On Teenage Roommates, Gender Fluidity and Dismerspectful Puppies— B.G.
October 22nd, 2022:
I’m almost two weeks into Plateau Place. This is the longest I’ve been on my own with the children.
It’s quiet now. Riley is at Cégep (that’s Quebec’s transition school between high school and college) and the Felixater is sleeping in.
I just finished cleaning up the kitchen.
I had told them last night that I would do the dishes this morning. It was shabbos and I was feeling generous.
“Wait…you cooked us dinner and you’re cleaning up??” asked Felix. I smiled and nodded.
Cleaning up after them is way easier than getting them to clean up after themselves. With the added plus that they thank you.
Mistress Me will NOT just pick up after children who can pick up after themselves, though. We foresaw possible shenanigans and created some pretty fool-proof Mary Poppins Systems. So I haven’t had to do too much grownup enforcing.
Every now and then, though, Felix does acrobatics in his bedroom and suddenly his aquarium is lying smashed on the floor, liquid pooling all over the bedroom, fishies gasping for air.
That happened the other day.
We were able to rescue the fish, and nobody wounded themselves too terribly on the glass. It was quite the evening, though.
Speaking of pets, Nacho is yowling at me right now. To hear him meowing, you’d think he hadn’t been fed in a trillion years.
But Riley swore they were gonna feed him this morning. It was the first day all week they’d gotten up early, and I was actually still in bed when I heard the door closing behind them.
So Nacho got fed, right?
I’ve sent a message to Riley anyway, which they may or may not receive sometime this year.
I’m trying to be better at the “they” thing. Riley told Gale that was the pronoun that felt right about a year and a half ago, when I was still traveling. Gale told me that Riley was still okay with “she” around people they already knew, though, so I kind of breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn’t have to monitor my pronouns for the rest of time.
Changing speech patterns is hard.
But last week when Lynn was over and we were playing Azul, I accidentally said “she” and I felt Riley flinch.
I apologized and doubled down on my efforts, which is what all the transgender/gender fluid literature says to do; don’t make a big deal of it, just correct the mistake and move on.
After Lynn left, Riley was like, “Lorelai…”
“I’m sorry I misgendered you!!” I blurted out before they could say anything, and they nodded, relieved but still a bit baleful.
“It’s just that I don’t usually refer to you in the third person,” I said, “And if I do, it’s with your mom, and…and and…you said I could say ‘she’ with people who already knew you. Right? Right!”
Plus, I just made a mistake and corrected it exactly as instructed! I followed all the non-binary rules! What more do you want from me??
I didn’t say that.
Guilt overtook me.
Before I could really stop myself I said, “Would you like me to start using ‘they’ as a general rule, even if I’m with your mom or people who know you?”
“Please,” said Riley, and I knew they meant it for real. So I tried.
When Mommy was over, we got a lot of practice in. Baby Girl had a good time with it. After all, if I can identify as a fairy princess, Riley can identify as an ambiguous gender.
I’ve always thought how stupid it was that there is so much gendered language anyway. After all, if gender isn’t relevant to whatever we’re doing, why emphasize it?
But it’s so ingrained. The first thing we have to determine when we meet someone is their gender. Otherwise language won’t work.
Our impressions change when we hear “she.” Resumés with the white men get the gig. We know this.
You know the joke about the glass ceiling, right? Well I mean, there isn’t really a glass ceiling. There is no such thing. It’s just that men choose certain professions, like, being a doctor, for instance. And women choose other professions, like, being a female doctor.
I fed Nacho. His yowls got to be too much for me and who knows when Riley will get my message. If he turns out to be gaslighting me, I’ll…
Do nothing, because he’s a cat.
I suppose if he’s really fooling me, I’ll learn from my gullibility and be better next time. But that’s what I said the last time Nacho tricked me into giving him second breakfast.
Saturday, Oct 23rd, 2022:
The power went out right in the middle of my presentation. Outrageous! We’re in the fancy part of Montreal. We’re not supposed to lose power without any warning.
I was in Gale’s office. I had called a break when bam: My worst nightmare was suddenly made reality. With the electricity out, so, too had evaporated the internet. I lost complete connection to our annual meeting with 26 board members and executives in attendance.
You know. The meeting I was running.
Thank god for hotspots. They barely even noticed I was gone.
Also thank goodness my laptop was charged.
The lights came back on right after my call ended, of course. Murphy’s law.
I’m home alone. Riley is at work, and Felix is out with a friend. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but I like to think that him leaving the house is a happy result of my confiscating his ipad. I had been a little worried his retinas might start leaking.
He’s done one out of the three things on his list.
FELIX:
- Mom’s trash can (empty to outside and clean)
- Mac and cheese tray
- Weekend chore
Feed yourself! And Maybe even…go outside — -Lorelai (“Mary Poppins”)
(I wrote the list this morning after putting far too much effort into the whole “pick my battles” thing. I decided that a congealed mac and cheese tray left stuck in the toaster oven made the cut. I even soaked it for him, because that’s how generous I am.)
I won’t even try to describe the state of his mother’s trash can. No, I don’t know why Gale leaves her bedroom door open.
Oh, Felix. I will tell you one thing…I love that boy, but I did NOT miss being his roommate.
His confidante, yes. His stuffy tea-partier, yep. His mentor in all-things-school-work-related, mm hmm. His co-conspirator in shenanigans? Absolutely.
His roommate? Not a chance.
Oh well. Sometimes, to have some of one, you gotta have some of the other.
