Walking Between Worlds:

March 1, 2010 at 1:11 am (Walking Between Worlds) (butches, lesbianism, Scintillectual)

The First Lesson:

When I was first starting to school, my best friend was the girl next door.  She was a year older than me and was blessed with olive skin and dark brown eyes and hair.  I thought she was beautiful.  At the time of this story, I was in First Grade and she was in Second Grade.  It took me years to realize she had been my first love and the first girl to break my little boi heart.  What broke my heart was not that she did not love me as I lusted for-loved her, but rather the hard lesson she handed me and the decade or so it took for me to process it.  It happened this way:

After school, Mary [or so we’ll call her] and I would play.  Often, as kids do, we played house.  One day, we were playing house and I walked into the door of my room announcing “Hi, honey; I’m home.”  I walked into her open arms–she was waiting to hug me–and kissed her firmly on the cheek.  This was clearly a mistake.  She nearly shrieked an inarticulate sound similar to “yuck” and jumped away from me.  Immediately, I dropped my hands to my side, puffed up a bit and barked back:  What???

“You really kissed me!” she huffed.  I was stunned and my confusion was over-taking me.  It seemed so clear to me; there was nothing to do but point out the obvious.

“Of course, I did;” I said.  “I’m the Daddy.”  Her face was set firm, her hands were on her hips and she proceeded to explain to me what I had done wrong as if I were too stupid to get it–which, clearly, I was.  “You are a girl,” she advised me.  I confirmed that I knew that.  And, as if it would correct the misunderstanding and make all well with the world again, I asserted again:  but I’m the Daddy.  She, then, droned on to school me on the fact that girls could not be the “Daddy” and should never, ever, ever kiss each other; it was wrong.  I asked the obvious question little bois ask their older women:  but, why?  Then I asked “who says?”  I even stated the obvious again:  If we say I’m the Daddy, then I am.  None of this derailed her.  She was right and I was wrong.  It was never spoken of again.

I accepted what she told me.  She was, after all, older and wiser.   But, there was this voice in my head that kept saying she was wrong, that the world really was the way it seemed to me at the time.  I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but could not find the words to make sense of it all.  In my mind, it was simple and clear:  yes; I was a girl, but I could still be the daddy if I wanted and I could kiss girls if I wanted.  It was that simple.  I said nothing, however.  I remained quiet.  For a long, long time. 

I am not sure exactly what I thought then about gender and sexual identity.  What I do know is that being a boy or a girl did not seem quite solid to me.  I knew the difference between boys and girls.  I had a baby brother who I helped change and bathe.  I had been peed on more than once in the process.  All that was pretty clear.  In some way, however, it was as if she had robbed me of something essential.  I had believed, on some level, that if I wanted to be boy-like [and possibly actually be a boy], I could.  That it was somehow up to me and had to do with what made me comfortable, what felt normal.  I was sure that if I wanted to kiss girls rather than boys, that was fine and a viable option.  She thought she was correcting some error in my thinking.  What she was doing, in fact, was teaching me about the world in which I lived.  My response was to go inward, to crawl into a world inside myself where no one knew what I really thought or felt about anything.  In that interior world, in that period of hours or days, I began to believe that there was something wrong with me because nothing she said felt like it applied to me or made sense.  In a child’s mind, it is not the world that is wrong when things don’t fit; it is the child.

I never forgot that day.  I never forgot the lesson.  It did rob me [for a time] of something essential–my image of myself, my ability to imagine myself and manifest that image.  It was one of those defining moments that are like literary foreshadowing.  As I aged, the androgyny became more pronounced, as did my knowledge that I was not interested in boys.  There were countless small and large events connected to my appearance, my interest in traditionally male hobbies and behavior, and my lack of interest in boys, that reinforced that first lesson.  It was a hard road that brought me here.  But, given the choice, I would not change it.  I like the self that emerged.

I can kiss girls if I want to and I enjoy it.  I can be the Daddy if I want and I like it.  So, to Mary I say:  I frequently kiss a woman who likes it when I am the Daddy. I love her with all my heart.  It is no longer broken.  She calls me her sweet Baby Boi.  And, every time she does, I am healed.