For My Mommy and Me

I have a picture of me when I was about 5 or 6. It’s Christmas day, and I am wearing a beautiful tulle dress with a red ribbon around my waist. (Or so my mother told me at least 500 times.) It is almost impossible to see the dress in the picture because over this beautiful new Christmas dress is an entire cowgirl outfit (gun holster, guns and all), on my head a cowgirl hat, and on my feet are my new cowgirl boots. My new Christmas shiny patent leather Mary Jane shoes are upside down and discarded in front of me. Apparently, I refused to wear my new Christmas dress unless I was allowed to wear my cowgirl outfit over it. (Or so my mother told me at least 500 times.)

My mother wanted a doll-child to dress up. It was the last thing I wanted. How was I supposed to run and play with my brothers and my cousins if I had to worry about falling over and exposing my underwear? And sit with my ankles crossed??? I was too fat for that. My ankles never cooperated, and always at the moment I least expected it, my little leg muscles would get so tired from holding my thighs together that my ankles would explode away from each other as if they had let out the biggest ankle sneeze in the world. Now THAT was embarrassing.

I was a little fat girl. Dresses made me feel ridiculous. I loved to dance, but standing around in ballet class in a tutu with all those little tiny girls…well, let’s just say…I was the elephant in the room.

But I think my size was more about my rejection of the feminine than my desire to eat. My mother was very feminine and pretty, tough to compete with when you feel like a gargoyle. But more than that, I saw my mother as the doll she wanted me to be… a very fragile porcelain doll. I was afraid she could break at any minute.

My mother cried a lot at home. She was quite gay and lively around others, but at home…not so much. She was an outline of a person. I never really knew what colors she had inside. Everything was deferred to my father, everything was done for my father, everything was blamed on my father. (Don’t feel too sorry for him. He was a handful.)

Although I did not understand it at the time, my mother was the product of her mother, and her mother’s mother before her and so on. My mother got a lot of juice around her femininity because of her looks and her social personality, but now I realize she was stuck in it. Her strong identification with the definition of what it was to be feminine at that time made her very unhappy, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled. She enjoyed the three of us, my brothers and I, but motherhood was not really what she wanted. She wanted to go out and be “someone.” She wanted what being male offered but she was so entrenched in societal expectation that I don’t think she knew how to get out or, worse, who she would be if she did.

So maybe I became a man for my mommy and me.