Somebody that I Used to Know (You Didn't Have to Cut Me Off)

            The Facebook events page boasted “Family Movie Night: Moana” in the Boston Commons.

Immediately, a vivid image formed in my head: Jen and Chris, a young mother and father in their mid-thirties, are leading their two children, aged five and seven, through Boston’s downtown park. Jen is holding one hand of each of her children. Chris is carrying two folding chairs for himself and his wife and two sleeping bags for the children. Jen is also carrying something—a third child, due in two months.

The five-year-old, Emma, carries her Moana doll. Dangling by the arm, the doll’s dress beginning to tear at the seams from hours of play with Emma and her best friend, Olivia, who also has a Moana doll. They’re long-lost twin sisters, was the compromise the two girls had agreed upon, as neither could be bothered to play the part of another character. The seven-year-old, Liam, is wearing his Maui T-shirt, Maui’s trademark words “You’re welcome!” splayed across the front, with Maui himself flashing his mischievous grin. Liam is carrying a toy of his own, in this case a plastic version Maui’s magic fishhook, which flashes lights and makes sounds when he swings it. Liam and his best friend, Noah, love to take turns pretending to be Maui and playing tricks on the neighborhood kids.

Family Movie Night will be a fun-filled experience for the children. Emma will love watching her favorite Disney Princess learn to sail and navigate the world, and Liam will crack up at Maui’s antics, such as when he pees in the ocean while Moana’s hand is dipped in the water.

Chris and Jen aren’t thinking about whether or not they will enjoy the movie: This outing is for their kids, and this movie is for kids. Tomorrow, Chris and Jen are going to meet with their neighbors, another married couple with young children. These parents will talk about how Ava has taken her first steps, and how Logan will be starting pre-school at the end of the summer. Then, the two families will meet yet another set of parents and their young children for lunch at Margarita’s in Waltham for a birthday lunch: their little boy, Elijah, is turning six tomorrow. And he is starting first grade in September.

            After lunch, they will go to the playground. The six parents will sit and talk about their children while said kids, all the best of friends, play together. They are children after, all, and childhood is a time when friendship exists without any significant barriers. Chris and Jen, however, are very selective as to who they allow in their social circle: They don’t have any friends who do not have children. In fact, when they got married, they severed contact with all their single friends. It was not a formal “parting of ways”; they simply stopped answering emails and phone calls from them, hoping that they would eventually get the hint. In fact, they didn’t invite them to the wedding or even accept their friend requests on Facebook. They kept their married friends around, assuming all of them would eventually have children. But when one couple remained childless after ten years, Chris and Jen excised them as well.  We’re in a different stage of our lives, they rationalized. We’ve outgrown these other people. If they don’t have children, then we have nothing in common with them.

            The Facebook page that advertised the Moana movie night was dated last summer, but I only saw the event page a couple months ago while searching to see if there was a showing of Moana in Boston: I hadn’t seen the movie in theaters, and I was hoping to see it on a “big screen” of some sort, perhaps with a friend. It had become one of my favorite movies after I first saw it last year, so of course I had to collect some of the merchandise: I have two Maui figures, one Moana figure, and Maui and Moana rag dolls; my laptop is covered with Moana stickers that came from the children’s picture books that I had bought (mostly for the superb illustrations). It turns out that in the first week of August, there will be a showing of Moana on Revere Beach. I will most certainly go, possibly alone, but one of my New York friends, who also loves that movie and who I’ve been needling to visit me, is going to see if she come that weekend.

If my friend and I go to this movie, no doubt we will be the anomaly among an audience of mostly young, isolated parents and their children, carrying Moana dolls and Maui’s magic fishhook. The kids in attendance are in the process of forming their identities, but little do they know that it is a temporary thing. Their parents have long ago left their own identities behind: they are no longer artists, writers, dancers, musicians, nerds, jocks, or any semblance of the personas that they had assumed while growing up. They are Parents, full stop. As they eventually learned, childhood isn’t a real thing; it’s not even a dress rehearsal for adult life. It’s a fake world created by the parents for the kids until they are old enough to marry and start a family. Life does not become real until you are married with kids and recreating the fake world for the next generation to inhabit for a couple decades. Those who never figure this out and don’t put away childish things have failed a major life test.

