My Life As A Girl, Part Two

(If you missed Part One of "My Life As A Girl", check it out here.)

How the world changes in just a few short years.

Five years ago, if friends saw me wearing a skirt, they knew it must be Halloween. Jeans and T-shirts were the usual stuff-- slacks if I had to look presentable-- but dresses? I don't think so. They looked fine on other people, but on me? Uhn-uh.

It was really Halloween that finally clued me in. Every year, I dressed up as the same thing: a girl. Not just any girl, either-- a gypsy girl, with a flowing skirt, big jangly jewelry, and entirely too much eye makeup. Stevie Nicks had nothing on me, not in October. I had two drawers full of "girl clothes" that I only pulled out once a year, and for just a few days, I felt feminine, in a wild, spirited, free-floating way. I was a girl! and I enjoyed it.

I'm not sure if someone actually mentioned the irony of the situation, or if it finally dawned on me of its own accord: my alter-ego was female. Until I hit thirty, I'd lived my life with no more concession to gender than was absolutely necessary to get married, have a kid, and find my way into the appropriate restroom in the mall.

Now I found myself drawn to things like fashion magazines, coffee clatches, and shopping. It was...uncomfortable. I felt out of place. Nearly five years into this process, I'll admit that I still feel slightly out of place.

In groups of women, I sometimes have this gnawing feeling that at any moment, they'll realize I'm faking it. I imagine they'll all jump up and point accusing fingers at me, "What does she think she's doing here? The lipstick and heels don't fool me...look, those are welding scars on her arms! Eewww!" I'll have to run for it, bawling my head off, heels and all, thus confirming every damn fool thing I ever believed about women.

Luckily, this hasn't happened. I seem to be able to navigate the mysterious world of women's groups, gossip, and fashion without much fuss. Oh, I'm still more at home with a power tool or a keyboard under my fingers, but I seem to be learning a surprising lesson: the things I once held against women were really things I held against myself.

So what if I like shoes? It's no crime to like to shoe-shop, is it? So what if I change my hair color every few minutes? It doesn't make me less of a writer, less of an artist, less of a person-- plus, it gives me a perverse sort of pleasure to say "No, not tonight...I'm doing my hair."

So what if I cried during Wall-E? So what if I secretly watch The Man From Snowy River and identify with the pretty heroine who has to be rescued because she does something impetuous and stupid? And so what if I cry during that too?

The process of individuation is a funny thing. We all confront it, no matter our biological gender. We discover along the way that the things we fight hardest against are really just parts of ourselves, buried deep and despised, waiting to be dragged out, brushed off, and seen in a new light. These alter-egos beg to be integrated in our lives in their own unique way.

Once we begin accepting them, we suddenly notice that they're not stereotypes anymore. They're not cardboard strawmen of "weak dependant women" nor cardboard cutouts of anything else...and neither are we.

We're individuals, with all the complexity and contradiction that the word implies.

I can weld, I can take off across country on foot, I can hang from trees and cuss. I can flirt, look stunning in a dress and heels, and cry at sad movies. I can do all of these things, and every year feel less and less self-conscious about it. It's good to be alive, and it's good to be a woman, that much I know.

Pink, though, I may never understand.

***


("My Life As A Girl" is Laura F. Walton's contribution to HerStories, V-Day Waco's collection of personal anecdotes about life, love, and womanhood in Central Texas. To contribute your own story, visit the HerStories page of our website here.)

Guest Post: A Look At Feminism Today

Feminism

guest post by Shelly Marek


Understand that we are in constant change and coming to terms with our fate. It seems strange how we think we are in control of everything and we have all the time in the world. Everything is so bittersweet. Change creates extreme hopelessness to the point of breaking the soul, but then comes a new strength out of weakness. We all have a purpose to achieve, but when we stand alone, we rarely complete it.

My focus is how do I make a better world for my daughter and son. My biggest concern is how to set the example so women will not to be at war with other women. We are our own worst enemies!

It is a gift if we can stand in unity even if we disagree. As women, we need to bring trust, hope, loyalty and respect back into our relationships with each other. I remember a song that said "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." What kind of world are we creating? A world where women backstab each other over men, money, material success and vanity?

