Our family was a lot like most first generation immigrant families migrating from Eastern Europe as the War in Europe began. My Grandparents had fled Hungary after World War 1. They landed in New York and slowly moved west to Chicago where my Grandfather found work at the US Steel Southworks as a welder and pipe fitter. He bought an apartment building on E. 92nd street on the south side and wanted to keep all the family together under one roof. My grandparents lived on the first floor. We lived on the second and my aunt and her husband lived in the basement. My Mother was raised a devout Roman Catholic. I was baptized at St Joachim and we went to High Mass every Sunday. My Mother went to the priest in our parish asking “how have I offended our Almighty Father, the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints to have been burdened with a child such as this”? I don’t know what to do with him. He tells me that he wants to be a girl! He follows me around in the kitchen and wants me to teach him to cook! He says he hates being a boy and he doesn’t want to be a boy. He asks me to fix him and I don’t know what to do. I have prayed asking the Almighty for guidance but I have not heard God speak to me. What should I do???
The priest told my Mother that she was a failure in the eyes of Our Lord and a failure as a Catholic woman and a Mother because she allowed this to happen. He told her the reason I wanted to be a girl was because she had not disciplined me enough. Looking back at those years, for my Mother, it was like Jesus talking to her through the priest. This testament was not to be questioned only accepted. So, for the next 14 years my Mother tried to beat the girl out of me…It never worked but it certainly made life interesting.
On a side note…I was also a very devout Catholic as a child. I went to bed every night and prayed to God and Virgin Mary for one of two things. Please fix me and make me a girl or show me how to accept who I was and learn to live with it. I never got any answers. Over and over and over, I tried to accept that I was a boy. I would try to lock up all those feminine feelings, those feelings I had that I wasn’t made right, that I was a mistake, that in my Mother’s words ” I was all screwed up”, that there would never be any hope or happiness for me. That I had not only screwed up my life but that I had single handedly screwed up the lives of my entire family.
The Girl Who Lives In My Heart 