Child of the Air

This afternoon, I finally wrote a poem in memory of my friend Caroline Mitter, who died last month.

"For Caroline"
by DW Rowlands
30 October 2019, in Catonsville, Maryland

"I love you." That's all there is to say.
        And now you aren't here to say it to.
        So all I can do is care at you.
        So all I can do is try to care like you.

I will remember the loyalty you showed me while you struggled,
        and do my best to always be there for my friends.
I will remember your anger at the injustice around you,
        and do my best to not to succumb to cynicism.
I will remember your sense of humor in the face of pain,
        and do my best to keep the darkness from claiming my mind.
I will remember the battles you fought to be allowed to fight,
        and do my best to stand up for others so fighting.
I will remember the value you saw in me,
        and do my best to be the person you believed I could.

I will remember you in a thousand ways, all at odds:
        a lover of people, and a lover of lonely lands;
        a tamer of dragons, and one who feared them;
        a wise and beautiful writer, and one too bone-tired to speak;
        an octopus, a gull, a cloud of bubbles dissolving in the sea...

All there is to do now is keep caring, even though the words are gone.
But one last time, I want to say it:
        "Cis-ter, comrade, friend: I love you."

CW: death, chronic illness, medical incompetence

My close friend and "cis-ter," Caroline Mitter, died yesterday morning. It wasn't really unexpected⁠—she had been chronically ill with mitochondrial disease for the past five years, and had had a number of cases of sepsis (what eventually killed her) due to infections in the IV central line she had been getting all her nutrition through for the several years since her gut stopped working⁠—but it still hit me very hard and I spent most of yesterday breaking down crying nearly continuously.


I first met Caroline in eleventh grade. We sat next to each other in AP Chemistry and I think we were lab partners for part of the school year. Unfortunately, when she left high school a year early to start college, we lost touch, since Facebook didn't yet exist. We did manage to reconnect a little over Facebook while I was in college and grad school, though I only had a Facebook account intermittently.

Caroline and I really first became close in early 2015, when I moved back to the DC area to write up my Master's thesis and rebuild my life after leaving MIT due to a mental breakdown. Ironically, this was also when she had to leave school out in California, due to her health breaking down.

Caroline had been in her fourth year as a student at the school of veterinary medicine at the University of California, Davis, the best in the country when her health problems⁠—newly diagnosed as mitochondrial disease at that point⁠—got bad enough that she had to go on a medical leave that ended up being permanent.

Despite the fact that, at the time, she was struggling with university administrators, doctors, and discovering just how serious her illness was, the first thing she said to me when we found each other on Facebook in February 2015 was to express sympathies and concern about the problems I was having with MIT: "It sounds like you're in a very tough spot. It makes me angry on your behalf." That was textbook Caroline: no matter how much her life was sucking, she was always worried about other people, and upset about injustices that were happening to them.

I wish I'd stayed in better touch with Caroline when she left high school back in 2009, but the four-and-a-half years of close internet friendship I had with her were amazing. She was incredibly supportive through my fight with MIT administration and my advisor to finally get my Master's. She gave me useful advice when I was trying to figure out how to find doctors in the DC area, and was an incredible ally about trans issues. And besides all that, she always had an amazing, absurd, and erudite sense of humor.

While I was relearning DC-area geography after moving back home, I mentioned to her realizing that most of the places I spent time while growing up were in the watershed of the Northeast Branch of the Anacostia, and she immediately informed me that "It's common for the indigenous range of a subspecies to correspond to such topographic features."

Like me, she had a deep love of geography and of place, even if we had very different sorts of places that we loved. While I've always been a bit of a city girl—I spent a lot of my childhood drawing maps of cities I invented, and I've been fascinated by public transit systems for a long time—Caroline, with her deep love of animals and the outdoors, preferred open, empty wilderness places.

Back in 2015, when we were catching each other up on our adventures since we'd fallen out of touch, she talked about all the parks and wild places in the California area she wanted to get to see.


Unfortunately, her illness ended up severely limiting her ability to travel at all, and particularly to places far from civilization, but when I saw her for the last time, this July, she told me she still occasionally made it out to an isolated spot on the coast north of San Francisco and that she hoped she'd be able to get to go there again.

On that last visit, we talked a lot about our travels. I told her about some of my crazy cross-country trips by bus and train, and all the cities I'd gone to, and she told me about the Badlands and the Black Hills and the Great Plains. She'd spent some of the summer before vet school in the Dakotas, volunteering with a group that provided veterinary services for the working horses on the Indian reservations out there. We both wished we'd managed to be close while her health was better: we could have had a wonderful drive across the country, with me showing her cities and her showing me the parks in between.

