Lying, Hiding, Denying

Confession: I’ve been lying to you.

Not lying in the sense I’m really a cis-male evangelical minister plotting to vilify the LGBTQ community. No, I’ve been doing what I always do, what I’m so adept at… what I was primed to do. Ghostwriting Rule #5: always analyze for the positive, right? I’ve been finding the gold, putting a good spin on everything. Just like I always do, like I’ve always done.

But I devised this piece-by-piece non-memoir to deconstruct the truth about who and what I really am, not to finally maybe understand myself, but also so someone else might resonate with a shaving of what I say here, a glob of my share there, and realize, “Hey, I’m not the only one.” Yet despite that quasi-virtuous intent, here I am, peering out from in my turtle shell, denying my own reality as usual, faking it, cracking jokes, and then glibly moving on.

I apologize. You deserve better. I deserve better. Let me try again.

Every one of my formally diagnosed or hindsight “it musta been” medical conditions affects me every single day of my life, despite being groomed to minimize, devalue, and disregard them. Not because I was abused. In the fifties—that era so familiar-and-comfortable to conservatives everywhere—racism and women’s rights weren’t the only non-issues. Learning disabilities had yet to be invented. Congenital health problems? Pshaw: “You have a vivid imagination.” Case closed. In my long-ago opening years, we had were smart kids, retarded kids, and kids who didn’t try hard enough.

Guess which group I was in—go ahead… guess!

Or don’t. Because it doesn’t matter. It never mattered. I didn’t matter, and that was the 800-pound gorilla atop the room-filling pink elephant. More than just non-girl/non-boy, I was simply… non. Non-conspicuous. Non-consequential. Non-significant. “It’s so easy to forget you’re around,” my previously-favorite aunt once told me.

In the first scene of Make the Yuletide Gay—fantabulous gay-themed Rob Williams indie movie, by the way— a supporting character hands his paper to the professor bent on talking to the film’s star. “Oh--were you in this class, too?” the prof asks the unnamed, nondescript extra. How I did not land that role I’ll never understand.

Therapist and counselors and do-gooders tell me to write, “I’m not intruding,” 100 times every day, but I call bullshit. I was not only intruding, I was non-entitled. And non-defiant. Unlike my brother—who had the audacity to not only possess but express his non-authorized/non-approved personality—I accepted my lot, turtling unnoticed in the corner, in the hallway, flat against the staircase wall as he reaped the consequences of his individuality. And never saying a word. After all, my brother was none of my business. He was my mother’s son, her family. I was merely family adjacent.

Sifting through the mud, my non-necessarity launchpad ostensibly funnels down to three events that took place in the three months before I turned age three.

Three. A Biblical number. A magical number. A nonsensical sidebar, but damnit, deflecting be my jam! And hey, I’m doing it again! Okay, back to it for reals this time, as my daughter taught me to say.

First event: our typical white family—mother, father, son, daughter—moved from our single-floor apartment to a two-story house with a basement and attic. Okay, so that might seem like it’s actually four stories—it always has to me—but nay, nay, it’s only two. No matter that the basement had the same square footage as the first and second floors plus a stand-alone toilet. Forget that the attic was tall and roomy enough to walk around and store things where no one could reach them. The basement was unfinished, so it didn’t count. Neither did the attic, because no one was allowed up there except my father. Ipso facto, it was a two-story house.

Non-sequitur sidebar: I had cause to peruse my digital (and so possibly permanent) medical record recently, where I discovered I’ve acquired with some twenty-four diagnoses—six of them concerning my eyes. The titles and particulars of those conditions didn’t last in my brain beyond the read, but I suspect whatever those ocular issues are, they got their start in my early years when mixed signals and deliberate mislead-tions gave me semi-permanent crossed eyes. This sidebar has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, but they say digression is good for the sole.

Another aberrant tangent: I have no memory of the apartment-to-house move whatsoever, since I had the barest beginnings of cognitive thought at that point. Now, I realize some people easily recollect everything about being two; hell, I once worked with an author who described the first year of his life, and another who claimed he could re-experience popping out of the birth canal.

I am clearly non-endowed with that kind of remembery. Those stories about forgetting my own name? Non-lies.

End of digression. Told you I was intrusive.

Second event: I fell down the stairs of said new house, splitting my forehead open on the radiator at the bottom. A non-retrievable scene, a still-visible scar—and a singular incident, as it comes with no story. In the world in which everything my mother did or was connected to had an accompanying hilarious or self-glorifying tale, my bloody escape did not. I fell on the stairs, I hit the radiator, I bled, that’s it. Nothin’ more to see here, folks, move along, move along.

Third event: my father came down those same stairs to find next to his morning coffee cup an article, sounding an alarm about daddies who cuddle their little girls—authorities might construe that as molestation!

Kinda takes your breath away, don’t it? Where in the world had she dredged up such a piece, even in 1955? But there it was, clipped from the newspaper—or a magazine, or just mimeographed as a handout, or who knows what—but printed clear as mud in black-and-white, so it must be true, right? Of course right.