As women, we need to reexamine why this is acceptable behavior. When did we as women sell out? I believe this is the new feminist issue. We should be rejoicing that Hillary was able to stand the oppressiveness of the democratic party-- shame on the women who then turned on her. I am still going to vote because it's the right thing to do; I am just so disappointed but I have to get over it.




(Special thanks to Shelly Marek of Hill County, Texas, for her guest post on women's issues! Shelly's letter will be archived with HerStories, soon to contain a wide sampling of local women's stories, viewpoints, and expressions.

Leave a comment for Shelly below, or send us your viewpoints; we'd love to hear them.)

My Life As A Girl

Okay, so I'm a girl.

I'm a woman, actually-- they take away your girl status the year you start using Miss Clairol-- but it all boils down to the same thing. People who have certain (ahem) characteristics are girls, and other people who have certain other (ahem) characteristics are boys. They put up little pictographs on restroom doors to remind us, lest we nod off and forget.

I didn't always know I was a girl. I was one of those pre-adolescents with perpetually skinned knees and a horse; I had a shelf full of books about wild adventures, dangerous quests, and seriously overeducated animals.

I'd have been a tomboy, if I'd known the term; the best you could say was that I was vaguely humanoid when I was washed. But then puberty hit, and with it came a few considerable shocks. Some were less impressive than others (barely B-cups, I'm afraid) but some were completely flabbergasting.

For instance, I could no longer hang from trees in my underwear with my best friends, who were, I discovered, boys. I could no longer convince anyone that I was going to be Indiana Jones when I grew up-- Lara Croft had yet to make her appearance, and the role model pool suddenly got a lot smaller.

There was Madame Curie, but I poisoned myself with my first chemistry set and my parents took it away. There was Jane Goodall, but Texas has a shortage of great apes and my little brother soon got tired of sitting in trees. There was Madonna, but her image didn't include any vine-swinging, nor anything else that looked like much fun, at least not to a twelve year-old.

As far as I could tell, boys got the good jobs like travelling the world in search of lost treasure, and girls got the crap jobs like typing and wearing pink. It was enough to give anyone a bit of a complex, even at twelve.

The psychiatric community has a somewhat controversial term for people who aren't sure whether they're boys or girls; they're called gender dysphoric. Once puberty was well underway, I was sure alright-- I knew I was a girl, but that didn't stop me from being slightly ticked off about the whole thing. I wasn't gender-dysphoric, I was gender-disgruntled.

It made me mad to discover that girls were supposed to cheer on the sidelines while the boys played football. It made me mad to discover that girls were the secretaries while boys were the CEOs. I had nothing against boys-- the male persuasion still made up eighty percent of my social circle-- but I wanted the kind of freedom that was evidently exclusive to those with a Y chromosome. To me, female equalled cage.

My gender annoyance became sort of a raison de d'etre. I spent most of my twenties proving that I could do as I pleased, girl or not. I had adventures. I swung from a few vines here and there, some shakier than others. I travelled the world-- or at least the southern United States-- spontaneously and with no regard for the so-called weaknesses of my sex. I had big fun, and plenty of the metaphorical adult equivalent of scraped knees.

But then the Miss Clairol years began.

There's something about the big 3-0 that causes a girl to take a good hard look at her life. The mirror begins to show the passage of time, and suddenly the raisones d' etre of one's twenties seem a little dated. The Big Questions begin to ask themselves, whether we like it or not.

Since I'm obviously going to be a girl for the duration (thanks to Neutral Medium Brown, $7.99 at Walgreen's) how do I make the most of it? Did women like Madonna really know what they were doing all along? What is this mysterious power that seems to resonate from the color pink? If I finally admit that I'm a girl, what does that do to my sense of independence?

And most importantly: what will happen if I die in my sleep and they find those copies of Cosmo and Glamour hidden under my bed?

(Click here for the second half of "My Life As A Girl", Laura F. Walton's contribution to HerStories, V-Day Waco's collection of personal anecdotes about life, love, and womanhood in Central Texas. To contribute your own story, visit the HerStories page of our website here.)

"Spaceball" photo from Flickr.com. View photographer's profile here.