It started in kindergarten. I liked the girls, not the boys, even though I was a boy. Not in a sexual way, I just felt closer to them, more understood, more accepted. I acted like them, laughed like them, moved like them, as if being like them made the world a little less heavy. The typical girl of this generation.
My mom always said she wanted a girl. She treated me like one, raised me like one. She was so lost in her desire that she shaped me into a feminine boy without realizing it. Did she see what she was doing? Did I understand it at the time? I think not.
The boys noticed and used it against me. I was "wrong," unacceptable. "Who wants to be friends with a girl pretending to be a boy?" they laughed. Their words cut sharper than I could hold, sharper than I knew. I always felt wrong next to my own gender, as if being born male was already a mistake.
I played in the kitchen, I drew, I played with dolls, I joined only the girls' games. Why was it wrong to do what made me happy? I never thought the problem was them. "Mom wants me like this," I told myself. "This must be right. They are just jealous." I believed it with all my heart, the heart they had shaped.
When I got hurt while playing with these things, they said I deserved it. "Of course you got hurt. That is not made for boys. You will never fit unless you change." They held back their laughter but I felt it like fire against my skin. I felt I deserved it more than joy, more than anyone else. I was the problem, was I not? I just could not fit.
Even though I was young, I already knew I was wrong. The worst part was the girls who supported me. "You are the only real one." "We love you." "We needed this." Their words wrapped around me like a fragile shield, making me feel chosen, special, untouchable. And yet, at what cost? My mom, the girls, my own mind, they all convinced me it was right. It was right but it demanded a price I could not yet see.
I never learned to be a boy. Later people would say, "You act like a girl," "Be a man," "You are crying like a girl." What could I be, after all those years of being molded another way? I could not just change everything overnight. My mom did not mean harm. She loved me as a boy too, but she obsessed over the girl she wished I were. I accepted it. I let her do things no kindergartener boy should have to endure. I know I regret it now, but I was just a kid.
"Mama has to be right. Mama knows best." That was planted in my mind by my own little hands, hands turned dirty in the garden, the garden of living in the wrong gender. It is all my fault now. I could not speak up. I was blind. The child in me did not see the future. But I had to, even as a kid, even when I should have been free of worry, I had to grow up.
Even outside of kindergarten, I was different. I liked the things only "girls" liked. I wanted to dress and act like a girl so that I could finally become one. A girl I never truly wanted to be.
Deep in my heart, I wanted to be a boy, but I couldn't. That was wrong. My garden had already grown flowers I couldn't just pull them out and plant new ones. They would take another year, and more energy than I had left. "I have to be a girl," I told myself. "It was just a mistake that I have that private part."
I thought my heart was pumping the blood of a girl. I couldn't see that there is no such thing as boy blood or girl blood. It was like trying to squeeze into a place where I didn't belong. I managed to fit in, but just because I was there didn't mean it was where I was meant to be.
All of my senses blurred out and were drawn over. I had to copy something that didn't exist for me, like rewriting a book without ever having read one.
I never wanted fun, never wanted joy or the simple things a childhood is defined by. I just wanted to fit into the picture everyone had of me. It was supposed to be my picture but I couldn't exist inside it.
"My brothers can be boys. They have to do all the hard work." That's what they told me when I confessed to them. "We need two hard workers and one career." I was their backup, just in case.
I wasn't born to live. I was born to be useful for my parents. I was made so they could rest once I grew up. They believed children are in deep debt to their parents, even though they held responsibility for me.
That's why I had to be a girl. A boy couldn't do gentle things, but a girl could. Yet there was no girl so I had to become one, so there would be no gap within the family. I was the glue holding the pieces together.
My parents weren't sick that was just what they were used to. That was their version of normal. They too had been "used" like this. They knew nothing else. They had lived through the same pain and learned to find comfort inside it.
"It hurts, but it also heals." But the healing wasn't for me. It was shared with everyone except me. I needed it the most, yet not a single droplet was left. "My mom cooks for us she uses her energy so we can eat." I used that as an excuse, not realizing that she took her energy back through us. The food gave her strength, but it also drained ours. Our energy was also my parents' energy.