Catalytic Converter (Pt 1)
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Catalytic Converter (Pt 1)
Catalytic Converter
Bren Linto Morrigan
2-25-22 (3 months out)
Copyright 2022
Janice throws her two bags onto the chair next to her and her coat onto the floor on the other side of her and sits down in her chair like a tiny weather system landing in the room. She almost spills her venti coffee on her hodge-podge outfit–
“Shit!” She exclaims, interrupting our conversation. Then, she dutifully pronounces her assigned statement, “I’m late!”
As usual, no one in the therapy group acknowledges her except Stein with a curt nod, as he furrows his brow more deeply, staring at Lydia over the tips of his fingers placed in prayer underneath his nose.
Lydia is a soft-bellied, serious, no bullshit, hilarious punk dyke. She is also a licensed therapist. She is probably close to 20 years older than I am and has been sober at least that long. She has a shock of thin, brown-red short hair, fashioned into that classic aging butch cut on the top of her head, missing only a fade towards the bottom, because I think a fade would be too extroverted for Lydia. And she’s wearing those comfortable, orthotic work shoes you see on nurses sometimes that are too old for her but really do complete the look.
Lydia specializes in working with queer, kinky addicts and has spent much of her adult life as a therapist working in community mental health.
Lydia also struggles greatly to find a stable romantic relationship herself and has found herself in a protracted pseudo-relationship with a woman who doesn’t love her back equally and who, frankly, has been treating her like shit for years.
“So whaddo I do, doc?” Lydia says, slumped down in her seat, her head pushed forward on her spine, which is chronically hunched.
We all snap our heads to look expectantly at Stein. He smiles and breathes in.
“Are you open to a suggestion?” He says, always one to appear to ask for consent.
“Obviously, that’s why I’m here, you schmuck,” Lydia says, scoffing. I giggle.
“Thank you,” Stein says, smiling at Lydia’s aggression and rubbing his chest. We look at him in awe of his incredible ability to take literally everything as a compliment, hoping to one day achieve these levels of spiritual enlightenment and codependency recovery ourselves.
He takes another breath and a serious look shadows his face.
“Grow your hair out,” he says, his voice absent of a smile.
I cock my head to one side, quizzically.
Lydia scrunches up her face immediately.
“Why?” she says, reflexively touching her hair.
“You are hiding the ways you are attractive and feminine. You locate the attractiveness and sexiness of being female in the women you are attracted to and disown femininity in yourself. As long as you keep doing that, you will continue to have difficulty getting into and staying in a romantic relationship.”
A hush comes over the group.
The Gender Studies major and bisexual in me freezes, shocked and perplexed.
I blink forcibly, as if I’m trying to blink away the blank spot that has spotted my brain.
I am brand new here, and Lydia is a bad-ass boss bitch, so I look to her face to understand what to make of this. I see her jerk back in her seat a bit and her eyebrows go up.
“...Okayyy…” She says slowly. It seems she is actually pondering this statement, taking it seriously. I tell myself there must be some groundwork laid here that I have missed so that Lydia is not throwing her keys at him.
“My mother suffocated me with femininity. She tried to make me into something I really never was… Wear braids, wear dresses… These things disgust me,” Lydia says. I nod aggressively. Ok, phew, I think, she is standing up to this.
“She shoved her needs down your throat rather than helping you have a healthy relationship with your own femininity. She made it about her and so you’ve pushed femininity away thinking you’re pushing your mother away,” Stein says.
Huh, I think, that weirdly makes some sense…But, isn’t that reductive? I think.
I look back to Lydia, like I’m watching a very high stakes tennis match.
The thought comes into my mind, is this what Stein thinks about all butch lesbians or just Lydia? I brush it away. This must just be about Lydia and her particular childhood.
Lydia is pondering. She touches her hair again.
Where is the bad ass? I think. The quipping Lydia of even moments ago looks small in her seat now, almost childlike.
Lydia says to Opal, who’s sitting next to her, “Do you think I look ugly?”
The voice that comes out of Lydia is very young. A lump rises in my throat to hear it.
Opal smiles her usual saccharin sweet smile and says, “No sweetie, I would never say that. I don’t think he’s saying that. I think he’s saying maybe you don’t embrace how beautiful you truly are.”
Two tears tap my cheeks instantly, and I can’t say why. That blank spot spreads across my mind again. I wipe the water off my face.
Stein looks at me, smiling. Don’t look at me, I think.
“Can you relate?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I nearly whisper, the blank spot dripping over my body. I look at Lydia.
I watch Lydia get smaller still. Is she even there? Her feet are no longer touching the ground.
