Your bag is empty.
It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and I’m standing here looking at the Bridger Mountains from the living room of my Broken American Home.
I’m sure if I put my phone down I could console the screaming infant, my nephew, wriggling in my other arm. My sister’s child is not happy, most likely because my face looks just enough like hers to be confusing for fresh eyes. This is not the first time a boy has looked at me and sobbed.
He stares at me and I wonder if he is a He or if, fingers crossed, I’ll need to send in a pronoun edit a few years from now.
My parents’ divorce was finalized two weeks ago and, although my siblings and I are staying at their house, neither was invited to dinner. Which is not to say that our home was intact before the very recent stamp of approval from the American justice system.
Various behavioral treatment facilities kept my siblings and me in a constant dinner-chair rotation growing up. This year, it’s my parents turn for timeout. My brother and his girlfriend are flying in after he gets off work on Wednesday. I haven’t met my brother’s girlfriend yet; she teaches high school on her reservation in California and is apparently too good for him.
Auntie Peter is horny and having a wobbly time juggling personal desires and family togetherness.
I’m sans plus-one, but my siblings’ functional relationships (which don’t preclude an amazing ability to grasp they/them pronouns) leave no seat empty at this year’s holiday table.
My sister’s other youngster is a self-defined girl. She keeps giving my wrist raspberries as I stare blankly and thumb through dating apps. My niece is four years old and a She; I asked. I also asked how she knows she is a girl and she said, “I know I’m a girl because it is in my heart!” which sent my trans ass into full-blown sobs.
I’m crashing on her floor for the holiday. She “toots” a lot, which is freeing; I’ve been eating weird. We have the same haircut and need for validation. She wants to watch a show with me called Doc McStuffins. She gives me more raspberries when I try to write. She’s asked me what this story is about and I said it was about her, which is only partly true. The other part, which I don’t tell her about, is that her Auntie Peter is horny and having a wobbly time juggling personal desires and family togetherness.
As American bodies make the seasonal pilgrimage home for Thanksgiving, anxieties from urban centers like the plague are carried onto planes and busses and ferried to satellite towns across the country. Nine-to-five troubles and social-media pressures are expected to be forfeited and replaced with the rumored comforts of homecoming. Tradition stipulates that, once you’re back in the bosom of your American family, you will express American gratitude for your nation’s stolen land.
But like many of my fellow Americans, I find that the cognitive dissonance of getting a vacation to celebrate this racist holiday by flying on a rocket during an environmental collapse combine with tense memories of fractured family dinners. The human psyche is a magnificent thing. In an act of self-preservation, maybe an anonymous boning could temporarily slow this blinding social, political and emotional kaleidoscope.
The inevitable emotional hayride that occurs during these winter months is special and site-specific for every American.
I live in New York City and have brought my East Coast lust home to Southwestern Montana and trauma’s origin. The inevitable emotional hayride that occurs during these winter months is special and site-specific for every American. My inner child has been triggered by my kin’s current children, and I’m deciding to use new and improved coping mechanisms. I have no clue how to quell the troubled baby in my arms but I do know how to comfort myself. I find American alcoholism to be passé and solitary, so I focus my addictive nature on more collaborative acts of disassociation.
I’ve been horny for at least 20 years. I will toast my brother on Thursday night for helping seven-year-old me print out naked pictures of Pam Anderson to show the straight boys in my class. And I will toast my younger self for how quickly I learned how to get guys to line up.
My horniness, like anything natural and beautiful, fluctuates. This week’s need for steed is particularly bloated due to dropping temperatures and my arms looking good. (I went tanning, don’t tell anyone.) And then there’s all that iconic New York beep beep! honk honk! to rile up my nethers. Not to mention the tiny inconsequential burp of horrific current event notifications tugging at my brain stem.
Suddenly, I receive an unsolicited and immodest picture of an old man who lives 200 miles away. I wonder what would happen if it caught the eye of my nephew. He doesn’t speak yet, so I can’t talk to him about it. What would I say, anyway? Would this snafu have subconsciously prepared him for whatever men’s locker room nightmare he will inevitably experience in a handful of years? Maybe I would say, “You have one of these, and people are going to say you have certain behaviors based on having one, but you should not listen to them.” He sees his patient mother in my eyes and calms down.
I try finding the child a pacifier but I can’t seem to let go of my phone. I look over at my niece, who is chewing on her own arm. She threw her pacifiers away, exlaiming that “big girls don’t use pacifiers!” I say “I love that!”
The app man I still haven’t spoken to, my only possible pacifier at the moment, assumes we are meeting up and asks “can you host??”
I tell him “no, I have a roommate.” Then I throw my phone across the room.
My niece yells, “Now can I show you Doc McStuffins?”
“Sure,” I say. “Thank you for asking, because a lot of men don’t.”
She says “I’m not a man, I’m a girl!”
And I say “Exactly.”