Living with my birth family was like living in an emotionally active earthquake zone. There was always some drama with Budweiser, Johnnie Walker, and Jack Daniels as a supporting cast. I coped by going to school every day and getting an education so that I could support myself when I graduated from high school. Thank God for Sputnik and the National Defense Student Loans I was able to escape to college. We were a poor family with my mom and stepdad not graduating from high school. My dad did because he was on the orphan train, but he died when I was 13. I hid my female self and was as butch as I could possibly be, not having a male ego. I was lucky I had a brain because I had little athletic ability, but I tried because it kept me out of the house after school. I struggled my way through college, finally graduating despite my lack of intellectual stimulation at home. I learned to think because of my intellectual New England Congregational Pastor and his son who was my best friend in high school. This all took place in the 1950s and 1950s in small towns in the Dakotas. When I left home for college, I was too broke, and not inspired to go home except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is how I dealt with my family the rest of my life, hoping life would be better, but it never was. My parents were pushing up daisies and I was over a thousand miles from the rest of my family including my own children and ex when I finally dealt with the fact that I was a transexual grandma and started living 24/7/365 as my bitch lady self. I am out via the internet to everyone, and I am surviving off of Social Security from the days I was a butch elementary and middle school teacher. I lost a lot of years being myself and my male hormones have recked havoc with my body, and there are lots of people who can out me if I try to go stealth, I just live with the fact that I am a transexual grandma, and not just a grandma. I have hopes of being able in the near future being able to take hormones and maybe have surgery at maybe 68 or 69 years old if health permits, because Medicare no longer blocks insurance companies from transitioning. I will have to see what my insurance company does, because now it will not cover transitioning services. They have not sent out a rider changing this policy, though Medicare has changed it. I walk through life as if it's a Dakota blizzard. I bundle up emotionally, put my head into the wind and walk to my destination as if my life depends upon it. I have learned that most people spend their lives looking out for themselves, being who and what they want to be, and us older sister types have to look after ourselves first, so we can take care of others.
I think you should look after yourself, and become an independent person, keeping contact with your family, showing up for what family gatherings, you can emotionally stand. I tried to stay at my folks place when I visited because we didn't have much money, and small towns in the Dakotas don't have many public places to stay in town. This was probably a mistake for me, because it was hard on my family. But eventually my marriage fell apart, and I began to realize that many of the years I tried to live as butch were just a waste of time, because if my ex would have refused to live with me as my female self, then the end of the marriage would have made more sense, and it would have been easier for me to deal with it emotionally.
I include most of these details to fill in how I dealt with my transitioning and my family because they present some context for how I dealt. There are no right or wrong decisions. There are decisions that are more emotionally healthy, but living with a family which is like an active emotional earthquake zone, has its emotional losses however you deal with it. If you distance yourself too much like I did, then you never really know your nieces and nephews, and their kids. You never really know your kid's spouses and your grand kids. I am not isolated but I have a cis partner with an ever redefined relationship, our eleven year old son, and her 17 year old and 24 year old daughters. I am out 24/7/365 as a female, but fight there identifying me as a male that dresses and presents as a woman. We buy dresses and make up together and go to the ladies room together and women's fitting room together, so go figure. Life is what it is.
But dealing with your family will be painful and not dealing with your family will be painful. Building up an emotional wall between you and your family will also have an emotional price because it will block off the pain and the loss which will remain hidden inside of you waiting to break out if ever the wall becomes structurally defective and starts to break down. You have to find your own healthy pathway to healing yourself emotionally, without becoming self-destructive or harmful to others. You have to find your own pathway through this dilemma with the help of your own understanding of a merciful, loving, forgiving, and kind God.