While I only came up with the details of the story just now as I wrote this, the general idea sprouted the moment I saw the ad for Family Movie Night: Isolated parents who had long ago seemingly stepped off a spaceship on another planet with exclusive membership, a holier-than-thou society where any adult who wasn’t married with children (or with the intention of having children) was an unperson, lightyears behind on an apparently linear, unidirectional trajectory of life and beneath them in every way. Why in the world did reading an ad for a showing of Moana trigger this vivid image in my head? Because I had been in a very dark place: My friend, Ryan, had gotten into a serious relationship and I hadn’t heard from him in months. He was blatantly ignoring my Facebook messages, and I kept thinking that it was due to of something like what I’ve just described: that he had “moved on” because he was at a stage in life that I have no way of knowing if I will ever enter.

A few nights ago, Ryan and I saw each other for the first time since January. We met for dinner and had a long talk about everything that had happened. It turned out that a message that I had sent Ryan in April, after we had briefly gotten back in touch, regarding concerns about the dynamics of our relationship was something that he had not been in an appropriate state of mind to address, as he had been overwhelmed by other things in his life. He also said that he had been realizing some things about himself that he didn’t want to face and that my message was yet another example being brought to his attention.

Ryan had meant to get back to me but the longer he put it off… the longer he put it off until ultimately it would’ve been too little too late, in his mind. He compared it to someone in debt who kept putting off paying bills until finally cutting his losses and declaring bankruptcy. Ryan had absolutely no idea how hurtful these actions were until one day when I messaged him with the direct question, “Are we still friends?”. He certainly didn’t realize how they made me second-guess myself and the way I’m hardwired and the way I live my life, feeling as though I’m a child: I’m demisexual (Google it), I don’t date, and I’ve never been in a relationship.  He realizes now that his behavior was hurtful and has since apologized. The two of us agreed to meet halfway on how we communicate; if Ryan doesn’t respond to messages right away, I’ll be patient, and in turn Ryan will acknowledge my messages but let me know if he’s too busy to talk or hang out.

Sure, you might say, people isolate themselves for a few months in the beginning of a relationship, but then when things calm down a bit, their friendships return to normal. Unfortunately, I did not have that kind of luxury to make that assumption about Ryan’s lack of communication, and for the few months that he and I had been out of touch, I was racking my brain trying to figure out why this was happening. I was also convinced that I would never see or even talk to him again. Because I have a history of friends ghosting me—such as in 2008, when Melanie, my best friend of sixteen years did not invite me to her wedding and completely cut me off  —my reflexive reaction is to assume that I have done something to make the other person angry, uncomfortable, or otherwise feel that the only possible way to handle the situation is to terminate all contact with me.

The situation with Melanie was very traumatic, and between that and Ryan’s lack of responsiveness, seeing that advertisement for Family Movie Night led to the above story being planted in my head. I have had similar embittered reactions when seeing this commercial and this commercial, both of which depict parenthood in an idyllic manner. Ever since the estrangement from Melanie, I reflexively think that in general I cannot—that is, I literally am not allowed—to be friends with people in relationships, let alone be friends with people who are married and have kids. If I met the right guy, sure, I probably would get married, or at least cohabitate. But as I’m demisexual, it’s not something that’s on my radar. I can literally count on my fingers the number of people I’ve been attracted to, and obviously my being attracted to that person is only half the equation: the other person has to reciprocate. Given that I experience attraction so infrequently to begin with, the chances of a mutual interest are very low.  And I absolutely do not want to have kids (I’d have to change my mind very quickly anyway, as I’m 37).

Why should my relative lack of interest in romance and sex and my decision not to have kids preclude me from being friends with people in serious relationships? When Melanie got married and cut me off, my mother told me that married couples usually cut off their single friends (she doesn’t recall putting it in those extreme terms, but I remember vividly that she did). She also said that when you get married it is a different stage of your life. Same as when you have kids. Although she has since retracted her statements excusing Melanie’s actions and has apologized profusely, it is difficult for me to forget. My vivid memory is both a blessing and a curse. Besides, I have heard that same mantra over and over again about “different stages” from a number of people. Some people have also called me “naïve”—a term that implies social immaturity—due to my inexperience in romantic and sexual relationships. Wouldn’t the more neutral “inexperienced” do? Apparently not, because the idea that experience with romance, sex, and the desire to have children make you an adult instead of one type of adult is so ingrained in our society. It’s as if life is a linear, unidirectional pathway with milestones that are objectively on a higher tier than others. Additionally, the idea that you can either be a married adult with children or be a proverbial child yourself is a false dichotomy, yet many people fail to realize that.

