Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Pictures are known not for their pictureness, but for their humanness."
The same can be said of mirrors. What I would give to see myself as a potential contender for the Fairest, a resident of the land instead of this amnesic state. I have forgotten all too quickly the coordinates of the embassy that we carry inside of us as an indication that second class citizens are not exceptions to humankind-they are inexcusable.
This happens every time I come home after being away for several months. I forget what I have learned at Rutgers about self-love until I am looking upon myself with the unaccustomed eyes of a layperson. The mirror occurs and I am affronted by a face made of fingerprints-no one has ever seen anything like it before and no one ever will again.
The formal term is freak.
My mother is my mirror-a hybrid of blank slate, acclimation, and ugliness. Her disapproving glare is like lightning that splits everything around it into a before and an after, into a dark past and an endless attempt at reconciliation. Whatever signs of long overdue acceptance she displays when I first arrive home are imbued with brevity, the kind that makes a bride last for but a day. Love of a child is not enough to impel her to enter the inverted world that hovers above a puddle, to liquidate her highly coveted way of viewing the world, to convert her contempt into its antithesis, to be a mother instead of an oxidizing agent adding fuel to a fire.
As we are driving in the car on the way to my grandfather's house, she says, as a way of holding my minor infractions against me, "You think I'm going to treat you like a boy? You have another thing coming." This comment takes me aback, as she has been referring to me as “Jordan” for days and making legitimate attempts to correct herself when she uses the wrong pronoun.
At my grandpa's house, she thinks nothing of having an open and frank conversation about my body parts and medical care related to my transition not only in my presence, but without my permission and as if I am not in the room.
The burden is on me to remove my person rather than on her to avert her gaze. This is because she is the primary source of perception and I am the reflection on the surface.
Mirror that she is, she makes my most salient feature my comorbidity, until layer after layer of flaws are wrapped around me like a cobra. She cuts off my circulation with the hysterical stridency that she uses to string together insults. Her esophagus has the wing span of a gargoyle as she screams obscenities so loudly that I can hear them through the front door of the house and from halfway down the driveway.
I understand now what it means to be a source of shame, a plague that has descended upon the family and defied their expectations of what it would be like to raise a child. I must bear the dishonor of waking up one day and realizing that I am loved in spite of who I am rather than because of it. When my parents speak of their child's accomplishments, it will be with affection that is soft and fuzzy, diluted by the anesthetic that dishonor draws up. As a drunk mind speaks sober thoughts, my mother in her endless slew of angry moments participates in the form of Truth. Her sentiments are distilled in a stream of consciousness, ostensibly unedited-and that is why I trust them, sadly.
But I must choose to be uncensored, too. It would be easy to go through life surviving, to be moderate, to speak in morse code, to reiterate what she says to me in a manner that is simple and to the point. It would be easy to communicate with enough marks to recreate the moment, and nothing more, to be detached and do only what I need to get by.
Instead, I must relearn the language that has been handed down to me. But being self taught requires enduring the turbulence associated with taking back the words that have been used to demean you. The reclamatory sense is more heightened than that of sight or sound. It is painful and amplified, but that is why our experiences can be used to create an even better masterpiece than can paint and pencils and instruments alone.
As Jean Paul Sartre would say, "Suffering is justified as soon as it becomes the raw material of beauty.." It is not easy to take a pastel to the precipitation and describe in every detail this vicious, relentless struggle with the pretty terminology that we use to classify the rain cycle, and yet we must. For although it is inexorable that the storms and the preceding calms we allude to will make cynics out of us, at least through the effort to allude at all can sorrow manifest itself as something that is more than a coincidence.
And so, I vow to paint pictures that are more than pictures. When I speak, it will not be for aesthetic purposes. When I speak, it will be my way of suing for all of the lost time due to transphobic comments and the disparaging parts of speech that she utters on a daily basis. It will be for, not eviscerating the bond between mother and child, but avenging the fact that it has to be there at all. My accounts will be full of eidetic imagery but also novel meaning that wasn't initially there. It is time to take back what is mine.
She should be the one living vicariously through me, but it is actually the other way around. It is I who is living through her. I see myself as she sees me, as her friends and colleagues must see me, as her family members must learn to. I understand what it is like to be them. It is the type of person that I was before I grew up and learned to think for myself, when ideas were handed down to me with antecedents and sacrifices made on my behalf.
It is like childhood, the lives that she and people like her lead. They are innocent and that is why they are troublemakers. Their ideals are less damaging than mine, less threatening to the stability of the world as we know it, while I disrupt the balance between all beings like ideas that were first espoused in the 1800's and the world hasn't been the same since. I am the hair that is let down, the corsets that are loosened, and the morals that follow suit. I am the bathtub gin that launched a thousand court dates. I am the conscientious objectors and the interracial couples. I am everything that was once an abomination. But always, always am I on the desirable side of the bell curve.
I have no need to do anything spectacular with my life. My only aim is to see something I can be proud of when I look into a mirror-when I look into my mother's eyes.
But this doesn't require winning her approval. What it means is that I can use her criticism constructively. I do not have to elicit her praise when I can use her as a source of inspiration instead. Her failed attempt at parenthood will be the victory that I gain on behalf of an entire community. It is in this manner that my appearance will no longer be an aberration. In fact, it might even be beautiful.
It is not an accident that portraits are one of the most popular forms of art, and that after that comes depictions of war. It is as if the capacity for violence is associated with looking at ourselves.
"Pictures are known not for their pictureness, but for their humanness."
So is hell.
