A Matter of Unimportance

4. Boy

I owe everything practical that I know to the fact that my mom homeschooled me. She taught me to read before my sixth birthday. She taught me more French than I'd ever need. She taught me about plants, water, and the earth in Whayas yard. She taught me how to see that everything was alive, living in a cycle together that made the world keep breathing. She taught me about stars and space and gravity. She taught me math, and how to count money, and how to survive when there's hardly enough. She taught me about food, nourishment and respect. We ate vegetarian, partially because meat was expensive and partially because my mom watched me cry when I found a dead bird in Whayas garden. She taught me how to cook. From a young age, connectivity with the natural world just dominated everything, including dinner.

She also took me to college classes with her. Even in the absence of Daniel, she was not a quitter. She maintained her education on a part time basis, sometimes only taking one class at a time. I'm sure there were rules against it, and maybe she intentionally chose classes that would allow for my presence to go unquestioned, but I knew how to stay quiet and so I sat next to her desk on the floor and most people ignored me. She also took classes online at home on a computer she'd rented from the library. We took those together as well. I was learning quite a lot about Environmental activism, which was her newest chosen area of study. Florence just loved nature almost as much as she loved me.  She also loved being loud.

She truly just really liked activism on its own. Turning 10 seemed to mean that I was quite old enough to partake in such things. 2008 was a difficult time on the economy in the US, with a major financial crash that had people taking to the street. Florence agreed with the major qualms, and so my mom and I marched through the streets alongside another few thousand disgruntled people in the city. We had a lot of fun doing that. I considered it part of my homeschooling; learning to fight the powers that be. She was just teaching me to pay attention. She was showing me that it was alright to demand things sometimes. She taught me about capitalism and corruption and about the fact that you definitely couldn't trust governments to do the right thing all the time.

Regardless, the recession of 2008 still closed the club I'd grown up in. That meant that after a decade of bartending, my mother no longer had a job.

This time wasn't the same as before. She was somewhat educated. She wasn't a teenager anymore and she had a meager savings account and  child that could technically stay home alone if she was in a pinch. She started applying for jobs and eventually was hired on as an office lady in an environmental protections agency. She brought home documents for us to read together and homeschool began taking shape in the afternoons. Notably, her college career was put on hold due to the schedule change and I suddenly spent more time at Whayas than I did before. That was fine by me too because Whaya couldn't hear me reading out loud to myself, and she always wanted her garden weeded. She made me tea and taught me to plant seeds.

Daniel was still popping in an out of the picture but it became clear after that initial Christmas tiff that he didn't really live with us anymore. He was more for visiting than he was staying. He was present, but not permanent. I only asked about it one time, and my mom told me that everyone had to live life in the way that was best for them. She told me we couldn't be trying to change that, and I accepted that she was maybe right, because she always was.

My grandfather wasn't exactly a constant figure, but he was around a little bit now too. Even though he'd been hostile and insulting, Christmas hadn't gone too terribly. I didn't like him, but I liked that my mom seemed to feel some level of connection in his home for the holiday and for that, I chose to tolerate him. We could be civil. I just needed to ignore most of the things he said when he spoke.

I was only 5 when he brazenly informed us that I was a boy that looked like a girl. You should know that it was maybe the first time gender had ever been a topic of discussion for me. I was aware that I was what would be considered a boy. I don't want you to think that my mom did something to prevent me from knowing that. As far as having some sort of baseline understanding of gender, I did know that I was her son. I was referred to as such by her plenty, but in the same way that my mother had decidedly called me Darling for my entire life, things like gender and names were not a cage for me. Maybe it's because I'd never had a consistent male figure aside from Daniel (who was not technically consistent). Maybe she just knew something about me that I wouldn't figure out for a while, but boyhood wasn't exactly a constraint I ever felt.