The notion that relationships, marriage, and children are “stages” is one that makes me cringe. In fact, recently, literally hours before Ryan responded to my “Are we still friends?” message, I was telling somebody at work about what was going on. I sought his advice because he was talking to me about his girlfriend and some of their shared friends. My coworker started with the damned “stages” mantra. I said, “No. Puberty is a stage. Old age is a stage. These are all stages that everybody goes through as long as they live long enough.” My coworker interrupted, saying, “Everybody also falls in love.” I said, “No. No they don’t. Just listen. I’ve never been in a relationship. It’s hard to say if I ever will be. It’s naïve to say that everybody falls in love.” I then explained to him what it means to be demisexual and also said, “And as for having kids? That’s not in my future.” My coworker has one hand that has only two digits. I wish I would thought to ask him how he would feel if someone had said to him, “Everybody has ten fingers.” It is frustrating when there are things that most people take for granted that are just not part of your own life.

As for Ryan, when we had our talk, I told him about the fears and second-guessing that plagued my mind during the months that we hadn’t spoken. Was he cutting me off?, I had wondered. If so, was it because I had never been in a relationship and that made me a child in his eyes? That was a notion that I had seriously entertained during those few months. I then confessed that I felt like an overgrown child. For example, when I’m at Target I might see parents buying Moana figures for their five-year-olds, and I’m there at age 37 buying these toys for myself: I haven’t left the fake world that adults create for children before boarding the spaceship and heading to the planet where real life begins.

Ryan commented that the idea that my sexuality, relationship status, and parent status should have any impact on who I can be friends with is ridiculous. He also said that he too sometimes feels like an overgrown child. For one thing, he likes things like action figures, children’s cartoons, and video games. Although already married once, he hasn’t had children yet and members of his family are pressuring him to remarry and have children. He told me that the fact that he hasn’t done this yet makes him feel like people see him as immature. I was floored when Ryan told me this. He’s 32 years old, and in 2018 being someone who wants to have kids and to have not had them yet at age 32 is increasingly common; my cousin had her first and only child just two months before her 39^th birthday. But Ryan’s family is from the south and, presumably, they have a more conservative outlook on life: Get married and have children by a certain age, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. But why? How does it affect his family members? These aren’t parents begging for grandchildren—his parents are deceased—and his two siblings already have children. So it’s unlikely a matter of pressure to continue the family name or to quell “baby fever” (not that anybody should pressure family to do this anyway) and more likely a question of what one has to do to be an adult.  It’s attitudes like this that fuel the cynical and embittered scenario like the one I opened this blog with.

Another scenario that kept coming into my mind over the course of the few months that Ryan and I hadn’t been speaking—partially because friends and family who I’d been talking to about this put it there—was that Ryan’s girlfriend perhaps had told Ryan she didn’t want him having opposite-sex friends. Initially, I dismissed the idea as ridiculous: In 2018? In Boston? And how threatening to their relationship would I, an androgynous, autistic, almost-asexual person, be? But since so many people suggested it, I truly began to believe it. What then? Should I stop making friends with heterosexual guys in case they get into relationships, because then they have to cut off their opposite-sex friends? And what if one partner of an opposite-sex relationship is bisexual? No friends for that person because everyone is a potential sex partners? Should I join the polyamorous community where there would likely be no politics involving the sex of the person you’re friends with? Ryan told me that this was another red herring: his girlfriend trusted him. She not only knows who I am but also knows that Ryan has several friends who are women. It’s not an issue.

What it ultimately came down to was that my message to Ryan about my concerns about our friendship was poorly-timed, and Ryan’s judgment of how to handle it was reckless. It had nothing to do with my sexuality, my lifestyle, Ryan’s girlfriend being territorial, or Ryan feeling like he was in a “different stage of his life” and that I was immature compared to him. While I know logically that anybody who writes me off as a friend because of my being single/childless childfree/anything else that precludes societal-expected adulthood is an ignorant person who is not worth my time, it’s difficult for me to put that into practice. The idea of somebody cutting off their single friends once they marry is cliché for a reason. After hearing stories like this so many times, having had it happen to me once and my fearing that it had happened to me yet again, eventually I begin to ask if I’m the one with the problem rather than conclude that a remarkable number of people are ignorant, inconsiderate, and limited.

