Rediscovering Pema

[Pema]

@davina61, @Northern Star Girl, @tgirlamg, @Dances With Trees, thank you all. You're all so kind and generous.

Davina, I'm glad to know that others have had such supportive mothers. Sometimes I feel bad that I am so fortunate while others have little or no support from their families.

Danielle, you're absolutely right. I could never have imagined it would go this well, let alone anything "better."

Ashley, onward is the only way. Next step!

Anni, as long as they're tears of joy, I'm happy to bring them. My mother really is extraordinary, as is my wife. I can claim credit for choosing my wife, but I didn't choose my mother; that was sheer luck. For myself, I feel quite ordinary - and I'm happy with that.

My mom has continued to blow us away today. Yes, she slips more often than not and calls me by my old name and "he," but she corrects herself frequently and even gets it right the first time occasionally. She's fully on-board.

There was a discussion about clothing at dinner tonight and then some quick internet research by my wife and mother. It culminated in Mom bringing out a pair of her pants and suggesting I try them on. They fit me perfectly and really looked quite good on me. My wife kept saying, "This is really unbelievable." It truly was.

I haven't mentioned it here before, but this is the very week that, in 2004, my mother was here at my home because I had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and would be having surgery on July 12. During that surgery, my heart stopped, and they had to restart it. So many aspects of my life seem so absolutely surreal sometimes that I have often wondered: Is this real? Am I in a coma? Did I die? And I have to tell you, all of this is so... hard to fathom that I still have to ask those questions.

As ever, thank you for being part of this wild journey. What a gift.

[davina61]

My mum is 89, she does about an hour of gardening every morning. Knits blankets for premature babies and reads a lot, she called in my workshop the other day to see how I was doing (still drives!) as she went to the church to get her local newsletter. Yes she dead names me and says he sometimes . I will meet her and my aunty for food shopping later, I help reach stuff from top shelf and she sometimes gets discount from my phone/store app .

[Pema]

I love that, Davina. It sounds like she is living a wonderful life and that you and she remain very close. I don't know what more we could want from a relationship with our mothers.

[Dances With Trees]

Anni, as long as they're tears of joy

'Joy' is close, Pema, but more like tears of relief or the tears I shed when I dropped my daughter off for the first time at daycare. Few relationships are more complicated than the one I have with my mother and I would have never been able to say to her the things you said to your mother. Never. I'm not envious. As much as I loved my mother, the world is a better place because of mothers like yours. Hey, if you are in a coma, can you transmogrify me into a 25-year-old Linda Ronstadt?

[Pema]

Hi, friends. I'm sorry to be missing out on the activities here, but I'm absorbing as much as I can of the time I have with my mother here until Monday. It continues to be a really wonderful visit - with lots of hugs, Annika.

I think we overloaded her Thursday night, and she let us know that "her mind was full" for the night. We appreciated her candor. I enjoy sitting on the patio with her and listening to her talk about her childhood and young adulthood, her family of origin and the roles they were expected to play, how that evolved for her throughout her life, how she felt about it all... I feel like these are the experiences of being human that I wish more of us would share, because it connects us in a deep way that few other things do. Sharing that with a parent is even more special. So I treasure these moments.

And I love all of you for being who you are and for sharing yourselves as you do.

[davina61]

Highs and lows you just have to take life as it comes just never let it get you down. XXX

[Lori Dee]

I understand. Here we have community gardens where there's a shared space for people to plant a raised bed of their own. I've never known how one gets such a plot for themselves. I've seen some very impressive gardens in them, though.

We set one up at my apartment building this Spring. It took a year for the management company to approve it, but we got it done. We used raised wooden bed boxes because some of our residents are in wheelchairs.

[Pema]

We just returned home after dropping off my mother at some of her friends' house. She'll fly home on Wednesday.

Her week-long visit was phenomenal. She was phenomenal. By the end, she was getting pretty good at calling me "Pema" and "she." I'm sure she'll lose some of that when we don't see or talk to each other every day.

I'm still not sure why she felt it necessary to email the rest of the (very small) family and a few friends to tell them the day after I told her, but so be it. The responses were all positive, some shockingly so.

So, something whose anticipation generated quite a bit of stress ended up being extremely affirming.

It's all a bit overwhelming, and I look forward to going back to my simple life of just being me with my wife.

Thank you all for being the incredible people that you are.

[tgirlamg]

Pema!

Congrats Sister!... These things often go far far better than the fear generated visions of how they will unfold we conjure up and cling to for so long... I'm with you on the simple life! That's the way to live!  Enjoy each day and give your wife an extra hug!

Onward!

Ashley 💕

[Dances With Trees]

Ashley said things so beautifully! What an amazing week, Pema! All of us celebrate with you.

[Pema]

Thank you, Ashley and Annika. It really was an amazing week, truly unlike any other.

Today was my first session with the gender therapist. It went well, mostly focusing on background, especially "formative relationships" in my life. I did appreciate her approach and her style. I have another appointment in two weeks. A big part of me feels not so much impatient but very eager to press forward with this. I could easily do this daily or even two hours at a time. But I can also do it every two weeks.

