The curse of Neverland

An old video for a collab channel I’d forgotten about. It just talks about how I dealt with the incongruence I felt with my gender as I grew up.

Charmed

I’ve frequently mentioned that what brought about this awareness of my gender dysphoria was a memoir assignment of a class this past spring (2010). Quite a few people have requested to read it, so I copied it below.

Daybreak

On a family camping trip to New Mexico, I was watching Dad get the dinner fire started. He could light a fire with a single match, even if all he had to burn were wet branches. I was a child who watched adults very carefully, especially my parents—memorizing their movements, their phrasing—always storing away tidbits of how to behave or how to react.

My job was to gather larger pieces of wood while Dad began carefully choosing twigs to teepee in the center of our fire pit. It was a reward to be helping him and he always welcomed me at his side. His way of teaching was through showing: He showed me how to do something— start a fire, draw a nose, ride a bike with no hands— and I would imitate. I took pride in doing things so similarly to him, and watching him create a roaring fire with such ease— his knees on the rough ground, his hands calloused and dirty— I felt honored to be his.

Waterfall

His child that would someday grow up and lead a family of my own. Someday I’d have to be the one to know how to make my family’s blazing campfire, load the hiking packs, clean the blades on the lawnmower, trim the highest branches on the trees, and teach my kids how to ride a bike.

Beyond the smoking pile, my mother walked to and from the tent, reorganizing our belongings and preparing the food supplies, occasionally checking up on my younger brothers playing G.I. Joes in the pine needles.

“Mom, why don’t you ever start the fire?” I was eleven years old and becoming more aware of my self, my changing body.

“Oh, that’s your dad’s favorite part,” she answered. “I don’t like the bugs that crawl out of the wood.” She shuttered. “Your dad is better at handling that type of thing.”

My mother has always been a fan of Maxfield Parrish’s artwork, and many of his prints scatter our walls. He added a final, blue-green glaze over all of his finished products, creating a soft, soothing scenario. In my mind, I lived in his paintings, and my mom and I imagined that heaven was depicted in Daybreak.

If I woke in the night and couldn’t fall back to sleep, my mother would pour me a glass of cold milk, peel a banana, wrap me in the small, red quilt we called “cow blanket,” and rock me while she sang: Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home; swing

Dinky Bird

low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, 
Comin’ for to carry me home? 
A band of angels coming after me, 
Comin’ for to carry me home.  Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home; 
Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.

As she sang, I imagined the blue-green world of a Maxfield Parrish painting—a white farmhouse with red shutters in the distance, a clear brook intersecting a soft meadow, and nothing else around me but a swing-set, where I imagined myself swinging high and low, watching a chariot flying down from the clouds to catch me just as I jumped from my swing as it hit its peak. As a child, I didn’t understand the song’s true meaning, but I understood that she was my chariot, swinging low to save me: to save me from my bad dream, from my hurt feelings, from my fears, from myself.

After school one day, Mom and I were making my bed together in my pale blue bedroom on East Gate in Terrell, Texas. White rabbits in blue overalls and pink skirts danced together on the border that wrapped around the room’s walls, and glass bunnies held Dr. Seuss books and family photos in place on stained, oak shelves.

Knave of Hearts Watching

In my five year-old mind, my mother was my greatest confidant, my loyal friend, and the person with whom I shared all my thoughts. No secrets between us! We would smile and say. We spoke daily, often setting a cassette tape-recorder nearby to record our conversations so she and I could listen to them one day when I was grown. The tapes have long since been lost, but the memories formed while following her around the house while she put away clothes or cleaned the bathtubs remain.

“I wish I was like Isaac,” I said one afternoon while we were making my bed together.

“You want to be a baby, like your brother Isaac?” She asked while tucking the corner of my cloud-patterned sheets tightly beneath the mattress. I tried to do the same, but my hands weren’t strong enough to pull my corner as tightly as she was capable of doing.

“No,” I answered innocently, “I mean I wish I was a boy like he is. I want to be a boy.” I pushed my hands harder beneath the mattress; I wanted to make my corner look as good as hers.

“Oh, Jamie!”

Her response had a sense of urgency in it—the way she sounded when we were going to be late to school or had guests coming and the house was a mess—but this wasn’t how she ever sounded in our conversations.

She stopped making the bed, looked at my eyes, and walked over to kneel in front of me. Holding my hands in hers, she said, “Why would you say that? God made you perfectly the way you are.”

Cinderella

My throat felt differently than it had before. I gulped and tried to loosen the tightening knot, my cheeks began to burn with confused embarrassment. It occurred to me that I had known I was wrong for wishing such a thought even before I saw the worry in her eyes.