I want to emphasize that when I talk about what happened with Melanie, my best friend of sixteen years, and what I thought was happening with Ryan, I am not talking about a natural, gradual drifting apart. I am talking about the sudden and deliberate excision of the other person from their life once they marry, an exclusionary action so severe that the former friends are not even connected on social media: Ten years ago, Melanie rejected my friend request on the then-popular MySpace (to my knowledge she is not on Facebook). I realize that when your friends marry and have children, of course you are not going to see them as frequently and that you have to adjust certain dynamics of the relationship. When my cousin Melinda had her child, I fully expected that whenever I hang out with Melinda her son will be there, at least until he is old enough to be alone more of the time. So I not only have adapted, but I have made an effort to establish a relationship with this child. He is only 3 years old, and I don’t think he’s seen me enough to recognize me. But when I do see him, I read to him and play with him, and not just because he is family either. I would adapt in this way even if a non-relative had a child.

Now, if only society would adapt a bit more.

I Am Moana!

Jeez, it's been another long time since I've posted one of these. Once again, I'm sorry! Updates: My job is going well. I also had my surgery to coil and stent my aneurysm last September, and I'm going for a follow-up angiogram in about a month to make sure everything is healing properly.

As you can see, the title of the blog posts alludes to the name of a song in the Disney movie Moana and, of course, the movie Moana itself. The other day, I had a really interesting-- and frustrating-- thread about this movie. It started when I posted this:

One of my favorite things about "Moana" is that it's a buddies movie with a guy and a girl. Yes, believe it or not, a guy and a girl over the age of 12 can hang out and even be alone on a boat for several weeks without falling in love (despite the jokes that [friend's name here] and I make about it). All too many movies that have a woman as a main character either portray her as someone who is an "accessory" to the man or, if she's the absolute main character, she has to fall in love with a man because, vagina. It's almost always obligatory when a woman is an absolute main character. Maui and Moana become best friends. They hug, they high five (yeah yeah, that wasn't around thousands of years ago, but it's Disney; what do you want?), they act silly in a way that's non-flirtatious.And I don't know anything about ancient Polynesian cultures, but I have heard that aboriginal cultures in general were often more egalitarian than the Christian-dominated cultures that followed in the centuries to come. So why not?

One guy, I'll just call him "G", wrote this in response:

G: So, actually you say that desire and bodily needs are rooted in christianity?I highly doubt that...
Me: No that is absolutely not what I said.
G: You've praised a movie for the lack of lust in it and then wrote, abo [sic] cultures like Moana's were more egalitarian than Christian culture. That is what you said.But let's flip the story, why is it a bad thing that men and women have basic needs and those needs are being addressed? The Heroine also eats and goes to the toilet sometimes.
Well, for the love part, I tend to agree with you, she doesn't have to fall in love to fulfill her needs, but I guess I'd prefer this romantic way rather than just showing her random copulating with strangers.Well, for the love part, I tend to agree with you, she doesn't have to fall in love to fulfill her needs, but I guess I'd prefer this romantic way rather than just showing her random copulating with strangers.
Me: No you are missing the point. Movies with men as main characters have them sometimes falling in love, sometimes not. If the main character is a woman, she has to fall in love. In other words, it’s woman [sic] being defined in relation to men.

The egalitarian stuff I was talking about was in reference to that they went on an adventure together that a woman wouldn’t typically go on, at least not in Christian dominated cultures over the past several centuries
The egalitarian stuff I was talking about was in reference to that they went on an adventure together that a woman wouldn’t typically go on, at least not in Christian dominated cultures over the past several centuries

What is frustrating is how often I have had this type of conversation with people and how often they misunderstand it. It's been going on since childhood. I thought my opening post was clear, but as you can see I had to clarify it. And the very idea that a movie not involving a man needing to get laid or a woman needing a man to love her (sadly, the formula for many romance movies is just that) is a good thing seems to be alien to so many people. I might as well be saying, "Wow, finally, a movie where somebody doesn't breath oxygen!" 

