Margaret Ann Hanko was convinced she was going to die the spinster daughter and never find love. She stood 5’9″ tall, pretty in her own way and was more muscular than most girls back then because of her job. She worked as a nurse in a TB Sanitarium in Oak Forest, IL caring for terminally ill Tuberculosis patients. She was well past marrying age for that time, being 34 and all, so she had resigned herself to live and die alone. She still lived with her parents on 92nd street.  A bit of an introvert, she threw caution to the wind one night deciding to go to a USO dance being held in downtown Chicago with her sister in the spring of 1948.

It was at that dance that she met the GI who would make her believe in love at first sight and become my Father. Her cloistered, unhappy life would never be the same… His name, she would find out after their first dance, was Ray. The Ray was short for Raymond.  Raymond Abner Mallo had just come back after serving his country in the European theater during World War II. He was stationed at 5th Army headquarters in Chicago’s Hyde Park district. Dad held the rank of Tech Sergeant , not bad for a guy from Rice Lake, Wisconsin who was only 35. He was a Military Policeman, who was attached to the Provost Marshall’s office at 5th Army. He stood 6’2″ and looked pretty damn good in his dress uniform when he first met Marge. From that night on, they only had eyes for each other. After a whirlwind courtship Marge married Ray in the summer of 1948.

I came along to ruin their lives in the spring of 1949. Shortly after I was born, my dad was reassigned to a detachment of military police in New York City tasked with apprehending deserters and Army personnel who went AWOL (away with out leave). Mom was very upset when Dad was reassigned to New York and had to leave us.

After a while, she felt that dad had deserted us and that he had left her to raise their screwed up son by herself. Dad came home on furlough (leave) as much as he could but things were starting to be different. Mom would complain to Granny about how unfair things had gotten since he had left and then she would normally finish the conversation  by looking at me and saying “And just what the hell am I supposed to do about that”? Even when he came home on leave she wasn’t as happy to see him and she made that very clear the whole time he was there. Slowly but surely, the period of time between Dad’s visits got longer and longer.

I was sure all of it was my fault because I was so screwed up. Dad didn’t come home as much because his son Michael believed in her heart that she was a girl.  I was the reason that Mom was so angry and unhappy all the time and it was my fault that the way she chose to communicate with her family was by screaming at the top of her lungs at them. I was the reason that Gramps was a chronic alcoholic and that Granny had huge weeping sores on her legs from the tops of her thighs to her ankles and was in constant pain.

I grew up feeling that I was responsible for all the pain in my family. I think I was 6 at the time….

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.