So when I was a little kid, my mother used to pick out all my clothes for me. That's not unusual at that age, I suppose; we're talking really little, before I went to school. However, the clothes she picked weren't the sort of clothes I think I'd have picked for myself, given the choice. They were pastel-colored, often pink, almost invariably frilly. She rarely dressed me in pants, preferring to put me in dresses or skirts. Sometimes she picked out matching outfits for the two of us (or as close as you can come to matching outfits for a three-year-old and a thirty-year-old).
Two little boys lived across the street from us. One was my age and the other was a couple years older. I was fascinated with them, because they got to do all this stuff I couldn't do. They were always climbing trees and running around and playing with sticks like they were swords. They played rough sometimes and got their clothes ripped or dirty. If I'd ever messed up my clothes like that, I've no doubt I would have been put in time-out. The littlest boy had a trike; his older brother had a bike. I used to watch them riding around and wish I could join them. Once I asked my mother if I could get a bike or a trike like the boys across the street had. "Don't be silly, Jackie," she told me. "You'd fall and skin your knees. You wouldn't like that."
She was always doing things like that; denying me things I wanted by telling me I didn't want them.
When I started kindergarten, there was a little girl with short hair, like a boy's hair. I wanted to have my hair cut like hers, but my mother told me I couldn't. "Oh, Jackie, she probably had to have her head shaved because she caught lice."
Maybe that little girl did have lice, but she also got to do other things I didn't get to do. She wore pants and t-shirts every day and never wore pink and roughhoused around like a boy. I had always been told I couldn't play rough, so instead I stood in the corner of the schoolyard trying not to get in trouble. I liked watching that girl, though. I was sort of in awe of her yet confused by her at the same time, because I didn't understand how she could be a girl and yet act like a boy. My mother taught me that boys acted a certain way and girls acted a certain way and that was just how it was, but this little girl seemed to stand in contradiction to all that.
In retrospect, maybe that girl was my first crush. I can't remember my feelings toward her clearly enough to be sure.
I was quiet in school. I was too shy to speak up, I think, because my mother always told me what my own opinions were. The problem is, when someone tells you something often enough — no matter how ridiculous it is, no matter if you start off knowing it to be false — eventually you start believing them. On top of that, I was a little kid, and she was my mother, and I trusted her in the way that little kids always trust their mothers.
Most of my teachers didn't seem to notice how subdued I was. They probably liked it; it made it easier for them to do their jobs. However, I did have a few teachers come up to me in private to talk to me, especially as I got older. The speech was always the same: "You're a smart girl, Jackie, why aren't you participating more in class? You could do so much if you pushed yourself a little harder."
Eventually I started to listen to them. I got more confident talking in class, and talking to other kids, voicing opinions that were mine and not my mother's. I even started to act a little more tomboyish, but only when I was safely out from under my mother's gaze. I wouldn't have dared to misbehave in her presence, and in her mind doing anything that didn't befit a young lady was misbehaving.
Really, my mother's problem is that she expects me to be just like her. I don't think she has anything in particular against tomboys, or masculine women, or whatever it is that I am. She just doesn't like the idea of me being one, because she wants me to be her little Mini-Me.
I was always small for my age as a kid. I think because I was small and kept to myself and wore frilly things and had ribbons in my hair, the other kids in my class thought of me as being kind of a baby. Even for the first year of middle school, when most of the other kids were starting to hit puberty, I still looked like a little girl. I got treated like I was younger than I was.
Right around the time I started seventh grade, though, I suddenly hit a growth spurt. I went from being short for my age to being tall for my age remarkably quickly. I didn't look like a little girl anymore; I wasn't "cute", I was an awkward beanpole of a kid. None of my clothes fit.
I started to get uncomfortable with the way I looked. There's no way for me to accurately convey the feeling except that it felt like my inner self and my outer self didn't match, and had never matched. In fact, being tall and skinny was the only thing I really liked about the way I looked now, because I didn't look like a cute little girl anymore.
Sometimes I got almost panicky over my appearance; I felt like I was being trapped in a shell that didn't belong to me, and I just had to break out or I'd suffocate. That's how I felt the night I grabbed a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut my hair as short as I could manage it.
I had always had long, curly hair. My mother liked to tie it up in pigtails for me. People complimented me on my hair often. I thought that because my mother liked my hair and other people liked my hair, I had to like my hair too.
I don't really remember actually cutting my hair: I just remember looking in the mirror when it was all done and feeling like a completely new person. It was strange and exhilarating all at once. The sense of excitement I felt was like getting a new present and thinking of all the things you might be able to do with it, all the as-yet-untapped potential.
The following morning, I was still feeling excited from having cut my hair — I guess I was riding out some sort of adrenaline high. I told my parents that I didn't want to wear girly clothes anymore, that I wanted to keep my hair short, and that I wanted them to call me Jack instead of Jackie. I told them this as they were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. They just stared at me the whole time like I had flown in from Neptune.
Neither of them put up an argument, though, and I headed off to school in the least feminine clothes I owned (which, unfortunately, was skinny jeans and a ratty old sweatshirt of my dad's that had shrunk in the wash). I felt pretty damn pleased with myself.
People stared at me all day long during school. I interpreted the stares as being of admiration or respect. When people called me Jackie, I proudly corrected them and told them to call me Jack. I got a lot of weird looks, but, like with my parents, no one protested.
No one protested at all the first day. Then the protesting began in earnest.
By day 2, concerned teachers were calling my parents to ask them about me. My dad, I think, handled most of the calls; I'm not really sure, because neither of my parents wanted to talk to me about it. Kids in school started bullying me and calling me names; "dyke" was among the politer things I was called.
The worst, though, was my mother.
Initially, she acted as though she had no problem with my decision. She was never supportive, but she didn't give me a hard time over it, until a couple days in. I don't even remember what started it, but she just blew up at me.
The gist of her argument went like this: Why couldn't I just be a normal girl? Why did I have to be so childish instead of acting like a mature young lady? Was this all just a ploy for attention? Did I need psychiatric help? What on earth had gotten into me that I would want to cut off all my beautiful hair?
I've never seen my mother so upset in my life as she was that day, and I hope to never see her that way again.
My dad tried to smooth things over, and he succeeded to some extend. I don't know what he said to my mother, but he got her to agree to letting me wear my hair short and wear less feminine clothes if I desired. The one thing she never agreed to do was to call me Jack; even though my dad eventually got in the habit of dropping the -ie, my mother still calls me Jackie and seems to have no intentions of changing that anytime soon.
I left middle school about a month later when the teasing and namecalling escalated to physical violence. A group of older boys had taken to slamming me into lockers, and when I tried to stand up to them the leader punched me in the nose. From then on, instead of slamming me into the lockers, those boys would just hit me when they saw me. It didn't take long for my parents to notice the bruises — I'm sure they noticed right away, actually, in which case I suppose it took a few days for them to decide to do anything about it. They pulled me out of school. My dad began homeschooling me not long after.
That's as much of this story as I think I'll ever be willing to tell.
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