Outtake: A Distaste for Nostalgia

The following scene was removed in the final edit of my upcoming book, 18 Months: A Memoir of a Marriage Lost to Gender Identity, to be released on Amazon on October 16. The book is the true story of the unraveling of a fifteen-year relationship when my husband came out as transgender.

The book is written in direct address, so the word “you” refers to my then-spouse, Jamie. This scene occurs after our separation.

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My father’s father died four years before I was born. Dad reacted to the news by hoisting a massive trunk containing the man’s every worldly possession into the backyard trash barrel and setting it on fire. My mother, who had talked him out of destroying family heirlooms on other occasions, arrived at the pyre too late to protest. She could only stand near the blaze, chastising my father ineffectually, watching priceless relics succumb to engulfing flames.

“The trunk alone was worth a fortune,” Mom told me. “It was an antique.” She recalls its contents: Dad’s baby dress, a long-sleeved shift of thin cotton lawn made by his mother. A yellowed baby blanket. His mom’s wedding gown, handmade of light blue linen. A three-and-a-half inch celluloid collar that a man could attach to a button-up shirt for a tidy appearance. A gold baby ring, set with a turquoise stone the size of a grain of rice.

And photos—all ancient and irreplaceable— of his parents, his grandparents, and his siblings. There was even one of Ellen, the sister who had died of some unnamed disease at the age of six, leaving behind a corpse the size of a doll.

“He didn’t even ask Florence if she wanted any of it,” Mom grumbled.

“Why did he do it?” I asked.

“Because if it’s gone, he doesn’t have to think about it.”

I know why he didn’t want to think about his father. According to family legend, the man was a layabout and an alcoholic. After his wife died of appendicitis at a young age, he made passes at my mother and his other daughter-in-law. Then he moved to Elgin to work at the insane asylum, leaving his children behind. My dad and his surviving siblings were sent to live with Florence, the single, blind aunt who subsisted on her father’s civil war pension.

When he had a stroke in front of the television at the boarding house where he stayed, his hand still clenched a bottle of bourbon. For half a day the other residents assumed he’d simply passed out.

Still, one must hold on to family things, my mom said. “He painted over those measurements in the utility room, too,” she said, referring to a spot near the door where she’d measured the growing height of my brother and me for the first decade of our lives. “It wasn’t an accident,” she added. “He knew what he was doing.”

I remember when the big black trash bag full of family Christmas ornaments, last seen on a shelf in the garage, went missing. Dad claimed there was a mix-up with the trash, but had his disdain for sentimentality struck again?

Nothing in the bag was new, nothing objectively pretty. There was a cross I made of burned matchsticks at Vacation Bible School. A construction-paper elf. Plastic icicles that glowed in the dark. A star my brother made of fluorescent-colored toothpicks, better suited to a space-themed diorama than a Christmas tree. Angels my mother and I crafted out of straight wooden clothespins, with painted-on faces and glittered gowns. Silk balls with pins full of seed beads pressed into them, an ambitious family project that had yielded only a few pieces. And bone-colored plastic Mary-and-Jesus scenes ensconced under clear plastic domes, one on red felt for me and one on blue felt for my brother, given as gifts by my mom’s grandmother, who was still alive and very old.

I know this distaste for nostalgia.

There was that one Christmas that was perfect. My extended family gathered at my aunt Betsy’s. Her house was smaller than Grandma’s so it wasn’t often chosen for family gatherings. But it was the coziest, most beautiful home I’d ever seen. White wicker furniture stood against a dramatic, large-scale floral wallpaper in black and pink. Antique valentines hung in frames and were tucked into wooden blinds. The beds and windows were draped with crisp, lavender-scented white linens. My aunt had two Christmas trees—a delicate, lacy fir embellished with tiny pine cones and perfect raffia bows for herself, and a sturdy blue spruce decorated with shiny tinsel and homemade baubles for her children. My cousins and I spun wooden tops on the hardwood floors as a fire raged in the fireplace and cookies baked in the oven. After dinner, my aunt sat down at her piano and played Christmas carols, inviting everyone to sing along. We sang for hours and I felt warm and content and enclosed on all sides by love. That one Christmas would forever hover in the back of my mind, a reminder of what Christmas was supposed to be and would never be again.

Instead, my family celebrated holidays half-heartedly, if at all, and never the same way twice. One year, we’d observe Christmas the day before, another the day after. Sometimes I’d end up at a Chinese restaurant with my best friend Renee. Too often, Mom and Dad would load my brother and me into the car, pile it with presents, and take off for the two-hour trip to Grandma’s, only to turn the car around after some knock-down, drag-out argument.

Spared from Dad’s ruin were a handful of items Mom had secreted away: his dad’s folding straight razor with its pearl handle and rigid box, a heavy brass cowbell engraved with French writing, and the coins that were placed on Ellen’s eyes to close them when she died.

Mom is a revisionist. For her, souvenirs substitute for happy memories. They spark her imagination and from the spark she invents good times that never were. I don’t throw things away like my father did. But I don’t reminisce over them like my mother, either. I just share my space with them and let them make me sad. It’s the worst of both worlds.

What will trigger my tears now is unpredictable. I choke up over a postcard featuring a tiny cottage in a heavy falling snow at dusk, its windows brimming with yellow light. I lose my voice mid-order at the coffee shop when I see a small stuffed bear in a duck costume propped up near the register. I think nothing of trashing a vacation photo of us at Myrtle Beach in a picture frame decorated with plastic crabs, but feel a pang when I throw away your moth-ridden Yoda shirt.