While we both knew that trip would never be possible, she did strongly encourage me to visit the Dakotas someday, and I promised her that I would do so. I'm going to try to travel there this summer if I can, though it's going to be hard to afford to do so, given how far away it is and the fact I'll still be an unemployed grad student. But, while I know I'll never be able to see nature the way she did, I want to get to see some of the places she thought were so amazing.

Another part of my life that I shared with Caroline was my poetry: she was one of my few friends who consistently read my poems, and there were a few of them that she really loved. One she loved was the first one I showed her. It was written while I was leaving MIT and struggling with mental illness:



More recently, she also told me she loved the last poem I sent her, late this July:



I could keep writing about Caroline all night, but I am not sure anyone would keep reading. (If you want more, one of her friends wrote a beautiful eulogy.) She was an amazingly smart, funny, and strong person, who meant a lot to me, who always supported me, and whom I aspire to be more like. Even while struggling against the disease that eventually claimed her life—and against the medical intransigence and incompetence that shortened it—she managed to train two amazing and adorable service dogs, Cricket and Raven. She provided an incredible amount of support for all her friends, and especially her fellow mitochondrial disease patients.

And well, the last thing she wrote to me, about a month ago, was "Oh dear. I'm sorry you're stressed, but you are NOT incompetent." I'll do my best to remember that.

A friend recently forwarded this Five Thirty-Eight article about the politics of two Cleveland suburbs, Parma and Shaker Heights, to me. I think he expected me to be interested in it from a political or urban history standpoint, but it actually hit me hard in a different, more personal way.  A lot of the article focuses on discussing Parma, a "white working class" suburb that bears a lot of resemblance to the Hamtramck, Michigan where my mom grew up, with the most pertinent difference being that Hamtramck is now largely African-American, Yemeni, and Bengali, while Parma has largely remained white. Like Hamtramck, Parma developed as a Polish Catholic ethnic enclave near a car factory and with a strong pro-union tradition.

The thing is that Parma, like "white working-class" and "white ethnic" communities in general, voted heavily for Donald Trump. And this wasn't a one-off fluke: it seems clear that it's the culmination of a few decades of responding to economic hardship and the collapse of unionized manufacturing jobs with xenophobia, racism, and a hatred of the welfare state because of a belief that it only benefits the "undeserving" poor.  The political shift of white ethnic communities like Parma to the right, and their support of Trump, are disturbing because of their implications for national and state politics. But they also make me personally uncomfortable because, on some level, I identify as a white ethnic, even though I'm (thankfully) not actually part of these communities.

That I'm a proud Polish-American is probably most evident to my friends from my cooking: I have a long history of inviting friends over for large, homecooked Polish dinners; I've made pierogi from scratch in thirteen states and one Canadian province; and my (Ashkenazi) ex-girlfriend used to rave about how she associated my apartment with safety and the smell of cabbage.  There are other components to my Polish-American identity, too, though. I make a point of reminding people of Marie Curie's maiden name and birthplace (Skłodowska and Warsaw, respectively). John Paul II, despite his conservative tendencies, will always sort of be "my" pope because he was, as my mom's family still thinks of him, "the Polish Pope." And, while I was never baptized and have certainly never been a Christian, Catholic ritual and iconography and theology still have a lot of emotional significance for me.

The Five Thirty-Eight article about Parma, Ohio was hardly the first evidence I'd seen of the Polish-American community having a problem with racism and fascism, but it was still a bit of a painful shock to see the African-American resident of Parma interviewed in the article say that she thinks twice about going into stores with Polish flags or ethnic emblems on them: "You're scared to because of the rejection of how people will act or treat you when you’re in there." After all, the sort of Polish groceries being discussed are places that make my feel happy—if also inadequate about the fact I don't speak Polish—right down to the portrait of Joe Biden¹ on the wall.

I suppose the "correct" response to these feelings of discomfort would be to find the time and energy to be an activist and try to push the Polish-American community to be more progressive and less racist. Except for one thing: I may think of myself as a Polish-American, or even as a white ethnic, but I'm really not part of these communities, and my pagan, trans, queer, graduate-educated self wouldn't be particularly welcome in them, even if I can pass as a cishet Catholic long enough to buy frozen pierogi, fresh keilbasa², and baked goods as a Polish grocery³.  This isn't just a matter of my being queer or an academic, either: while my mother grew up in a very traditionally Polish-American immigrant enclave, I only saw Hamtramck as a place we traveled a few times a year to see relatives and eat tasty food.

My dziadza (grandpa, pronounced "jah-dge") fit well into the Polish-American mold. His parents were both born in Poland, as were both his wife's parents. He left high school at sixteen to work in a car factory, was an early member of the UAW, got shipped to Europe to fight Nazis in Normandy, and ended up owning a small liquor-and-candy store he got from his father-in-law. He lived in the Polish enclave of Hamtramck his whole life, was pro-union but complained that it was too easy to go on welfare these days, and was a proud member of his local Polish Catholic parish until he died and was buried in Detroit's Catholic cemetery. I'd like to believe he would have seen through Trump's fascism if he was still alive—he died in 2002—but I can't help worrying that he'd be on the wrong side today.  After all, the statistics aren't in his favor.