There are a lot of things that I appreciate about Moana, and the fact that they didn't chuck in a love story is one of them, for the reasons I stated above. I am sure the only reasons that the writers didn't put in a love story are: 

a) because it was irrelevant to the plot and 

b) because in today's world of Internet predators the idea of a 16-year-old falling in love with an ageless man (who is presented as if he is in his mid-twenties, perhaps) would just be inappropriate (although maybe there was a little bit of a feminist consciousness when the story was written). 

But let's look at it for a moment as if this were a real scenario. Why isn't Moana falling in love with Maui? I mean, they have been alone together on that boat for weeks! Surely some primal instinct would take over, right? Why didn't she fall in love? I don't know. Maybe she's gay. Maybe she's asexual. Maybe her sexuality hasn't awoken yet.

Or maybe Moana IS heterosexual and, gasp, there was just no sexual tension between her and Maui, and why is really not important.Yes, believe it or not, this is possible. I'm heterosexual but I have a lot of friends who are guys and the sexual tension between us is zero. We might high-five or hug (depending on the person and my relationship with them) but that's as far as it will go or ever will go, even if in the snowball's chance in hell that we end up stranded on a boat together for several weeks. This may be because I'm demisexual (Google it) but I think there are a lot of heterosexual opposite-sex friends who don't encounter sexual tension when they spend time together. I remember being frustrated as a kid when my mom would say that in every interaction between heterosexual people of the opposite sex, there is always going to be some level of sexual tension. No. That's not true. For some people, yes, it absolutely is true. Some guys see an attractive woman and their mind doesn't even register it. Others immediately think, "Oh she's attractive." Others still within a nanosecond of seeing an attractive woman think, "I want to fuck her." And this is just the cisgender man side. Cisgender women? Same deal. What about gay cisgender men and gay cisgender women? Probably even more complicated when we are talking about transgender and gender non-binary people.

I guess what frustrates me the most is when I praise Moana and other movies for having guys and girls being close, non-sexual friends, other people are hearing me say that sex is bad. Or they think I have a personal sexual problem. But what I really am praising is the visibility of other types of relationships, that sex isn't the be-all-and-end-all of human interaction. I'm praising the visibility of someone who might be gay. Or asexual. Or not sure yet. Or just praising the idea that heterosexual people can spend time alone without wanting to do each other. Is it really that complicated? 

While I do think the whole idea of women being defined in relation to men is still a pervasive problem in film, I also think it is happening less and less. Moana is one film that is finally breaking that mold. Moreover, I think in terms of film characters she is a good role model for young girls. She is strong and determined and independent. And as for Maui? Yeah, he teaches Moana wayfinding, but he also learns a few things from Moana. How often do you see men learning from women in movies?

The Long Silence, Part 1: Writing to Survive

The Silence

The long silence began at age eleven and continued until I was twenty-eight.

For almost twenty years, my parents- Mom especially- unwittingly sent the message that everything about me was wrong. In particular, my self-identification as a tomboy and corresponding gender expression were subject to extreme scrutiny which in turn was a huge source of mental anguish for me.

As I entered adolescence,  Mom began pressuring me to mature into a "young lady". She didn't understand why I so vehemently refused to wear low-cut shirts, short shorts, and other "girly" clothes like the rest of the girls. I tried telling her that I was a tomboy-- I figured it was just another accepted way of being. I didn't realize that it was something that most people considered a stage, something that I was expected to outgrow. I should mention that when I called myself a tomboy, I didn't mean in the tongue-in-cheek way that some people use it when saying, "Oh, I like sports, I'm a tomboy" (I hated sports at that time, anyway). I meant that it was where I fell on the gender spectrum (though such terms did not yet exist, or were at least not well-known) and Mom kept telling me that I was growing up and needed to learn how to be more feminine. We often got into intense fights that left me feeling scarred.

Eventually, it seemed clear that the word "tomboy" was a dirty word-- when Mom did say "tomboy" it was laced with disdain. Time passed. I was 13 years old. Then I was 14 years old. Then 15, 16, 17... and I was not outgrowing it. I knew that I never would. But how in the world could I tell Mom this? She sounded so damn sure that she was right and that I would "change my mind someday". Even though I was sure that I was right and that Mom just didn't get it, I lived in abject terror that I would have to eventually change and conform. After all, it's a tired cliché that children grow up to say, "Mom was right. And I thought I knew everything." If that didn't happen, what would it say about me?

