Thomas Beatie is a pregnant transgendered person who is legally recognized by the state of Oregon as a man. Ten years ago he underwent reassignment but decided to keep his female reproductive organs in case he ever wanted to have a child. Two years ago he stopped taking his testosterone and later with the help of his wife, underwent artificial insemination. According to his gynecologist, his pregnancy is a perfectly normal one. And why shouldn’t it be? He’s a woman. Genetically he is a female. No matter what a person does, the genes they are born with can’t be altered, and he is as XX as I am. So when he told Oprah that his being pregnant is a miracle, I have to respectfully disagree. It’s no more a miracle then any other women’s pregnancy regardless of the means or degree of difficulty, but it’s unsurprising that the press and pop culture media have jumped all over this farce. The world is so devoid of true miracles that it is willing to have one manufactured for it. Mr. Beatie is not technically a man but a woman, and women get pregnant. At best it’s a bit weird, but a miracle? I don’t think so.
family
Leaving Edmonton
A tip for all traveling with tykes around the holidays, dress your wee one in something seasonally fitting and adorable. For example, bunny ears and a tail. My daughter made the ears at child-minding and the tail in her kindergarten class Holy Thursday and proceeded to wear them non-stop through the rest of that day and into Good Friday when we were flying out of Edmonton to Minneapolis for holiday. She would even hop for people with all the verve of Peter Cottontail himself. Now we have flown with Katy before and she is very cute even without a costume, but no one in Customs or with the TSA has ever seemed to notice. But, as a bunny she drew smiles and cooing noises from nearly every one she encountered, proving that even these folks are human. I was beginning to wonder. It was the most pleasant near anal probing I have ever been on the receiving end of as far as airport security goes. None of the usual “mach schnell” and stealing furtive glances around myself wondering if someone was going to snatch us from line and whisk us off to some little room somewhere. (Perhaps if I wrote about them in a more upbeat and ingratiating manner I would be less nervous?)
Despite sailing through customs and security, we ended up boarding late, as there was snow in Minneapolis that delayed the inbound flight we were taking. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to fly back and forth between two destinations all day long. It makes teaching look like fun in comparison. Though the weather portrait being painted for us by the Edmonton Northwest employees looked dreary, the reality was not as bleak. Not really any colder when we finally arrived but minus the sunshine we are becoming accustomed to seeing for at least part, if not all, of our days.
We barely made the connecting flight, only to be stuck on the runway for almost as long as the actual flight took. De-icing and then waiting for our turn to take-off pushed this flight back as well. I don’t take things like this in stride as my husband does. He reminded me when I was particularly crabby that if he ends up taking the Houston job we will eventually have to fly overseas and those are much longer flights. He is a “see, it could be much worse” person and I am an “it kinda sucks now” person. I think I would have been better had I not had a child next to me kicking my legs and pelting me with a hundred questions or the Father Knows Best family sitting in the seats ahead of us loud talking with another passenger.
People who can strike up meaningless banter with their seatmates on a plane always impress me. Chuck Palahniuk refers to them as “single serving friends” in his novel Fight Club. Directly in front of me was a young college student and a thirtyish woman who looked as if she could have been that girl you knew in high school who was a cheerleader and in homecoming court and dated only the cute athletic guys from well off families. You know her, right? Well, they get plump and cut their hair into short fashionable SAHM do’s when they hit thirty and flirt with single guys nine or so years younger on planes when they are coming home from shopping jaunts to Mall of America where they met their college sorority sisters for a mad weekend of credit card maxing and mai tai’s at the Ruby Tuesday’s. They probably don’t also get hit on by the kid’s dad in the seats across the aisle whose wife is sitting right beside him looking like a fiftyish version of her though. Am I being catty? Okay, I am. I like running across these women now that I am older. I enjoy seeing what time has done to them. I wonder if they realize what has happened, or if they are just as clueless as they were back in high school. If they are, it is willful. How could you stand being the same vacuous person as an adult that you were as a teen?
Stuck as we were and as loud a competition as this father and son were in for the fashionably done up Sex in the Small Town woman, I ended up having to listen to the dad tell the same bad joke over and over, the mom recite the doings of their entire clan for that last two years – this included a complete medical history of her father and a bragging session about their well-married older daughter and finding out the kid’s name was “Bud”. Who does that to their own child?
