By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When Dena Eber’s mother died, she sat shiva twice.
She mourned for her mother and the loss of her daughter. The person she raised as Margaret was now Alex.
Alex had told Eber that she was transitioning at around the time Eber learned in 2020 that her mother had pancreatic cancer. The disease took her mother quickly. Eber was able to be there with her when she died. Alex’s transition is ongoing.
A photographer who teaches in BGSU’s School of Art, Eber processed this by making art.
“The project started because I’m always making art. I’m looking at my world and making art,” she said. “That’s what I do. I’m an artist. I can’t take that out of my body.”
Eber produced two bodies of work from that year. One, “Passage” is available in a digital version on her website is about the Philadelphia home in which she grew up. It had been in the family for 56 years. Her parents had bought it when she was born. In the months following her mother’s death Eber and her sisters, each of whom live in a different part of the country, cleared out the house, scrubbed it, in preparation for selling the property. The house that was the center of their lives was gone. Eber wondered: “What does it mean for a family not have a base? Where do we go for Thanksgiving?”
The other project, about Alex’s transition, “you refuse to believe to believe that you ever liked pink,” is available as a book from Big Cartel.
“It made sense for me to work on both projects,” Eber said. “It’s about losing my mother and losing my daughter.”
All this transpired during the pandemic. Alex was enrolled in a college in Wisconsin, but was doing their work from the kitchen table.
The book documents, in intimate ways, that first year of Alex’s transition.
“This was so poignant,” Eber said. She wanted the book to deal with that first stage
“You refuse to believe” includes intimate photos as well as text exchanges between offspring and mother that show the raw emotions of the time. Much of that springs from Alex’s transition, but some will sound familiar to any parent who has raised a young adult. Conflicts over money are common. The trauma of lost love may be complicated by fluid gender, but as Eber points out, it is universal.
“As an art professor, it’s not the first time I encountered someone transitioning,” she said, “but it was the first time happening to me. All of a sudden I understood what a mother might be going through. I felt that there was a need for that story to be out there. There’s so much out there from the perspective of the person transitioning and not so much from the perspective of the people who love them and their transition.”
Eber said that she had students whose parents who disowned them. She understands that those parents are shocked and confused. People can’t help but project what their child will become as they get older.
“You have to decide that the person you thought you raised, you have to let that go,” she said. “It’s just a switch you have to turn off. …It’s a mourning process.”
But in mourning the loss of Margaret, she “fell in love with Alex.”
She showed the book to a student now transitioning . “They cried and said, ‘my mother needs to see this.’”
She hopes that the book will help other parents experiencing this not to feel alone as well as helping other people be more empathic and understanding.
Eber was divorced shortly after Alex was born, and raised them as a single parent. She married Blair Grubb in 2019. He, as are her sisters, are supportive of Alex’s transition.
As a child, as Margaret, Alex loved hats and dresses, and the color pink, though they still deny it. But they didn’t quite fit with the other girls even as a child, Eber recalls. Though they did try to fit in by feigning a crush on “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe.
As Alex approached their teen years, Eber came to understand her child was gay. Alex told her she was gay when she was 16.
This was not a surprise. “It was a surprise that they were genderless,” she said. “They hated being a girl, but did not want to be a guy. If they could they’d remove any indication of gender from their body.”
In the book, Alex and their mother have exchanges about hormone treatment. But Alex has a severe underlying health problem that could be life threatening. When they had their breasts removed, the recovery took far, far longer. That occurred outside the period covered in the book.
In the book, Eber tells Alex frankly that she doesn’t want them to die before her. Alex responds, “I don’t want you to die.”
The end of the book includes their exchanges after Alex had seen a proof of the book before it was published.
Alex questions the terminology used. “I’m not genderqueer. Over the year I came to understand that I’m non-binary.”
“Remember,” Eber responds, ”this book unfolded in real time over a year, so we both learned a lot.”
But, Alex insists, it should reflect the person they are now.
That process of self-realization continues, and Alex expresses their desire to have their mother create another book reflecting what has happened in the three or so years since.
“I was always willing to let you take pictures of me,” they write, “and I still am.”