I keep thinking of Lily Tomlin in the rocking chair on Sesame Street for some reason.
I will have to fill in the blanks for you later dear reader. I am 3 months out, after all, and I must circle the drain for awhile before I can tolerate really going down in there and pulling out each strand of mangled how, of now-putrid bits of us sloughed off over a sink.
Within a year, Lydia has grown her hair out a few inches to show off her curls, she has dyed it a glorious dark feminine red; she is wearing more form fitting clothing; in fact, I’ve taken her shopping and helped her pick out some outfits. The orthotic shoes are a thing of the past. Earrings sometimes adorn her.
And she is dating a man.
That’s what I said, dear reader. She is dating a man.
When she talks about him in group, it sounds clinical. It sounds experimental.
It sounds like the way straight girls talked about kissing me in college, after they’d had a couple of beers or a couple of shots or a couple of glasses of wine. Only Lydia is sober, right? She’s not under the influence.
Right?
I’m starting to forget about the girls and women now, too, though I don’t realize it. I’m not noticing how Stein always talks about my future mate as a man; he never changes it up, never throws “woman” in there. I am not noticing the way I get dressed for group therapy every Wednesday morning, the way I make sure my hair looks just so, the way I’ve grown it almost to my waist now, how I’ve come to believe that embracing and displaying a particular version of femininity is a necessary part of recovering from my “trauma.”
I am not noticing that his pulsing, insistent, constant yet subtle version of events has almost wiped my childhood clean, removing all my crushes on Sommer and Kiesha and Emily and Monique and Josie and Nikki and Kerri and Olympia and Phoebe and removing the women, Sharon, Leah, Gabby, who kissed me, who undressed me, and I them, in afternoons, in evenings, naked, sacred for me … and replaced them with a tale that my attraction to girls and later women is rooted in my mother’s boundarylessness with me growing up and that if I look more closely at myself, really, if I’m really honest with myself, I’m really attracted just to men, he says, insists, convinces. If I remove all that trauma with my mother - because I guess a boundaryless mother is “traumatic” enough to cause attraction to girls at the age of 3 - what I’m really left with is a mature, fully heterosexual, feminine, long-haired, slender, spiritually evolved, demure, contained, pleasing, and utterly controlled future wife.
For whom, I now wonder. A controlled wife for whom?
Now it’s 2022.
I still have Tray’s number in my phone, despite the fact that she moved out of state nearly a decade ago, and we have not stayed in touch. Thank you, weird data storage bots in the sky.
I’m awake now, and I want to know. I want to know what she made of what he did in is “work” with her; did she think it was part of her “recovery from trauma?” Did she think it was helpful? How would I even talk about this with her? What I observed on the outside of her, looking in, as her friend? Is it even my business? How does a person start a conversation about this? Is she still with that dude she left town with?
I text her.
“Hey, It’s Bren Morrigan. You have been on my mind of late bc stuff has been popping up from early recovery days. Would you ever be up for a chat? Would be curious about how you are and also to check out some memories I’m having from back then to see if they line up. Hope you are well either way.” I include a gratitude prayer hands emoji.
She texts right back: “Woah hey!!” And she expresses that yes she’d be psyched to catch up.
She asks where I live, and I let her know that my boo, our dog and our cats live in _____.
She responds with where she lives and says, “My wife and I just left ___.”
– and I immediately start to feel tears on my cheek. I read it again. “My wife and I…”
The last time I’d seen Tray she was in a relationship with a man and in a group with Stein. And she was just about to move away with the man she’d been dating.
She’d gone through the full Stein conversion too, in a different group than mine. No one referred to it that way, obviously. Not her, not I, no one. The thought never entered our minds, as far as I knew. She had seemed happy at the time in her new look, her new dresses, her new high-heeled shoes, her new longer, styled big hair, wearing make-up, newly dating a new cis dude. Long gone were the days of the women she fucked and the work-boot wearing, genderqueer-presenting Tray whose short messy haircut and t-shirt and flannels wardrobe always seemed to say “I have a guitar and hiking gear in my trunk, let’s go.”
It is entirely possible this was an authentic transition for Tray back then. Given the uniformity of the presentation of Stein’s women across so many groups, however, particularly the longer you were in group with him, I do reserve the right to be suspicious, even so.
Back then, I had thought, still calling myself a bisexual - not knowing I’d be letting that go too, for a time - who was I to talk? Who was I to say anything to anyone? Contained, Bren. None of your business, Bren.
…I write back, today, “<3”
And then, “That brings me joy.”
Catalytic Converter
Bren Linto Morrigan
2-25-22 (3 months out)
Copyright 2022