Searching for Solace

Today, I just have a need to write something. It will be whatever it will be. These last few days have been incredibly emotional, I am not great at identifying emotional stuff within me much beyond happy and sad, angry and and pleased. Going further than this into the nuances of emotions is a thing I struggle with.

It’s not that I struggle to know that these words that I have are inadequate to describe the feelings and emotions I am experiencing. I know fully that these are not adequate descriptors and I feel the nuances and the extreme fluctuations in my feelings and emotions. Naming that however is much more difficult a task. A task that is not much more than a stab in the dark for a word that might fit.

It’s the last day of the what is colloquially known in Melbourne as Cup weekend. It’s a bit of an unofficial four day weekend in Melbourne. The first Tuesday in November is when the famous Melbourne Cup horse race is run, and for residents of Melbourne that Tuesday is an official public holiday. What invariably happens is many people take the Monday as an extra day off and make it a four day weekend.

Primed for a relaxing and enjoyable weekend, I was planning to work the Monday, but nevertheless have a good weekend with some time spent with my kids as well as chill out time for myself, I arrived after a bit of a sleep in and a lazy late morning coffee at a local cafe at my former partners home to catch up with my kids.

I was not ready for what greeted me. News that my former father in law, does someone really ever become a former father in law? Well he was in hospital and the new was that he was dying, it was just a matter of time. I was somewhat shell shocked and shattered at this news.

My former partner was resting after spending all night with her father. It was by all accounts harrowing. Her dad had gone into a state of delerium and it was tough to hear some things, and bizzare too off course.

I suppose, I am not sure what the process really was for me, but I seemed to click into being a supportive person to my ex and of course my kids. It was as though this just happened, it wasn’t as if a consious thing happened. It just was what it was.

The next couple of days really through to Monday morning, I spent with my kids and ensuring my ex had what she needed as she negotiated this time with her dad. I did my best to be strong and supportive for my kids and my former partner. I think that overall I did a good job.

I ended up taking Monday off work after getting the news he had died at 1am in the morning. I felt I needed to be there, to support, in whatever way I could my kids, my former partner. I wasn’t sure how that was going to go down but I needed to do it.

Well it turned out they just wanted space and I was pretty much on my own. In that I realised that I was beginning to grieve myself. I had held it together for the others and not thought about my own feelings and emotional responses.

The relationship I had with my father in law had been fractured at times, and yet, we both loved each other. He had wanted to be a father to me, and I had wanted him to be. My own father was incredibly abusive and I went no contact with him many years ago. With my father in law, though, it seemed matching up our complimentary desires never quite worked out in reality. Some of it of course was my fault and some of course was circumstance and some of course was his projections of what I should be, and of course my receiving of those projections in a distorted and twisted sense of what they were.

We shared times of joy and laughter. Unfortunately we also shared times of hurt and judgement at each other. This was exacerbated when the relationship with my former partner fell apart, and my transition as a trans woman was something he really struggled to accept. There was one occassion that was extremely difficult, in anger and raised voices he called my by my birth name repeatedly getting louder as I refused to answer, he demanded I stand up and be a man, and asked my former partner if he ‘had’ to use my chosen name.

It was an incredibly traumatic day. It hurt deeply, and I wasn’t sure what the future held for us.

I only got to see him a few times after this, and thankfully they were positive exchanged. My transness was kind of just not mentioned and somehow we muddled through.

I know it is only a short timeframe since it happened, I get that, but I have this feeling of not knowing where to place my own grief in this situation. Almost as though I am meant not to have this, but I do, and that is what it is.

It is as though I have to forget it all and be the supportive one, be with the kids, provide the space and support for the rest of the family and somehow not have any support thrown back to me by them. It’s really hard.

I am hurting, and finding the words to name that hurt is difficult, naming the feelings and emotions is difficult. All I know is that they are raw, deep and painful.

In a couple of days is the funeral. Internally I have questions raging about how I present at the funeral, am I truly welcome even? I will have to travel from work to attend the funeral and so another layer of complexity to that quetion of presentation is added. If I just wasn’t going to work that day, I guess I could just present in some kind of androgynous way, not because it is the way I want to present but, really, if I am honest, because it would be easier, easier for me and definitely easier for the family.

I have been presenting full time as a woman for more than a year now, and the idea of presenting as anything different feels like a kind of betrayal of myself. I have never presented as anything but female at work and so it would be somewhat out of the box to be doing anything other than that.

Where I am at I guess, at this point, is in a place of pain, a place of trying to understand that and process it. Process the complexity of the relationship I had with my father in law, for all its difficulties the reality is that his loss is a great source of pain.

I wish I could more easily name the things that I feel, I wish I could, but it seems very very difficult and I am not sure how to proceed.

I’m hurting and looking for solace I guess. I wonder where it will come from. I know it will come, but from where at this point is something of a mystery.