Alex as Well Read Free Page A

joke.
    ‘You should do up your office. It makes you look daggy. It looks like you don’t care about your work. Paint it a different colour. And the pictures should be at eyelevel because they’re for looking at,’ I tell him, looking around the room. ‘I saw that on one of those renovation shows.’
    ‘What about your father?’ he asks.
    ‘I told my dad and he left.’
    My lip does this weird, involuntary stretch to the right, so I grab it.
    Crockett just looks at me. I don’t know what he’s thinking. He’s all inscrutable, and I am out there on the ledge. I think most people know, just by looking at me, that I have a screw loose, but this is the first time I have opened my mouth and asked for help.
    He says, ‘I’m sorry.’

4
www.motherhoodshared.com
This is my first post. Almost fitfeen years ago I had a baby, and after the birth it took them ages to let me hold it, and I was saying, what is it? A boy or a girl? But they just kind of looked at me. They wrapped the baby up, and nobody said anything to me. They were all looking at each other.
So I held teh baby, but I knew there was something wrong.
Finally the paediatrician came in and told me and my husband that our child was, I can’t remember the word he used. Sexually ambiguous.
Their advice was to do some tests, and decide which one the baby was more of, and then to raise the child as that sex. But they had to wait until all of my hormones were out of the baby’s system. They told me not to breastfeed either. I think I missed out on a special bond there.
The baby had a penis, but not a normal-sized penis. My husband and I thought that if the child has a penis then it must be a boy. They said the baby also had no testes, but ovaries, and we could have them removed later. He had injections to replace his hormones.
We called the baby Alex—not Alexander or Alexandra, but just Alex.
They wanted to do all this testing all the time, and they got me to keep track of what toys Alex played with and whether he played with girls or boys more, whether he was passive or aggressive. Then when he was four they changed from the injections to oral hormone medication to make sure he kept growing as a boy.
We kept a log, and he went to see a specialist every few months. When you keep a log you can’t not think about it. You have to think about it every day. You can’t just take your kid to the park and watch them play on the swings. You’re constantly analysing and comparing. Every single thing is a sign.
We tried not kkeping a journal for a few months, but the doctors went bananas. They said they couldn’t make medical decisions without data and we weren’t supporting our son’s healthy development.
It’s a lot of pressure. My husband and I started fighting, because we always planned to have more children, but then decided we shouldn’t in case it happened again. Hedecided that. I still wanted more kids. Then I went off the pill and didn’t tell him, and then later I found out he had a vasectomy and didn’t tell me. And, since I’m getting personal here, he did have a scar there and I was worried it was something bad like cancer. It’s pretty bad that he let me worry like that.
He thought life was better without the journal. He wanted Alex to stop seeing the doctors. Anyway, long story short, we disagreed about one thing, and then another, and then every single argument we had became a fight about that.
As Alex got older, my husband thought we should explain it to him, but how do you even begin to have a conversation like that with a kid who’s already a bit out there? I thought it would be easier for him not to know, and then he wouldn’t get anxious about it.
And then last night Alex says to us, sitting there at dinner. I’m a girl. Just like that. Three words.
And my husband explodes at me. I couldn’t stop crying. My husband packs up a suitcase and he walks out. He’s gone to his borhters place. I’m still crying now.
I can’t handle it. I look at