Even though Mom understands better now, I don't think she knew how much mental anguish this whole thing caused me. It was something I thought quite deeply about as I suffered in silence, knowing that I couldn't talk to them about my thoughts, and I don't think she or Dad were even remotely aware of it. They certainly didn't know that I wrote about it. It seems that they just saw me as a fish that was aimlessly swimming around, crashing into the side of the fishbowl.


Writing Throughout the Silence

How in the world could I handle this series of rejections from my own parents who honestly and sincerely thought they were helping me? I wrote stories. The great thing about writing is that you can say what you want without people interrupting you to question, correct, or criticize. This cathartic writing started when I was twelve. Maybe when my parents read this blog post, they'll realize how deeply I was thinking about certain issues when they dismissed my viewpoint and awareness of who I was as me not understanding the world and just being a teenager who thought she knew everything.  

Cathartic Writing #1: A String of Events

I often came up with odd ideas for cartoon characters, stories, and jokes. If I showed them to my mother, she got upset about everything that was off-color in any way. She always threw in my sex as a factor as to why such ideas were inappropriate for me to write about and draw. It became clear that I could not predict what would set her off, so I stopped showing her anything for a decade. I felt asphyxiated in so many ways that seemed related to-- to put it bluntly-- what was between my legs. 

I wrote and illustrated a story, A String of Events, in which a character goes through a similar asphyxiation. I had a cartoon series, Radioactive Squirrel, which was my answer to the children's cartoon Darkwing Duck. Just like in Darkwing Duck, Radioactive Squirrel has an adopted tomboy daughter, in this case a girl named Slick. There are some differences: Radioactive Squirrel's brother/sidekick, Flash, has an adopted son named Spunkster. Coonster, Radioactive Squirrel's pilot (a raccoon, of course), has an adopted daughter named Ghouler, who is a bit like Wednesday from The Addams Family. All these characters live together.

In this installment of my series, Slick gets the lead role in the school play. This role is in a Western that requires her to use a gun. Radioactive Squirrel does not want Slick to be in such a role in the play because he thinks it's inappropriate for girls. But she tricks him into thinking that she has been assigned another role. On opening night, a movie director sees the show and invites Slick for the lead role in his upcoming movie.  Radioactive Squirrel, already fuming that Slick has tricked him, does not want her to be in the movie because it might be too violent, have foul language, and make her play a role that is too masculine. Flash takes matters into his own hands, allowing Slick to be in the movie.  

Here is a scene from the story, with minor grammatical errors and all. The dialogue from Radioactive's mouth is eerily similar to the kinds of things my mother said-- and how she said them. You'll see Radioactive stutters from his upset in one line:

"Well, I got the leading part in the school play! They called me 'one heck of an actress'!" [said Slick]

"Really?" said Radioactive. "Who do you get to be? A princess? An angel?"

"No," said Slick. "This is a play about the old west. I am a teenage cow-girl who fights a desperado and saves the day."

"WHAT?!" said Radioactive. "My little girl has to be a-a fighter! That is not suitable for a little ten year old girl!"

"BUT DAD!" said Slick. "That part required a girl, and Ghouler gets to be the phantom who is the desperado's assistant!"

"I don't care what Ghouler has! Besides, for her, the phantom part is very inappropriate! But I won't say anything to Coonster, because Ghouler is not my daughter and you are! Besides, for them to decide a girl should get this part is very wrong!"

If you think I didn't know what I was doing, the title page of this story reads "This is dedicated to those who feel the need to blow off a little steam." 

Cathartic Writing #2: All Right Now

Okay, so I'm probably not the first kid to write about their parents' yelling into a story as a way to vent. But these feelings about gender policing did not go away, despite Mom's insistence that I would change my mind as I grew older. Not only did they not go away, but they also grew more complex. As my teen years rolled by, it became increasingly clear to me that I was never going to feel or even want to be more feminine, no matter what Mom said.  But I felt frightened, wondering if she was right. I mean, look at all the movies about tomboys. In Now and Then, for example, the tough tomboy, Roberta, becomes feminine and dresses girly as soon as she gets her first crush. Mom often told me that I was the only girl who didn't want to be feminine. My cousin, Melinda, who was well-read in gender issues, assured me that it was not uncommon, that I was not alone, and that some people are actually do more than gender-bend, and are actually transgender. Mom's response when I worked up the nerve to tell her this? "Melinda has a lot of radical beliefs."