We managed to arrive in Iowa nearly on time and with all of our luggage this trip and scored a nice vehicle from the rental people. My best friend and her family drove over from Des Moines to meet us at our hotel and we ended up swimming that night and spending time at the nearly deserted mall the next day. And despite the dire predictions, the weather was seasonable and most of the snow had melted. I have found out a few things about my family that I am wondering the impact of on me this coming year but that is stuff for another day.
I still hate flying and would much prefer driving however.
Is it game? Or match? Or maybe meet? I have no idea. It was Fan Appreciation Night at Rexall Place, which is where the Edmonton Oilers play their home games. It is games, I think. We did not see them. We watched a WHL junior game. The Oil Kings versus the Rebels, who are from Red Deer. Both teams are just about dead last in their division and when we left, after the second period (it’s period, right?) because Katy was getting tired and it was late, the Oil Kings were winning 4 to 1. That’s goals. I do know that. But not much more.
My husband, Rob, has played hockey nearly all his life, and my late husband, Will, was nearly as interested in hockey as he was in NFL football, but even with their combined instruction so far – I still can’t make heads or tails of the game. Why is some body slamming against the wall (or is it boards?) okay and other times it elicits a time-out (that’s a penalty and you sit in a box for it)? I don’t know and neither does anyone else because when I ask, I get the “it all depends” speech, which leaves me as unenlightened as ever.
Katy thoroughly enjoyed herself. She got to have popcorn and a Coke. She is almost never allowed pop (it’s pop up here not soda) and that in itself is noteworthy. There was plenty of extraneous activity to keep even the marginally interested spectator engaged. Things like the usual t-shirt giveaway every 10 minutes or so, and some blond toothy twenty-something who kept popping up on the big screen above the ice to yammer at the crowd about prizes and giveaways and contests whenever eager young people in the employ of the arena were not hurling things at the spectators. I asked Rob if he recognized the young man. Was he a local celebrity? TV or radio? Only to be reminded by my husband that we don’t watch TV. Right. Hard to keep up on the local talking heads when you listen to XM exclusively and read the newspaper to find things out about the world – mostly beyond Alberta because if you only watched the local TV stations for news, you might wonder if the rest of the world had been destroyed in some geological disaster or nuclear accident that we didn’t hear about here because, well, it didn’t happen in Alberta.
Unlike the last hockey….thing….I attended with Will about eight or nine years ago this one flew by, but mainly because I was sitting next to Katy. She had many questions about the goings on. Most of them I couldn’t answer with any degree of accuracy, but she appeared to be fine with that. She was very concerned about the officials’ safety and well being. Probably something to do with their decided lack of protective gear. She also seemed a bit worried about the players who jumped over the wall onto the ice instead of using the door. She wondered about the coaches and decided that she didn’t want to be a hockey player herself because I mistakenly referred to the intermissions between periods, as “time-outs” and she didn’t like to be timed out.
As we were leaving, I became aware that my boots were glued to the floor by some congealed liquid. Pop, no doubt but aside from this, the arena was remarkably clean. Even the washroom. If you know me, you know that I have an aversion to public washrooms due to their general state of disgustingness. The washrooms at Rexall Place have that worn out look that much of Canada’s public areas do but it was clean. There was even a washroom attendant to mop up the sink area which, if you watch Oprah at all, you know is just a cesspool of germs that makes sitting on the toilet seat about the cleanest thing a person can do in a washroom.
Katy acquired an Oil Kings flag in the gift shop on the way out and wheedled unsuccessfully for a jersey (I would have liked a t-shirt myself), and we emerged from the arena to find it was still snowing as hard as it had been when we arrived. Winter is cruel. Parking lots and sidewalks have been snow free and dry since early in the week and spring threatened. And so, it follows that snow must fall. It is only mid-March and this is Canada – as I am reminded often when I read about the warming and melting back in Iowa.
Katy is excited about her next hockey game. She has a flag to wave now and knows that if she wants something free thrown at her, she must stand up and wave or dance for the webcam like the little boy that the perky talking head spoke to at one point in his give-away madness. The boy looked about eight or nine and would dance suggestively on demand much to the delight of the crowd. Rob remarked that the kid would be much in demand by the ladies someday, provided that he was playing on that team.
I think a hockey game here and there would make a nice family outing. Like hiking and camping, it is a Canadian thing to do and we are fast forgetting our American ways in favor of our new home.
anniegirl1138 