Appearances can be deceptive.  We try to keep a cheery face on a very trying situation, try to find normalcy in a surreal place.

E continues to encounter extreme setbacks and challenges, due to being “different”, such as still not receiving her birth certificate with the legal name/gender change, or her tax return with the much-needed refunds that she’s entitled to.  No doubt the sludge that is the Ohio government bureaucracy was thrown into confusion by the process, and won’t make it easy to just become a normal person moving forward.  Then there’s the health insurance from hell that will no longer cover routine medical expenses, though they certainly make her pay for it, and won’t release her from the contract.  And those are just some of the highlights of being in a marginalized fraction of a percent of a shunned community in this backward state.  That on top of still grieving for all the people and life that she was forced to lose.

But I’m not here to whine and feel sorry for ourselves.  We make the best of a bad situation.  We take each day as it comes, and work through the challenges together.  We continue to hope and plan for a modest future away from here, from all its traumatic reminders that she’s not welcome or acceptable.  We witness the political climate around us becoming even more bigoted and non-inclusive, but we hold onto the hope of just finding a quiet corner out of the limelight from which to start over, near people we love who get it.  We look forward to a future cross-country hippie adventure wherein E finally gets to discover other places not Ohio.  We try not to be defeated or stop dreaming.

So that’s our positive spin on a negative world.  It’s not very ambitious, but it’s what we’ve got.