Silence reinforced, time to write.

What if, I thought, there was a story where a tomboy didn't turn into a princess after getting her first crush? What if, instead, the person in question understood her, just like my friend Jonas (a camp counselor and my first crush) did? What if he became her friend, just like Jonas did?

The story, which takes place in the mid-'80s, features Rachel, a 12-year-old tomboy who spends time primarily with boys (something I wish I had done as I probably could have been spared a lot of the duplicitousness of teen girl friendships). Rachel's mother, who had accepted her tomboy ways over the years, suddenly starts pressuring her to change. She wants her to dress more feminine, act more feminine, and play with girls-- not other tomboys, but feminine girls. Much as I found sanctuary at my left-leaning summer camp, Rachel finds sanctuary at the house of her best friend, Jake. She develops a crush on Jake's 23-year-old brother, Bernie. In this story, the two families have known each other for her entire life, so it is a bit odd that Rachel suddenly gets this crush. But get it she does, and she finds herself spending hours talking to Bernie about the way her mother keeps pressuring her to change. She says many of the same things I said to my cousin and camp friends at the time (sounding more 16, the age I was when I wrote the first draft, than 12). Unfortunately, I can't find the original draft (though I'm sure it's on a data CD somewhere), but here is some dialogue from another draft I wrote a year later:

“You need to talk to your parents. You can’t continue having fun this summer if you have to do it behind their backs.” [said Bernie]

“I can’t talk. They won’t listen.”

           

“You don’t know that.”

            

“Tried it in the past. Never worked. Besides, I feel almost obligated to their views.”

Yes, I wrote that as a teenager. This isn't a bit of 20/20 hindsight on my part; it is what I was thinking at the time. I also said these things to my friends from camp and to my cousin. Yes, I did indeed say that I felt obligated to my mother's views. Again, when you are a kid and one of your parents sounds so damned sure, you question your own sanity even though you know that you will never change your position on a particular issue. And on top of that, many adults, such as my teachers, often commented that people get more conservative as they get older--  I didn't realize this meant fiscally conservative. I thought it meant socially conservative. That also greatly terrified me, especially when Dad would say things like, "What are you even fighting for?" as if I was a rebel without a cause.

Here's another scene, which I think aptly illustrates the discomfort I felt when my parents got on my case about gender issues. And the very last paragraph bluntly illustrates just why I thought enforced gender roles were absurd, and what it ultimately came down to:

“Rachel,” said my mother as my father turned onto Solar Drive to exit the development. “I want to see you act like a lady tonight.”

I looked back at the children on Sunset Drive. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I willed my heart not to race.

“It means you are to behave like a lady. You are to keep your voice down and you are not to play physical games with Jake.”

 “Whatever,” I said, just to keep her happy, though there were no guarantees.

“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” said my father. “She and I are looking out for you and with your best interests in mind.”

I said nothing. I concentrated on my breathing pattern. I would talk to Jake when I got to the harbor. He would laugh with me and let me get some frustration out of my system.

I didn’t get it, anyway. Why wouldn’t my parents just let me be who I was? I liked being loud with boys. I liked wrestling with Jake. I liked skateboarding. I liked being with my friends and they liked being with me.

But why? Why was it that last summer, I was allowed to wrestle and allowed to be loud? Why was it that now that I had a thick bushel of pubic hair and what I called “Japan Flag Syndrome” I had to limit my behavior? Why?

And a similar one:

“You can’t let your reproductive system constantly determine your behavior,” I said.

It confused me even more when other kids at my camp supported me and my gender expression (which without Mom there to scrutinize me sometimes even included flattening my chest with sports bras). They also said things like, "Your parents should be supporting you in your beliefs." Many girls didn't even shave their legs because they didn't believe in it, and their parents supported them. I thought to myself, Would Mom think these other kids' parents are too permissive? That they're bad parents? That they're radical? That they're not bringing their kids up right? And then of course I began to wonder if my parents were just plain conservative. In fact, I remember thinking that whether gender-bending was okay was a controversial issue, every bit as controversial as euthanasia, for example.

This line from Rachel came straight from my thoughts about my family: 

"...and here I am cooped up in this old-fashioned Victorian household!”