I really made an effort to stick to salient points and then stop to let her ask follow-up questions to try to hone in on what she felt was important. It would be easy just to ramble on, but I absolutely want to leverage her experience and knowledge to do this efficiently and effectively. She responded to those pauses in a way that left me feeling pretty good about her ability to facilitate my getting to where I want to go.

Tomorrow: Round 3 of laser beard removal. Honestly, I'm not sure any more will be of value. Most of what remains is white, and the few dark whiskers can probably be done with electrolysis along with the white ones.

As Ashley says, onward!

[Pema]

[Pema]

Round 3 of Beard-B-Gone went well today. The technician was impressed by the losses since last month. She cranked up the power a bit more, and she paid attention to my requests to be sure to target specific areas that I think she'd slighted during the first two.

I felt very little discomfort over 90% of the area this time - indicating that there were few remaining dark whiskers. The majority were in the goatee area (where the most nerve endings are!), including the corners of the mouth. When I got home, I was surprised to see that many were already popping out in that area.

She said next month we'd assess whether another round is even warranted. It's possible that there will be so few remaining that electrolysis will be more efficient.

[Sephirah]

I just wanted to stop by to say thank you, honey.

It takes a special kind of person to support other people while going through the same thing. I've been keeping an eye on a lot of things and... you are kind of special, Pema. What you do is not something common to the world. I just wanted to thank you for drawing on yourself to help other people dealing with the same thing. You are a blessing to the site, and the people who frequent it.

<3

[Pema]

Well, thank you, Lauren. I don't think of myself as being particularly special. I just figure we're all out here trying to understand what it means to be "real," and that can be a tightrope walk, so we might as well help each other out when we're able. And I think you understand as well as anyone that our hearts grow stronger from giving love to others.

In other words, I've learned a lot from you and others here. I intend to try to help pay it forward.

[Sephirah]

I don't think of myself as being particularly special.

Mhm. Like someone saying "Well I don't think I'm beautiful"... It is all in the eye of the beholder, sweetie. You don't have to see something within yourself in order that other people see it within you. I can probably list a whole litany of people here for whom that is true. But I don't want to make them blush.

You are special, Pema. So... thank you. You make a bigger difference here than you probably think. <3

[Pema]

Today was my second session with the gender therapist. I was quite pleased with how it went. She had either retained or studied up on what I'd said in the first session, so I didn't need to repeat or remind her of things. She started right in with the next set of questions, and we moved through them at what felt like a healthy pace, including follow-up questions from her.

The control freak in me would like to have a syllabus (or better yet a flow chart) for her approach, but I felt very good today about how things are going overall. I actually enjoy this process. Maybe that proves I'm...unusual.

I scheduled another session for next week and another for three weeks out. Summer scheduling is complicated.

[Lori Dee]

The control freak in me would like to have a syllabus (or better yet a flow chart) for her approach,

I have had clients who were the same way. I would give them a "homework" assignment of things I wanted them to think about before our next session. Although they did think about it, it quickly became apparent that they had given it some thought, then put it away. In our next session, I would have to ask an unrelated question out of the blue to snap them out of the monologue they had memorized. When they were no longer thinking about the assignment, we could get back to therapy and discussing things from the heart and not from the head, if that makes sense.

Keep it spontaneous. An unrehearsed discussion is more honest and authentic. But if you have things that you want to discuss, by all means, make a list and bring it with you.

I am truly happy things are going well for you. They will just keep getting better.

 

[tgirlamg]

Today was my second session with the gender therapist. I was quite pleased with how it went. She had either retained or studied up on what I'd said in the first session, so I didn't need to repeat or remind her of things. She started right in with the next set of questions, and we moved through them at what felt like a healthy pace, including follow-up questions from her.

The control freak in me would like to have a syllabus (or better yet a flow chart) for her approach, but I felt very good today about how things are going overall. I actually enjoy this process. Maybe that proves I'm...unusual.

I scheduled another session for next week and another for three weeks out. Summer scheduling is complicated.

That's Wonderful!... Glad you are finding enjoyment and value in the process sister!!!🤗

Onward!

A💕

[Pema]

Thank you, Lori and Ashley.

Lori, it's not that I want to rehearse for what's coming; it's that I want to know that she has a plan and what it is. I'm very much a "systems" person, so I want to know what the strategy is for getting from here to there. Because I'm a control freak, I don't often trust that someone else has given it the thought necessary (because that's my experience more often than not). So this is my exercise in letting go. But it does cost me quite a bit of money, so I still feel like it should be a bit clearer than, "Let's see what she has for me today."

I learned in my first year of teaching that preparing a script for what I'd say in class was a waste of time. All it took was a student asking a question, and we were in uncharted territory - which was almost always much better than me delivering a monologue. So I'd make an outline of the topics I wanted to cover and the order of them, and I'd try to keep the conversation on that track. I think of this similarly. But I'd still like to see the outline. I always shared my plan with my students so that they had a kind of roadmap of where we/they were in the journey and so that they had more of active role in their learning.

But again... I'm a control freak, and one who really, really values clarity in communication.