None of Dziadza's six kids really followed in his footsteps, though. He made sure they all got bachelor's degrees, and all of them except my mother ended up with Master's degrees. For the most part, they ended up being teachers and librarians, though one black sheep became a bank loan officer. There's a wide variety of politics (from Republican to "both parties are fascists" radical), religion (from agnostics to quite observant Catholics), and connection to the Polish community (some stayed in Hamtramck and environs; others moved as far away as Los Angeles and, of course, DC). And my mom married my father, whose hometown, Worthington, Ohio, has a history of being as WASP and rich  as Shaker Heights, if not more so.  Although my dad isn't a WASP, and his family has some Central European Catholic roots as well—I really want to find out the details of the politics that got my great-grandfather Franz Weisner kicked out of Austria-Hungary—he's always been as solidly opposed to any sort of ethnic identity beyond "American" as my mom's family has been proud of their Polish roots.

Anyway, it's hard to say where this all leaves me.  A part of me wants to be proud of a Polish-American identity that's only partially mine, while another part of me is just angry and sad about what that identity has come to be associated with in this country today.  And it's not just a problem in this country, honestly: a look at present-day Polish politics is fairly disturbing, with a rather fascist and quite antisemitic party running the country.  I suppose I now understand better the dilemma faced by an MIT undergrad I used to know, who kept talking about how wonderful the small-town South she grew up in was while not quite grasping how unwelcome most of her friends—and she herself, if she didn't hide that she was bi and poly whenever she went home—would be there.  I hope I'm managing to do a better job of handling this than she did.



________________
¹ - I'm well aware of Joe Biden's problematic history on race and his issues with sexual harassment. I certainly don't think he should be running for president. But there's a part of me who finds a liberal Catholic who's pro-choice and is actually quite good on trans rights really strongly appealing.

² - If you've never shopped at a Polish grocery with its own deli counter—or eaten at one of my Polish food nights—you've probably only ever had smoked keilbasa. Fresh keilbasa is, in my opinion, better, but since it spoils quickly, being raw pork and all, it's harder to find and basically never available in supermarkets.

³ - If I can find one. I've developed a mental map of where to find Polish neighborhoods and food in a number of American cities, but DC's lack of a history of manufacturing means that—along with not having the working-class white suburban racism of many Rust Belt cities—it doesn't have much in the way of Eastern European neighborhoods.

This is definitely not what I was supposed to be doing today, but I still haven't managed to make myself focus on doing the long-overdue homework for my independent study class on using R for geoanalysis. Instead, in between helping my chosen sister with a mental breakdown and having one of my own, I managed to write a poem. I've had Kipling's "A Song to Mithras" stuck in my head for a while, so I made my own Hellenic version of it.

I don't know when I started filtering what I told my parents about my life. I suppose it was in middle or early high school, when I started masturbating and instinctively knew it was something I wasn't supposed to do and they weren't supposed to know about. But that was something I didn't really tell anyone about, until Sir Grace and I became really close friends in my senior year of high school and I finally had someone to confide in about such things.

Still, the real start was probably at Caltech, where I started to have multiple close friends, developed interests I didn't want to tell my parents about, and realized that I was transgender. By the time I was in grad school, I'd learned to maintain two versions of myself: the real one, and the curated version I showed my parents: straighter, saner, more normal, and more boring.

I didn't tell my parents that I was trans, I didn't tell them when I started taking hormone therapy, I didn't tell them when I started using anti-depressants, and I certainly didn't tell them about my suicidal ideation or other mental health problems. When I did finally tell them about things, I did my best to minimize them: I treated my mental health problems as entirely a thing of the past, I explained about hormones while trying to minimize my transness, and so on.

Up until about a week ago, this had worked fairly well. I had explained to my parents that I was trans, but had let them mostly think of this in terms of my being on hormones, even if that was something they didn't really understand. I'd let them continue calling me "he" and by my birth name, because it seemed like the easiest solution. I'd made sure they never saw me with a purse or in a skirt. And I'd generally made sure that their interactions with my friends were constrained to ones that wouldn't make them too uncomfortable. (And wouldn't make my friends too uncomfortable, either.)

It's hard to say why exactly I did this. Or, more accurately, it's hard to admit why I did it. I'd stopped really loving them, and had transitioned to just wanting to avoid conflict or stressed. That and, especially with me living three miles away and getting to use their car for free and so on, it made a lot of financial and practical sense to be on good terms with them. In any case, it's something that had worked well, and could probably have gone on for a while...until the cancer situation hit.