And another:

"You don’t even know me. I am a human being, and human beings make mistakes. Deep down I am a good person, and I also think that my degree of femininity is irrelevant and none of your business.”

There was Rachel, saying things to her parents and others that I could rarely work up the nerve to say to my parents.

Incidentally, I still want to write a novel with these characters, but I also want to come up with a different storyline.


Cathartic Writing #3: Survival of the Fittest

By the time I was 17, my thoughts about gender issues became even more complex. It was devastating to hear Mom tell me over and over that I had to start being more feminine, that someday I'd change my mind about these issues, bla bla bla. I don't think she knew just how deeply I was thinking about these things. I thought about them so deeply that I came to the conclusion that the reason people are so hung up on gender roles is based on the instinct to reproduce (years later I would learn that this sort of thing is called evolutionary psychology). Thus I came up with a story to illustrate this absurdity and how it hurts people. I wanted to write it as a dystopian graphic novel but unfortunately I had a really hard time with story structure and never finished the script, let alone a full fledged graphic novel. This is the synopsis of the story (which perhaps I will write someday, but I suspect a similar tale has been told), Survival of the Fittest:

Experimental mice live a secret science lab miles below the Earth's surface and, despite the experiments, have pretty decent lives. They are even friends with the cat that lives in the lab. Then there is a nuclear war that annihilates the entire human race, except the scientists in the lab. They realize that they are probably the only humans left and commit suicide. The mice realize that they, too, are likely the only mice left. But they try to figure out a way to both survive and repopulate their species.

In order of the species to continue, difficult decisions have to be made since resources are limited. First thing's first: The mice eat the bodies of the dead scientists. Soon, the food in the laboratory kitchen is gone as well, and the mice resort to killing and eating the cat. The main character, a teenage mouse named Renata (I chose the name because it means "rebirth"), can see where this is going, and is already horrified that the mice have killed the cat for food.

The Enforcers, a group of Nazi-like mice, comes to power. Renata's own 12-year-old brother even joins this group. In order to ensure reproduction and that the mice are well fed, the Enforcers kill for food anybody who cannot reproduce-- that includes mice that have passed reproductive age, mice who are gay, and mice who do not fit into their gender roles (because how can you reproduce if someone of the opposite sex doesn't even know WHAT sex you are?). Mice are pressured to start procreating as soon as they reach reproductive age.

Renata knows that this cannot end well, that ultimately everybody will be killed, not just those deemed "unfit". She leaves the lab and sets out on a two-week journey. She eventually finds a patch of land that was not affected by the nuclear war. There is some food and water-- enough to start over. So she journeys back to the lab to tell everybody. But when she gets there, her worst fears are confirmed-- just about everybody has been killed in the constant warring. She sees a mouse kill her brother, and in a fit of rage she grabs a gun and kills that mouse. She looks around and sees that she is literally the only one left. Exhausted and ultimately resigned, she carves a stone tablet that says "Never, ever forget." And then she turns the gun on herself.

Final Thoughts

It hurt that my parents couldn't see that I was a deep thinker and that I intensely entertained many issues. It seems that they just saw the potpourri of superficial behaviors and points of view as evidence of me not understanding the world rather than simply evidence of who I was. I know what you're thinking-- what if I had shown my parents the stories I had written? It sounds like a good idea, right? The written word is powerful, after all. In fact, transgender musician Ryan Cassata wrote this song to try to get it through to his father that he wasn't just going through a phase, that his identity as a boy was there to stay. But, as I've stated before, I was afraid to show Mom any of my stories. Secondly, I don't think she was ready to hear it. I don't think she would have understood what I was trying to tell her and what kind of mental anguish I was experiencing any better than before. If anything, I think it would have raised more questions than answers, and that's just a shame.

Fortunately, some people did understand what I wanted to say, and they listened. I remember in the summer of 1998 being up until 3 AM with one of my counselors, telling her about Survival of the Fittest and the ideas behind it. I recall that she told me that she was going to think about this story for days, because it really gave her pause. Yes, at age seventeen, I got someone seven years older than me to think deeply about something that she hadn't thought of before. She could see that I was a deep thinker. Many of my peers at camp also knew I was a deep thinker, and my old friend Jenna knew this as well. I know they appreciated that about me and just how deeply I thought about certain issues.

I can only hope now that my parents also appreciate it.