Free Hooked by Chloe Shantz-Hilkes Page A

wasn’t until I was sixteen or so that she finally admitted: Okay, this is not temporary. This is the deal. But once she’d done that, it was like a done deal—nothing worth talking about. Her attitude became: Of course you’re transgendered. What’s to discuss?
    Dad to the rescue
    Between the ages of six (when my parents broke up) and thirteen, I only saw my dad one afternoon every week. I pretty much hated our get-togethers and didn’t want anything to do with him. I felt like he was a deserter and had abandoned me with my mom, whom he knew was an alcoholic. His excuse was that he didn’t want to put me through a custody battle. But my parents still get along, so this never made a lot of sense to me, because I’m not sure if there would have been a custody battle. I still have conversations with my dad where I say, “How could you do that to me? How could you leave me with her?” So for a long time, I was really mad at him and didn’t want to see him, but when I was thirteen my mom said, “All right, you have to spend one night a week with your dad.”
    What was weird is that he ended up being helpful. Whereas my mom—in her drunkenness—kind of dismissed my whole experience of being transgendered, my dad sat down with me and listened. We spent many, many hours talking about it and he worked hard to understand it. By the time I was in high school, it was clear to me that my dad was more of an ally than my mom. My mom had made it clear that she wasn’t all that interested in what was going on with me. Whether it was school or my being transgendered, she was too preoccupied—or too drunk—to pay attention. I still had to live with her, though.
    How I coped
    For the longest time, I was sure that my mom’s drinking was my fault. I think that was partly because I went to a nice private school and we lived in a nice neighborhood and all the other kids I knew basically had perfect lives. They had two parents. They did nice things like go to ice skating lessons and play soccer. So I already felt like I must be doing something wrong because my single-parent family was so different from theirs. Plus there was the fact that I was transgendered, which also made us different.
    Many addicts’ children blame themselves for their parents’ substance abuse. In the case of alcoholism, some children feel they are driving their parents to drink. In reality, the children of addicts are victims, and their parents’ behavior is out of their control.
    Above all I was certain that, if I talked to anyone about my mom’s drinking, people would find out that we were even more different than we already seemed. So most of the people I grew up with had no idea that my mom was an alcoholic.
    I think one of the ways that I dealt with the secret of my mom’s drinking was by maintaining total academic control. Even though my mom didn’t care how I did in school, it was essential to me that I get perfect grades and impress my teachers. I decided that if I couldn’t control other parts of my life, I would control school.
    I also took over many household responsibilities, so by the time I was seven I made all of our meals, bought a lot of the groceries, and even did some small repairs to broken fences and leaky faucets. On the one hand that was a burden, but on the other hand I found the responsibility comforting because it was something I could control.
    Not breaking any laws
    Growing up, I thought a lot about the fact that my mom wasn’t doing anything illegal. Also, my mom would often tell me stories about people who were really over the edge. For a while she worked with drug addicts whose children had been taken away from them, so I knew that my situation wasn’t as bad as theirs, and I felt like I didn’t have all that much to complain about. I also believed that, if I spoke up, someone might take me away from my mom—like those