The Doll House

My great-uncle died back in April. I visited my family in Maryland for his viewing. This was a month before I came out and I wrote about it at the time. I shopped this piece with no luck so I'm sticking it here....

My grandfather built doll houses for the girls in his life: one each for his daughters and one for his granddaughter. He did not build one for me. He did not know I am a girl. He died not knowing this. 

 

I come from a family of builders, their fingerprints quite literally on famous edifices from the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville, North Carolina to Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland. This skill eluded me; about the only creative gift I have to offer the world is the written word. Yet I was always impressed by my grandfather's ingenuity: the smoothness of his angles, the minute details of the window frames. No doubt this was handed down from generation-to-generation.  

 

My grandfather's brother recently died, having outlived his two younger brothers. This was not a tragedy: 91 is as good an age as any of us can expect. The tragedy is the business I planned to attend to in Maryland: proving my great-aunt's existence. 

 

A girl was born before my great-uncle to his parents. She lived all too briefly. From what little I know, she was a happy child, taking my then-toddler great uncle's face in her hands and smiling. 

 

She died at age five of pneumonia, with much debate as to how she caught it. She is buried with my great grandparents. Aside from her grave, I can find no public record of her existence. With my great-uncle's death, there is likely no one left on the planet who has a visual memory of who she was, what she sounded like, what made her smile. 

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When you transition, especially at an older age, you feel nostalgic for a past that never happened. Looking back on childhood memories, I have no idea what was good, what wasn't, what was masculine performance, what was depression. What exactly were those corners of euphoric joy buried in a haunted house of dysphoria, a house with no dolls. While the term "gaslighting" has long been overused, all trans people are socially gaslit to a point. You can't go back and relive the past the way you are taught: looking at the bad times as lessons and holding the good times with joy. 

 

I have a wary feeling towards my memories. There were moments of happiness as I grew up with a lot of love from family and friends. But there was also no prom dress, no pom outfit, no scrunchie to tie my long hair, no awkward exploratory wouldn’t-it-be-weird-if-we kiss in the locker room, no Fuffy fanfiction. Many people many things prevented me from these memories. Creating something in my head would be a maladaptive cope to deal with the facts, inhibiting me from the woman I am and am meant to become.

 

And that's perhaps why I have pursued my great-aunt's existence for it mirrors my transition: finding beauty in ugliness. She was born into a world of angry cis men and cis male anger was the greatest fear of my life for 39 years. Our country is shrouded in the political nightmare of that anger. The evils in our world are justified with that anger. Through all that anger, I fight to prove she existed. Through all that anger, I fight to prove I exist. 

 

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Just before I leave for Maryland, my mom texts me. She thinks she found my great-aunt's birth certificate. And she was going to leave it for me by the doll house in her basement. 

 

The doll house built by my grandfather. A note through time for the doll I have built. 

 

One cannot help but smile at the coincidence. 

 

My mother did not do this intentionally; she saves her sense of drama for her sermons. But maybe forces unseen nudged her. 

 

Because if you're always looking back in pain at what could have been, you sometimes miss the ways in which the world affirms you. 

 

My great-aunt lives. I live. 

 

___

 

I almost quit. 

 

I got to my mom’s house at 11:15pm after a four-hour drive and went straight to the basement. 

 

I combed through records, marriage certificates, divorce papers. I learned my grandfather was a bad high school student and often traveled to Ecuador for work. I saw photos of my great grandmother, who suffered from polio just before the vaccine, holding my grandmother while standing on two feet. I had never seen her stand without a cane. 

 

Tears and fond memories but no certificate. 

 

And I’d had enough. It’s time for bed. I would have to leave the reader with a cliffhanger. Such is life. 

 

I shifted two folders of tax returns back into their original place. In doing so, a series of older documents and photos fell out.  

 

One was a photo of my great-uncle at a young age next to a horse on a family farm. 

 

The other was this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holding my great-aunt's birth certificate at last, I was overwhelmed by the moment. Proof of her life, witnessed by a descendant she couldn't possibly fathom would someday exist, next to the doll house built by the brother that she never got to meet. 

 

That house was for a girl. I am a girl. I had no dolls. I made myself into one. At last and for the first time, I meet my aunt at the doll house.