As it was physical, unassailable proof, it immediately became family scripture, a dictate from on high, and so immediately consigned to secrecy lest anyone question its authenticity or authority.

I didn’t even learn about the damned thing until sixty years later—*taking a nanosecond or two to breathe*— when my father confessed this sacred truth because my son-in-law had told him I deserved to know. He—Dad—stopped me in the front hall of the house he and Mother had lived in for forty years, and in which he planned to eventually die. (He didn’t; she saw to that.) We were conspicuously and purposefully alone so no one else would hear our sotto-voce conversation.

She found out anyway. He likely told her. Dad didn’t keep secrets from his wife. Nobody kept secrets from Mother.

If’n you need a moment to untangle that twisted chain of logic, do it now, because things get kinda convoluted from here on.

The reveal happened on Wednesday, November 1, 2015. That Friday, all of two days later, my mother contrived—with my unwitting, dumb-as-fuck assistance— to implode our family once and for all.

Nay, nay, that’s a lie. The setup began on Friday. It took her until Sunday to irrevocably bring the house down, so to speak. And, yeah, it was a tough fight, Ma, but by golly, she pulled it off! None of those puzzle pieces ever fit together again.

Okay, so sorry, no convolution today. Ima leave that grotesque, mind-blowing, life-altering twinkle of time and its horrific, years-long aftermath for some other chapter(s). For now, just trek back with me to the 3 x 3 x 3 mini-epoch, during which I was relegated with malice aforethought to interloper, superfluous but non-returnable.

To recap: We’d moved. I’d split my forehead. My father had been warned away from hugging, cuddling, and by swift extension, interacting with me. To cement that non-relationship, Mother “made it known”—my husband’s term for how she ruled her roost—I was “not to bother said father because he “shouldn’t have to deal” with me. I don’t know what, if anything, she said to Brother, but I understood that he, too, “shouldn’t have to” deal or talk or play with me.

I was two years old. What ghastly toddler terror had I pulled off to make me unfit for my own family? Was this permanent punishment all because I asked for a penis?

Betcha not.

‘Cause even though that’s my oldest memory, it could easily be just that—a memory of desire, not an actual vocalization thereof. I absatively cannot swear on a bound copy of anybody’s mythology that ever passed my teeth. My missing penis has been a life-long loss-by-omission, but am I absatively, posilutely confident I ever asked for it out loud?

No.

Still, she’s dead, he’s dead, my brother and I definitively non-relate, so the facts of the case, Mr. Prosecutor, hardly matter at this point, do they? If it please the court, let’s focus on the non-disputable fact that from the tender age of not-quite-three, I lived separate (but not equal) from everyone in my house save my mother. I interacted with Dad and Bro only at the dinner table, only under Mama’s vigilant eye and ear. And to ensure I understood her rationale [sic], she made it known, “Real people don’t do that,” whenever Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Bachelor Father, Leave it to Beaver, or other family shows were on. “Real families don’t hug and kiss each other or say, ‘I love you’ all the time,” she insisted. “That’s complete nonsense, just storybook pretend.”

I certainly had no model to disprove her. Or her contention that fathers naturally distance themselves from their daughters. When I noticed uncle fondling his way down from my cousin’s shoulder, she snapped, “He’s just a dirty old man. Stay away from him.”

And certainly nothing disproved the fact that I, being girl, existed for one reason and one reason only: to be pretty, the sum total of what anyone could reasonably expect of me.

But I didn’t see pretty when I looked in the mirror. I saw a phony image that dressed according to my mother’s taste, wore her hair the way my mother preferred, and had sparklingly dead eyes. A fraud, uncomfortable in its own skin, unknowable even to itself.

Half of that short lifetime later, I stared and stared and stared at myself in an opulent restaurant’s ladies’ room while my husband played a piano bar. “Flat, lifeless hair,” I assessed. “Ovally, maybe heart shaped. Hollows under check bones….” Suddenly, I saw it, what my mother kept telling me: my face was pretty. I did have beautiful eyes. Wow--quite the revelation!

Also quite the “so what?”

How did realizing I was in fact pretty change my life? How did it help anything? I still wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. It didn’t do anything about those things hanging off my front. I still got pissed off whenever anyone treated me like girl, which was, ya know, all the time. Besides, what was so great about it? I could hardly take credit for it, it wasn’t an accomplishment like covering that month’s rent. There was nothing to be proud about it. It was just the way I was born.

Which, of course, was my underlying problem, since I was other than the way I was born. Maybe my face was pretty, but my spirit sure wasn’t, so the compliment, if that’s what people wanted to call it, was essentially meaningless.

Of course, the pretty tag comes in handy now and then. I never girled well enough to use it as a feminine wile or position myself against other non-boys, but it’s a handy red flag in today’s online socializing. Whenever someone posts or texts or messages me about my pretty face or how beautiful art mine blue eyes, I know exactly what to do.

Un-answer, unfriend, un-connect.

Actually makes things a lot simpler.