Her two, soft hands wrapped around my own; her brown eyes burrowed into mine. She told me, “God tells us in His Word that it is wrong for girls to want to do the things that boys do, or for boys to do the things that girls do.”

The knot wouldn’t let me swallow it away.

“Jamie, it makes God sad when we aren’t grateful for what He gives us. You’re my gift from Him, and I’m so glad he gave me a little girl! Being a girl is very special, and just as good as being a boy.”

Fountain of Pirene

When she bowed her head and thanked God for making me His child, for making me a girl, and for giving me to my mother as her only daughter, I watched her eyes squeeze together, the skin wrinkling at the corners of her eyelids. She protectively squeezed my hands in hers. I bowed my head but didn’t close my eyes. My mouth was dry and I was scared to swallow, worried that my fear would be heard if I tried to move the knot stuck in my throat.

“I love you Jamie, my beautiful, intelligent, first-born daughter,” she told me before standing to putting the final touches on the pillows and stuffed animal arrangement on my bed.

I could feel my skin getting ugly.

The B-I-B-L-E! Yes that’s the book for me! I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E! Mrs. Bell—who doubled as worship leader and sole first grade teacher—led the music, her pudgy, white hands pounding the rhythm in the air.

“Who’s ready for ‘Father Abraham’?” Mrs. Bell cupped her hand behind her ear and leaned forward expectantly. Pews full of eager, smirf-colored boys and girls, dressed in our uniform shades of blue, jumped up and down. Squeals of excitement pierced the high, auditorium ceiling. “Father Abraham” was the best song because we got to wiggle and hop almost freely without getting a demerit.

Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons had Father Abraham…we sang-shouted.

It was a habit that started when I was eight years old, holding my chest, pulling and squeezing at it when I tried to fall asleep at night, when I took a bath, when I used the bathroom. I didn’t know what caused breasts, but I was convinced I could prevent them.

Evening

Hiding in the bathroom, I sat on the linoleum floor squeezing the area around my nipples—pulling it, ripping it, digging my fingernails deep into the skin trying to loosen the tissue I worried would form breasts. I would alternate between tearing and hitting: holding my hands in tight fists, I beat my nipples, hoping something would be damaged enough to prevent my chest from getting any bigger.

In the third grade I added exercising to my regime: Sit-ups by the hundreds, sprints across the front yard, jumping jacks in the bathroom. If breasts couldn’t be stopped by force, I’d have to stay thin to keep them from growing. In the evenings our family walked down the road to the high school track. My parents walked laps, but I ran barefoot—I needed my feet to be strong, I needed to learn to fight weakness, and I needed to run to keep the fat from growing on my chest.

“Someday, Jamie, someday very soon,” Blake taunted in a sing-song voice as we walked through the underwear section of Target. I was eleven years old, and Blake, our neighbor, was two years younger. I was the oldest of our group—Isaac, Blake, and Josh—our neighbors.

I glared at him trying not to let my embarrassment show through into my anger. Blake grinned mischievously and held a bra in his hand, goading me with raised eyebrows and playful expression. I burned red and walked away, tears welling up behind my eyes, but held back by pride. Isaac and Josh were watching, waiting to see what type of reaction Blake was going to receive for joking about me being a girl.

But I knew Blake was right. Mom would make me wear one of those soon—she’d been hinting at it for a few weeks already.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Seventh grade meant changing classes, getting a locker, eating lunch at whichever table we wanted, and competing in athletics. It was exciting, especially after so many years being the elementary students who looked up to “the big kids.” It was finally our turn: the year Travis got his first girlfriend, Laura started shaving her legs, and Rachel got her period.

“Boys, you’re turning into men, and girls, you’re blossoming into ladies.” Mr. Williamson’s tanned cheeks tightened around his broad, white smile as he introduced our schedules. The boys would be taking a class titled “Manliness,” where they would learn how to change oil, replace tires, and build bird houses, while the girls would take “Charmed,” learning the art of ironing, stitching, and the differences between formal and day-to-day makeup application techniques.

“My life is over!” I sobbed, head in my hands, salty tears smeared into my loose hair that had fallen from beneath my baseball hat and now stuck to my wet cheeks. I cried without restraint, openly and utterly honestly. My mother tried to console me, but couldn’t understand why carrying a purse was causing me so much trouble.

The Talking Bird

“Jamie, you’ll only have to carry it for a few days each month when you’re having your period- that’s it! It looks just like a little backpack, and it you’ll be able to carry a hairbrush and ponytail holders and gum in it—it’s not all bad,” she tried to convince me. “Your life is far from over.”

