NOM

I got to spend a few hours with family. It was pleasant. My grandmother only misgendered me a couple of times.

I'm supportive of my trans and non binary kids. I still misgender them now and then after years of trying. It's hard to overcome the prior years of language in my head. My career was in writing and i have a minor in German where nouns are all gendered in various ways.i have a lot of programming in my head about how words and gender go together.

That I'm trying seems to be what matters to my kids.

I'm sorry to hear your grandmother did that to you. Was it actually pleasant at times?

My family had our annual advent gathering recently. It was a mixed experience.

It is hard to remember a significant change after years of knowing someone as a different name or gender. I had a friend who just changed the name he went by, and it was hard to adjust to the new name. And now I am struggling to remember to address my daughter in law’s sibling by her new gender. What makes it harder is she is only part way through transitioning, and her own parents still think of her as their oldest son. So, around THEM, she is still he.

So, unless she is mis-gendering you on purpose because she is refusing to accept the change, just let it go and don’t let it hurt your feelings. It is just like my husband is constantly calling our grandson by his uncle’s name it is the kind of slip old people make out of habit. And to be fair, this grandson is more like our son, his uncle, than he is to his dad, or our son’s own son is like his dad. If you looked at family pictures, you would assign this grandson to the wrong parents.)

We also had our family Christmas party this weekend, and the only problem was that half to 3/4 of the people were out sick, or didn’t come because of sick housemates. Our DIL is about a week out of the hospital and they are still working to get her system balanced on meds. The emergency is past, but she is still too weak to walk. Our SIL is just recovering from the surgery to fix the broken blood vessels in his digestive system, after several blood vessels ruptured due to liver damage that is basically the result of war injuries aggravated by the stress of PTSD. He is not even one week out of the hospital. His daughter and granddaughter and significant other who live with them refuse to accept the step family, so if he wasn’t coming neither were they. The other couple living with my daughter and SIL, SIL’s best friend, he is stage 3 or 4 cancer, and he couldn’t come. (They would be homeless if D & SIL hadn’t taken them in.) My brother (never married) and sister (also never married) were both out because of Covid. So, my sisters 20 year roommate also didn’t come because my sister totaled her car and roommates truck won’t make it that far. Sister not quite recovered from Covid/pneumonia and brother just barely sick but tested positive. My son is just recovering from mono, which drained his ability to fight other infections and so now he has shingles. Our adult grandson wasn’t feeling well, and with everything else going around, he decided not to spread whatever he has. And so his significant other didn’t come without him. Anyway, smallest Christmas party in 20 years.

She got it right eventually. That is what is important to me. It was otherwise quite pleasant.

For a good part of the world, the extended family is still the basic unit. In the US, 16.1% of the population lives in a three-generation household.