Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Yeah, she just would . . .
    ‘I am not allowed to tell you much about the Wintersons,’ said Ria, ‘The information here is confidential, but there are letters from Mrs Winterson saying that she hopes to be able to adopt a baby, and there is a note from the social worker who visited them reporting that the outside toilet is clean and in good order . . . and a little note that says of your future mum and dad, “not what one would call modern”.’
    Ria and I fall about laughing — that note was 1959. They were not modern then, how could they ever catch up when the 1960s happened?
    ‘And there's something else,’ said Ria. ‘Are you ready?’
    No. I am not ready for any of this. Let's have another drink. At that moment in comes a theatre director I know slightly — she is staying at the hotel — and soon we are all three having drinks and chatting away, and I wish I was one of those cartoon characters with a saw coming up through the floor in a big circle round my chair.
    Time passes.
    Are you ready?
    ‘There was another baby . . . before you ... a boy . . . Paul.’
    Paul? My saintly invisible brother Paul? The boy they could have had. The one who would never have drowned his doll in the pond, or filled his pyjama case with tomatoes. The Devil led us to the wrong crib. Are we back at the beginning? And was the birth certificate I found, in fact, Paul's?
    Ria doesn't know what happened to Paul, but there is a note from Mrs Winterson that I am not allowed to see, expressing great disappointment, and explaining that she had already bought Paul's baby clothes and wouldn't be able to afford a new set.
    I am just about beginning to take in that Mrs Winterson was expecting a boy, and that as she couldn't afford to waste the clothes, I would have been dressed as a boy ... So I started life not as Janet, not as Jeanette, but as Paul.
    Oh no oh no oh no, and I thought my life was all about sexual choice and feminism and and ... it turns out I began as a boy.
    Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
    There is such fierce humour in this absurd explanation for everything that my feelings for all my mothers and all my identities are suddenly joyful not fearful. Life is ridiculous. Chaotic crazy life. And I am reciting in my head the Anne Sexton poem — the last one in her collection The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). It's the one called ‘The Rowing Endeth’. She sits down with God and . . .

’On with it!’ He says and thus
    we squat on the rocks by the sea
    and play — can it be true —
    a game of poker.
    He calls me.
    I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
    He wins because He holds five aces
    A wild card had been announced
    but I had not heard it
    being in such a state of awe
    when He took out the cards and dealt.
    As He plunks down His five aces
    and I sit grinning at my royal flush,

    He starts to laugh,
    the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth
    and into mine,
    and such laughter that He doubles right over me
    laughing a Rejoice—Chorus at our two triumphs.
    Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs
    the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
    The Absurd laughs.
    Dearest dealer,
    I with my royal straight flush,
    love you so for your wild card,
    that untamable, eternal, gut—driven ha—ha
    and lucky love.

    And lucky love. Yes. Always.
    Susie tells me that mothers do everything with boy babies differently — they handle them differently and they talk to them differently. She believes that if Mrs W had psychologically prepared herself for a boy through the long process of waiting to adopt, she would not have been able to shift her internal gear when she got a girl. And I, sensitive to all signals, because I was trying to survive a loss, would be trying to negotiate what was being offered and what was being required.
    I want to say that I don't think identity or sexual identity is fixed in this way, but I think it makes sense to factor in what happened to me — especially as Mrs Winterson must have had enough confusion for both of us.
    She was always lamenting that I would not be parted from my shorts — but who put them on me in the first place?
    I felt freed by the new information but I was no nearer to finding my mother.
    I was lucky because a friend of mine has a cryptic crossword kind of mind, and he loves computers. He was determined to find me a family tree, and spent hours logged onto the ancestry site looking for clues. He targeted male relatives because men don't change their surnames.
    Eventually he