I hadn't really planned to tell my parents if and when I had the gender-affirming orchiectomy I was looking into getting. It didn't seem necessary or a good idea. But when I found out I had a tumor, it felt like something I couldn't rally keep secret from them. Especially not since there was a possibility of longer-term treatment being necessary. Of course, telling my parents what was going on meant them wanting to be there for my surgery and my recovery. And meant a lot of awkward contact between them and the friends who took me to surgery, and whose house I'm staying at while I recover.

The result of this happening, and happening while I was stressed out by cancer and surgery, and then under the influence of anesthesia and opiate painkillers, was that my two personas collided. My parents saw me wearing skirts (pants weren't really an option with my healing crotch), and they heard my friends calling me "she." What I didn't predict, and probably should have predicted, was just how angry this made them. They found it deeply disturbing, and the fact that they were already distraught by my having cancer only made it far, far worse.

The result was that I ended up getting yelled at for fifteen minutes by my dad about how the friend who came to the surgery with me was a horrible person because she kept calling me "she" in a "heavy-handed" way. There was also some weird anti-Semitism (he asked if she was Jewish and said she was acting "just like a real New York Jew") and homophobia (he said that lesbians are social outcasts, and her being gay was probably why she was reveling in the fact that my queerness was forcing him to join her "island of misfit toys"). And then my mom lectured me on how the friends I was staying with didn't really care about me like she and my dad did, because they were letting me stay with them even though some of them were sick.

I haven't talked to my parents since those conversations happened, and I'm stressed out by thinking about what to do about this. The best option strikes me as trying to pretend the whole thing never happened--which largely worked for the time in grad school where I blew up and wrote a very angry email to them about how upset I am that they had me circumcised as a baby--but I am not sure if it is viable this time.

Advice would be appreciated.

This last weekend, my grad school friend and lab comrade visited me from Boston. The two of us have been calling each other chosen sisters for quite a while and, while she was in town, we decided we wanted to formalize it. We wrote a short ritual--with religious bits pared down enough to not upset my pagan or her Christian preferences--to recognize us as chosen sisters and performed it at a friend's house with some of my local close friends in attendance.

It was really a wonderful experience, and I'm glad it's something I got to do. As an only child who isn't that emotionally close to their parents, chosen family is really important to me, and it's always a worry for me that my feelings about it, and about specific people, are asymmetrical, so it was nice to formally recognize how we both feel.



The text of the ritual, and more photos, follow behind a cut in case you're interested. As always with rituals I post publicly, feel free to adapt bits of it that you find useful for your own use.

( Read more... )

On Monday night, some friends and I got together to watch the Steven Universe Season 5 finale, "Battle of Heart and Mind" / "We Need to Talk" (link full of spoilers). The episode was...a lot, and I feel like I need to try to put together some of my thoughts about it on here. The following is cut for spoilers:

( Spoilery Thoughts on the Episode )

 After over three weeks on the road, I'm finally home in DC again.  It's been a long trip--possibly the longest I've ever done--and both an enjoyable and a sometimes painful trip.  I've collected a lot of counties I'd never been to before, and a lot of transit I'd never ridden before: I finally finished riding all the rail transit in New York that's not commuter rail, and I visited Cincinnati and Indianapolis for the first time and rode the Cincinnati "Bell Connector" streetcar and the soon-to-close Indianapolis hospitals monorail.

This afternoon, Jan--my girlfriend of about two years, and the first person I ever dated--broke up with me.  The specific details that precipitated it are a bit incoherent, and not really important, though I feel like the fact it happened on a 66 bus is somehow notable.  It was a long time coming, and I think we'd both come to realize that our relationship wasn't really healthy for either of us.  Our personalities clash a bit, we had conflicting triggers, and we weren't really physically compatible.  So, in the long term, I think this is for the best.

That said, I still ended up breaking down crying soon after it happened, and still feel kind of...flat?  Emotionally damped?  It's a little awkward that the break-up happened while I was still planning on staying with her for the three remaining nights of my visit to Boston.  She said I can still stay with her if I need to, but tonight I'm staying with some friends out in Waltham, because I felt I needed to get away from her.  I'm not sure what I'm doing on the nights of the 31st and 1st, but I will figure something out.

Anyway, it's probably telling that one of the things that stressed me out really badly was the realization that I'm not sure there's anyone in Boston I can stay with on future visits here.  I have a number of close friends and chosen family people who live here, but most of them don't have living situations where they can have me crash at their places.  I hope I can manage to continue to visit Boston regularly in the future but, whether or not I can, this at least seems to suggest that I'd already emotionally acknowledged that my and Jan's relationship was not going anywhere.

Jan and I are going to try to stay friends, and I think we can probably manage it on some level, though figuring out the details is going to be a bit tricky.  We're both quite new to this sort of thing and don't really know what we're doing.  For now, my goal is just to get through the logistics of the next couple of days.