I feel like my coming out (at home) has hit a hitch, and I guess I'm trying to find some perspective.
I told my mother first, some time after speaking with my GP and a day before before attending an LGBT meeting with friends. I'd felt a need to tell her all that week, and I wanted her to know where I was going as I was, frankly, excited. My sister was told soon after but my Dad took longer, as the appropriate moment never seemed to come. He's a conservative sort, not likely to share many emotions other than humour or disgust. I blurted it out to him in the middle of a breakdown, which was not the smartest of things (I was coaxed into it). It didn't seem to register for him.
Things have been quiet since then. With my intended transition scuppered through fear and a lack of money, and the NHS still keeping me on a waiting list, there hadn't been much to speak of, and I fear my parents may have dismissed this as an odd phase. So after my Mum and I spoke again on the topic, and I found a healthy jolt of momentum to get things moving for my own good, I decided to wear different clothes and continue coming out that way.
I've done it before, having donned a lovely cardigan during cooler months, but this was an androgynous thing at best. A skirt seems to have prompted a far less accepting response, and this is only the first thing I've done to suggest "hey, I'm transitioning". Needless to say, my quite modest skirt, paired with an ordinary but matching t-shirt ('cos sadly I've not the baldest of bodies), has been worn many times in the solitude of my bedroom.
There's a moment in Transamerica when Bree's mother yanks her into the house, squealing "get in before the neighbours see you!" I feel like I'm hitting that hypothetical sort of a situation, as my mother expressed her discomfort by saying "we sometimes have people over". We really don't that often, and I just managed to hold back my retorts because oddly enough, somebody ringing the doorbell while I'm dressed en femme sits among my greatest fears.
I do not know how else to include my parents in this. I should say that I think my sister will be fine - she already drops hints about straightening hair and which conditioners I might use, and we've shared an appreciation for fashion magazines in the past. But this is the first, tentative step I've taken towards trying to be myself at home and I've been figuratively locked up in my room again by what's been said. Is his the sort of thing which just takes dogged persistence, or a patient (and deeply frustrated) approach?
