Could it have felt any more awkward? I am not sure how.
I was thirteen years old and meeting my older brother for the first time. I had only come to know of Steve a week earlier. In the coming days, I would learn that he was equally unaware that he had a younger brother.
I had moved to Rosalia six months earlier, joining Mom and her new husband, Charles, on his farm a few miles outside of the small farming community located thirty-three miles south of Spokane. Mom had agreed it would be best for me to finish out my seventh-grade school year in Spokane. I had spent the last eight years of my life living with Grandma while Mom served in the military. Due to a helicopter accident, she had been medically discharged. Nine months after she returned to Spokane to live with Grandma and me, she married Charles.
The Secret in the Family Tree
Steve and I shared the same father. Mom and Dad were high school sweethearts who married a year after graduation, and I was born a year later. But unknown to me, when Mom was sixteen and a junior in high school, she had her first child with Dad. Due to her age, it was decided that Steve would be adopted by Mom’s older sister in Dallas, Texas.
For my entire life, I thought I had a cousin named Steve, and he thought he had a cousin named Glenn. Neither of us had any idea we were brothers; we had never even met. Then, a few weeks before our meeting, his adoptive parents died in a car accident. While his two siblings were taken in by his father’s family, it was decided it was best for Steve to be reunited with his birth mother.
Where was our dad during all this? No one knew. The marriage of our young parents had not gone well—a story I will provide more details on in coming posts. When I was five, they divorced. Not long after, Dad left Spokane with a girlfriend and hadn’t been heard from since. Mom tried to make it work as a single mother, but as life kept getting harder, she enlisted in the Army, and I went to live with Grandma for eight years.
Meeting Steve, Meeting Veronica
When Steve arrived at our home, I didn’t know whether to smile, shake his hand, or give him a hug. That was one source of the awkwardness. But there was another layer: while we had never met, we had spoken on the phone, and he had seen pictures of Grandma and me.
On this day, he was meeting his “cousin” Glenn, but he also knew about Veronica. He had even spoken to Veronica on the phone.
Charles, my new stepfather, had been very clear on one issue: he would not welcome me as Veronica into his home, only as Glenn. After eight years of exploring my feminine self and identity, I was suddenly living in Rosalia full-time as Glenn. Over the course of that first day, I could tell Steve was confused about how to interact with someone he largely knew as Veronica, who was now standing before him as his brother, Glenn.
It was confusing for him, and no less confusing for me. Since around the age of ten, I had lived a rather open life regarding my gender; my classmates and friends knew me simply as “different” than most boys. Over that time, I had found myself attracted to boys, and had even been kissed by a few as Veronica. One boy I had always considered to be incredibly cute was my cousin in Dallas.
A boy I now knew to be my brother.
As Steve and I spent that first day striving to overcome the awkwardness, I found it incredibly hard to think of him as a sibling. He was way too cute. In the quiet spaces of my mind, I found myself desperately wanting him to meet Veronica—to get to know me as a girl.
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