It was hopeless. I had fought against my body for as long as I could consciously remember, but at the age of thirteen, the ultimate betrayal couldn’t be stopped.

“You’re becoming a woman,” she told me, trying to be encouraging.

I broke at the waist and lay limp across my thighs, tears dripping off the tip of my nose and spilling from my chin. I had no energy to hold myself upright. There was no going back. Getting my period had changed everything.

Stars

The other girls all started carrying purses that year, too. Only a few remained who didn’t need them, but everyone carried them just the same. I had never been so dirty as the day I walked into school with a purse on my shoulder for the first time. I couldn’t hide the ugliness anymore. I could feel the stares—everyone saw me for what I was: a traitor. I could feel my disease creeping out from inside me onto my skin.

Each night, I shaved my legs meticulously, sure to remove every trace of hair—because girls shouldn’t want hairy legs. I wore my sports bra to bed just in case there was a fire and I had to get outside quickly—I couldn’t chance someone seeing that I had breasts.

I learned how to wear mascara that year, and I joined the cheerleading squad. I wore lipstick and held hands with Jeremy after school, but the ugliness seeped out of my pours. I could smell the stench of femininity in my sprayed hair and polished nails, and I couldn’t wash it away, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

When school was let out in the afternoons, I tore off my uniform skirt and ran with my dog across the field into the trees behind the house. The more I covered myself in dirt, the higher I disappeared into the trees, the further I swam, the deeper I fled into the thorny undergrowth, the less ugly I became.

King of Black Isles

As an adolescent, alone, very far from anyone who could hear my screams, I would climb to the highest I could reach in my favorite Bur Oak tree. I would dangle from the limbs, and imagine a blue-green world below hanging feet, only my hands holding me in place.     But I hoped I could be brave enough to let myself fall from the tree one day, so the ugliness inside me could spill away for good, but I was always too much the coward.

“I can’t live like this,” I cried, curled in a ball and burying my face in the pillow between my arms. It was just before the 2010 new year. My roommate didn’t know what to do. She’d come in and found me by accident.

“What are you talking about, Jamie? Can’t live like what,” she asked.

Enchanted Prince

“Like this. In this body. I can’t do it. I can’t let myself stay like this.

“Jamie, what do you mean, ‘in this body,”’ she said with concern

“I can’t be a woman any longer. I can’t do this. I’ve tried. It’s suffocating me. I can’t keep living in this.”

“I love how much fun you have with life, Jamie,” my mom commented as I rigged together a mulberry basket to hang from my neck so I could climb high enough to reach the untouched, spring harvest in the neighbor’s tree. I was living at home again after being away for ten years. My parents thought I moved home to save money; but I knew I was no longer strong enough to want to survive if I were alone.

I smiled cheekily and continued working with my contraption, as the familiar ugliness began creeping up my throat.

“You make so much more of your life than anyone I’ve ever come across. I don’t know where you get it, either.”

I had lain awake most the previous night, as I did most nights, trying to figure out how to end the life she admired so. During the days, I kept myself busy so that I wouldn’t have to follow through with the plans formed the night before.

Little Princess

“You don’t care what people think; you’re just comfortable being you. I envy that about you.”

I care most what you think, which is why you can’t know my secrets, I wanted to say.

“You’re beautiful, sweet girl. Do you know that?” She’s never ceased with her adoration and open encouragement, but it shouldn’t belong to me. What she sees as beautiful is just a blue-green varnish to soften the ugliness.

My classes end early on Thursdays. I come home to an empty house, no distractions. Sometimes the ugliness makes it unsafe to be inside alone, so I take the dogs for a walk to an open field down the road.

I lie down in a patch of clover while the dogs sniff happily around the area.

I close my eyes and let my hands rest beside me, palms against the cool grass. The clover pulls the dirtiness out of me, the stench of my ugliness disappears, and I smell like the earth, instead. I lay amid the patch of clover, my barefoot toes tracing over the soil.

I am the child resting by the pillar near the water at Daybreak; I am the Knave of Hearts Watching; I’m at home in The Fountain of Pirene; I know the nude’s freedom of Stars; I am the Enchanted Prince; I’m as sexless as the swinging child in Dinky Bird; I live in Evening.

 

Lady Ursula

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, 
Comin’ for to carry me home?

A band of angels coming after me, 
Comin’ for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home.

 

Playing in the spring

Our first mountain hike

Boys playing with GI Joes

Snacking at the tent site

Playing with the campfire