![]() “It felt like you were rejecting all the privileges we’d worked so hard to give you.” She said that, as a child, she would have given her front teeth for the clothes she lavished upon me. My mother surprised me by admitting she’d been self-absorbed, only seeing me as an extension of herself. After the festivities wound down, I asked her what prompted the change. ![]() Gone were the multicolored miniskirts of yore. Two holidays ago, my mother started giving me gifts I would actually wear: a pin-striped blazer, a men’s wallet, and even a skinny tie. Buying me dresses was a way for her to fix a past tarnished by the scarcity she lacked now but it was also her way of fixing me. With a home in the Bay Area, a career in editing and a successful husband in finance to boot, mom had it all. Her childhood princess dreams went unfulfilled. She could never afford the skirts and dresses that she lavished upon me. My mother grew up financially strapped in Kansas with a strict puritanical mother and a dying father. “You’re so ungrateful,” she said, as I opened a full-length purple ball gown on Christmas my senior year of high school and promptly frowned, tossing it to the side. Every family occasion became knock-down verbal warfare, with me fighting for my right to dress as I chose. But I didn’t want to be the type of girly girl my mother’s narrow sense of femininity mandated, either. I knew something about me was wrong.īy high school, I realized I didn’t truly want to be male. “See here missy, we can’t take the case and that’s that!” If my mother caught me, she’d turn beet red and yell at me to go to my room and change. I’d often sneak into his room to try them on, tying my father’s pocket watch to the belt loop and twirling it around, pretending I was an old-timey gumshoe. I envied my older brother’s pants and crisp white-collared shirts. I tried on my father’s after-shave and cologne. By middle school, I thought I was a boy born in the wrong body. I wanted to like dollhouses and frilly outfits but, no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t. When I was young, my mom’s anger toward my style of style was so marked that I knew I wasn’t the child she wanted. (At a young age, I already had “Xena Warrior Princess” collectable figurines.) I’m sure my mother thought if boys were more attracted to me I’d get straightened out, so to speak. It occurred to me that she sensed I was gay. “It’s like your Mom wants you to wear slutty clothes,” my friend Julia said, holding up a sequined tube top. “Has she met you?” my friend Amanda asked, laughing as she stared at the rack of multicolored miniskirts and then back at me, a 16-year-old in cargo pants and a breast-obscuring hoodie. Her tactics were notorious with my high school friends, who’d come over after Christmas to survey my loot. Weekends in December became forced marathon shopping excursions in which I tried on skirts and gowns that would later become my presents. And the holidays were the best opportunity for her to operate on me. ![]() But whenever my mother put me in a dress, I felt as if she were taking a scalpel to my identity, trying to slice out the parts she didn’t like. Maybe the use of “assault” sounds melodramatic, and I admit that being plied with finery was an extremely first-world problem. ![]() She was a middle-aged female Liberace, whose tastes veered toward the laughably eccentric and: a pink shorty robe spackled with butterflies, Lilly Pulitzer skirts, and various camisoles of varied levels of transparency. Every week in high school, mother assaulted me with a new article of clothing. Quite the opposite, my mom waged a war to get me into more feminine attire. I grew up in the ’90s, with a mother who wasn’t exactly the Angelina Jolie to my Shiloh, defending my boyish sartorial choices. And in a red dress with the words “Santa’s Helper” bedazzled on the rear, I felt like an idiot. An inveterate tomboy and a closeted lesbian, I felt like an impostor in a dress. “Just try it on once for mummy.” She stared at my offending Giants baseball cap and T-shirt. “Try it on,” mother said, holding it up in front of me. I tore open the Santa paper to find a short red cocktail dress.
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