanish and prune the wayward vines. I wish I had jumped into the creek near our house once more, hiding below the surface as long as my lungs would allow, like I did when I was a kid and wanted to get away, even for only thirty seconds. I wish I had captured the smell of my mom's kitchen in a mason jar so I could unscrew the lid and let just enough leak out to remind me of the hours I spent cooking with her, an activity I learned to love. It became a means of temporary escape from my dad's judgmental comments and cold shoulder because other than devouring the meal my mom prepared, it was his manly duty to stay far away from the kitchen while a meal was a work in progress.
On my last evening there, I biked up the steep hill to the top of Burnett's Mound, a bluff that overlooked the small town of Topeka. It was here that I had spent endless hours as a teenager, lost in a book or scribbling wistful wishes of escape. I was grateful that no one was up there and furious at the crushed cans of Miller Lite that were desecrating the hill, scattered about the dusty trail that led to the top. I dropped my bike at the end of the trail and tried to catch my breath. The bike ride up the steep hill left me winded and I realized that there was a space of two years and many cigarettes between this ride and the last time I had pedaled the trail. Sitting with my back against the tall oak that dominated the bluff, the bark felt familiar and calming, like there were invisible impressions that had been made over the years and my return reminded me that they would always be there. The crickets in the grasses behind me chirped a familiar cadence as the season's last lightening bugs danced in response and I gazed down at the small city below me and wondered if this would indeed be the last time. I knew that when I got back to Portland and started taking hormones, my body would begin to change, making it impossible to keep my transgender identity from my parents any longer. I'd already started constructing the letter that I would end up sending them a the following February, a letter telling them what the previous two years of my life had really been about, a letter explaining to them that this had been a long time coming, a letter that they would never answer. It would be my last communication with them.
Still on the bluff, embraced by the old tree and solitude, I didn't realize I was crying until I felt the tears drip off my face and cascade over my hands which were folded in my lap. At first I thought it was raining and that I would get to witness one more of my beloved thunderstorms, but this was a quiet storm. This was one produced by my heart and the reality of goodbye. I rubbed my soaked hands over my face letting the salty tears cleanse me. I was ready to go home.