Sick MICHA CA ´ RDENAS They say we’re sick. The year I gained a breast, my mother lost one to breast cancer. The year I gained my voice, my mother was losing hers to dementia, brought on by chemo and twenty years of anti-psychotics for her schizophrenia. The doctors say we’re sick Myself and my mom. We each take our pills everyday from little amber bottles. But I don’t feel sick and that gives me some feeling of solidarity, empathy, something I can’t find words for, for my mother. It makes me wonder if my mom feels sick? I remember her smile when I last visited her, in North Carolina, which I can’t do often. Laughing with her, I started to relate to her in a new way, as a person, as a femme who wore poodle skirts and now uses a wheelchair, who loved my Colombian father and his thick accent. Getting in the car, my mom held my hand in hers and said we have almost the same color of nail polish on, the day was beautiful and so painful I struggled not to cry, for her. In a way we’re all sick, but we’re all also caretakers, family members, chosen and biological, and we are all there for one another, in need or to offer help, in a society that would leave each of us in isolation, we are finding ways of existing together, interdependent, and however difficult it may be at times, with love. In an article discussing Lea T’s fall advertising campaign for Givenchy and Lady Gaga’s fashion shoot as Joe Calderone in Vogue Hommes, the New York Times declared ‘‘2010 will be remembered as the year of the transsexual’’ (Van Meter 2010). In Gaga Feminism, J. Jack Halberstam describes ‘‘the very recent rise in CA ´ RDENAS * Sick * Keywords 181