If I was going to be staying here a bit longer, I would definitely use a giant bin system. I would leave it out and deposit the detritus of his hurricane walks through the house. It would contain every unwashed dish and piece of dirty underwear.
I suppose I would rescue (to the refrigerator) the milk that he routinely leaves on the kitchen table for the house elves to put away. But I would put something else in its stead as a symbolic item to dispose of.
The bin would come with some kind of buyback system to motivate that he learn from his complete disregard to the rest of the house.
It’s a good idea, right? Right.
But…I’m leaving in a couple days and won’t be here in order to properly see the system through from implementation to conclusion. So I’ll just pick my battles and let Gale figure the rest out.
Gale gets back Tuesday. Right around this time in two days, actually. Pretty much 48 hours from now.
I’m gonna stay an extra night to welcome her home properly. I’m tentatively excited. She’ll be tired and we’re still not normal.
But I think it will be nice. I’ll stay one extra night. Maybe two, but maybe not. I’m kind of ready to go back to my Happiness Palace.
I saw it last week for a split second, my Happiness Palace. I needed to pick up, like, everything, since I had only packed for a couple of days the first time.
Plus, I was headed to the country with Mommy.
Oh, right! That was the silver lining of my mom not being able to visit! I had already been planning to leave the kids for a weekend, so I had said no to that whole “beautiful cabin in the woods with a hot tub” thing, remember? I didn’t want to abandon them for that long.
But since I didn’t leave, because my mom didn’t come, I was able to sneak away for a couple of days with Mommy.
I left the kids with a clean house, food for a couple of days, and several lists.
Felix says that I suffer from a list affliction.
“If you are gone for the day, a list! If we are gone for an hour, a list! If you leave to use the bathroom, here are 79 things on Lorelai’s list!”
I laughed so fricking hard.
I love lists. Plus, he always ignores them anyway, so what difference does it make?
The cabin we went to belongs to Mommy’s other little.
I know, Mommy has another little! OUTRAGEOUS!
I met her for the first time last week.
If we were polygamous, she’d be my sister-wife.
In polyamoury, they call it a “metamour.”
But Mommy’s my BDSM Mommy, which makes Mommy’s little…my actual-pretend-for-real sister.
A sister!
A whole sister out there, who I’ve just barely met! I saw her for a second before I went to hide in the bedroom until she left.
She has super pretty hair that curls lots and lots.
Gah gah I’m a baby.
The house felt scary at first because it belonged to somebody important to Mommy, and that is weird because Mommy is the privatest person in the universe so usually I don’t see the important things except now I guess I do because I am a wiggle worm.
Also it smelled like dog. Icky yucky gross.
They leapt up on me and kept smelling my bum-bum AND my princess parts! And they were VERY impolite and dismerspectful, interruptin’ and woofin’ and stuff.
Dogs are ‘nnoying.
But they’re KIND OF nice once you get to know them. Especially Barney, who proudly strutted around with a stuffy in his snout. All he wanted in the universe was for you to admire his stuffy. Which I could totally relate to.
And even the butt-smeller dog was a cutie pie after she stopped trying to smell my butt.
And after a while I forgot the house smelled like dog.
My nose didn’t, though. I’m allergic to all the animals and I had to take the pills and we still hid in the guest bedroom most of the time.
Oh, but it was wonderful. There was a hot tub, and woods, and a bed, and a kitchen and music and Mommy and TIME, so much time!!!!
Two whole days’ worth.
I spent a large portion of Tuesday completely freaking out about Thursday. (Thursday was the day. Like, THE DAY. Marisol and I had been appointed to run the whole thing and it was the real shit, man. And in person, too, which I’ve barely done since the pandemic. Working with actual three-dimensional people requires a lot of preparation, including what am I gonna wear from the waist down because usually it’s sweatpants.)
I made the mistake of checking my emails when I first woke up, and didn’t recover for about six hours.
Mommy says if Mistress Me can’t be left alone for just one minute without forgetting not to check her email, then…
Then she winked at me and said she was certain it wouldn’t happen again.
It won’t, believe me.
It was a mind fuck, though, to convince myself that I deserved to be happy while I prepped. This huge part of me felt like I was playing hooky by being with Mommy, instead of at home. Where literally all I would have been doing was stressing out.
So now I was stressed out about not stressing out!
It was so hard to convince my brain that actually, I am allowed to relax and take care of myself, and still prepare, and that won’t somehow jinx the whole thing.
But eventually, I did remember, and it was glorious.
I didn’t smoke any weed on Wednesday because I wanted to conserve my brain for the day to come. I drove back to Montreal, a renewed Super Boss Bitch.
The panic didn’t come back.
Marisol and I kicked ass on Thursday.
I’m on Gale’s terrace now. It’s so weird that she’s there and I’m here. Time and distance…what mind trips they are.
On the wall in the alleyway behind her house, some poorly talented graffiti artists have vandalized the wall with their tags. I recognize one of them; it’s scrawled all over the tunnel leading from the metro to my house.
Apparently whoever it is gets all over the city, huh.
It’s so juvenile, defiling someone else’s home just to write the name you made for yourself.
It’s like peeing on your territory. Except you’re not a dog, and you could be more evolved than that.
I’m suddenly starving. I guess I should go figure out dinner for me and my teenage roommates. That’s a whole new jigsaw to solve, since they’re each picky, but in opposite ways.
The kids today! Outrageous.
Cutie pies.
Love,
B.G.
PS From Invisible Narrator:
Baby Girl just walked into the kitchen and saw the cat.
“NO, NACHO! Fool me once, fool me twice, but I will not be fooled again! No second dinner for you!”
