…a reconciliation…finding .me.

Sunday, May 18th 5:20 am

Good morning everyone! It is a cool six degrees Celsius, overcast and very humid here in the Gatineau hills this fine morn. So humid in fact that I am sitting inside to write because the coolness with the help of the humidity cuts right to the bone and even my piping hot mug of mint tea couldn’t keep me warm outside!

I am being a wimp - I know.

I can’t think of what I really want to write about today so I will discuss the most obvious thing about this past week. The energetic gardening that I described in my post last week has netted me an intense case of poison ivy. Luckily I have been able to go to work but it seems I have been ‘blessed’ with a ‘systemic’ reaction to the stuff and it is essentially all over my body at this point. I know that it will eventually all go away (in two to three weeks) but after a week of putting up with it I will probably visit a doctor next week just to be on the safe side.

My bout with poison ivy annoys me because I was really starting to feel the momentum of my transition beginning to kick in. I was getting more and more confident with presenting as an androgynous female (purse, female clothes, etc…) and I was planning to get my ears pierced this weekend but then the poison ivy happened. I feel like I will lose three weeks of progress towards my transition as I wait out this ‘plague’ that has been visited upon me. If I see the doctor and he suggests prednisone to treat the poison ivy inflammations I will probably give in and take the treatment even though I cringe at the thought of a steroid entering my body at this point.

C’est la vie.

And that is really what I think I can learn from my third encounter with that vile weed. I look at the dug out garden - I got rid of all of the poison ivy in it!! - and I look at how happy my wife is because she finally has her garden back and I think - the sacrifice was worth it. Tough to believe as yet another grouping of blisters breaks out on my body and I am forced to just let the gross body hair on my hands, arms, chest and legs grow out unimpeded but I see my wife smiling and I think it was worth it.

The enforced break from moving forward on my transition has given me some time to look after other things in my life and around the house. I was planning on going out shopping this weekend as my female wardrobe is sadly lacking and my semi-female appearance makes shopping in the ladies section much easier now - what freedom! - but I am stuck at home so I have decided to do some ‘spring cleaning’.

My apartment is much smaller than ‘my share’ of the space at my wife’s place so I need to ‘unencumber’ myself by going through all my old clothes, my old stuff, my old papers - my old life - and keep only what is necessary to my continued life as Marybeth Allison. I won’t throw everything out but I will throw out a great deal of the ‘baggage’ and the accumulated detritus of the past twenty years - the stuff the I have carried around ‘just in case’ since I finished university.

It is almost like fate intervened and pulled back on my reins before I got too far ahead of myself. I really do have some things that I have to look after before I careen headlong into my transition. The downtime that I will have been ‘blessed’ with while I recover from the poison ivy should give me enough space to put to rights many of the unsettled and unresolved bundles of issues that I need to deal with so that I can start my existence as Marybeth Allison unencumbered.

It is funny but I now see my poison ivy affliction not as a curse but as a blessing.

I certainly wouldn’t have felt this way prior to hormones…

Transition is a wondrous process indeed!!

Love,

Marybeth Allison