I was pretty small when I got it, and I don't know that I wore it all that often. It was a costume for dress up play, so my mother would not have thought it appropriate to wear outside the house. I think I outgrew it fast. And I have vague memories of being a little too yippie-ki-yi-ay when I had it on, so that may have been one reason it was kept in the back of the closet and only brought out on rare occasion when I was "being good."
Even without all the trim and holsters and silver-tone conchos and all in the picture, it's evident why my mother called it a cowGIRL suit. It was pastel pink. It had a short little skirt -- with fringes? Pretty sure it had fringes.
I knew better, though. It was a cowBOY suit, and I firmly and repeatedly corrected anyone who said otherwise. I didn't grok the cowGIRL thing. It was cowBOY or nothing.
And therein was the opening salvo, a warning shot over the bow of my mother's Good Ship Perfect Daughter, the first strains of the overture in a lifelong tragicomic operetta that might be titled, "I Gotta Be MEEEE." Subtitled, "I'm... I'm a WHAT exactly?"
My mom had some pretty solid ideas of what a girl ought to be. Images like these from a couple of knitting books that she handed down to me are exemplars of what she had in mind when she put in her order for My Perfect Little Girl TM Patent pending, Bettie Page bangs and all:
Perfect little girls, from what I gathered, were:
- Dainty and delicate.
- Always adorable.
- Well-behaved.
- Clean and perfectly groomed.
- Neat and tidy.
- Mommy's little helper.
Her ideas of what little girls should wear were solidified in the 40s and 50s, so that even in the 60s/70s she resisted any notion that I could wear pants to school, and she sewed me some dresses in a tiny flowered print with puffed sleeves and poofy skirts that were the latest in style when she was of an age to start planning her Perfect Little Girl TM Patent pending. So yeah, in '68 and '69 or so, when the other girls were all hip in flared jeans and mod dresses and mini skirts, I was turned out like something out of a Fun With Dick and Jane reader.
Meanwhile, after I learned to read at a very young age and was gobbling up every Early Reader in the house and the nearest library, I slurped up my brothers' Henry Huggins and other Beverly Cleary books, science books, mysteries, Indian crafts and lore books, and spent time looking longingly at the pictures in brother K's Cub Scout manual like these:
And these:
And these were illustrations for Arrow Point requirements. Requirements! WOW! Not only did boys get to do exciting things like climb trees and build shacks and make electromagnetic cranes, they got awards for it!
Sign me up! I thought.
Now, I was pretty cognizant about the physical differences between boys and girls. I knew that I had all the physical characteristics of a girl. But... I was nevertheless the kid who insisted I was wearing a cowBOY suit. I frequently wished I'd been born a boy because my brothers and their friends got to do cooler things than I did. I knew from the girl bits in my underpants that I wasn't physically a boy. Nor did I identify as a boy. But... "I'm a girl" never quite rang true for me, either. I had dolls and doll clothes, but I didn't do much with the dolls besides put the clothes on them. I preferred being out in the sandbox with my brothers and their Tonka trucks, but no one got Tonka trucks for me. My brothers got chemistry sets. I asked if I could have one. I got craft kits, which were okay, and tea sets, which I had no idea what to do with.
Mom reminded me over and over that I was her "dainty and delicate" little girl. Sometimes when I got to play with my brothers and things got a little wild, Mom would cry out, "Where's my dainty and delicate little girl?" and if I got snarky and said, "I didn't know I had a sister," that put a swift end to play time then and there and I was sent to my room. My brothers scorned "dumb girl stuff," and wanted nothing to do with the few girlish things I was be interested in. My dad... he seldom had much to say about gender roles and what little girls "ought" to be (beyond the time he saw me reading Captains Courageous and said, "Isn't that a boy's book?), but when it came to choosing family outings, it was Dad who chose and we did the things Dad liked -- fishing, going for a hike, going to the beach, camping, going to the zoo, outdoor stuff like that, and we all participated. It was stuff I liked doing, too. By the time I was six I could bait a hook and clean my own fish. Besides learning to cook, which was a little like chemistry (actually it's a lot like chemistry), and needle crafts, I didn't much like housekeeping and other traditionally feminine pursuits.
So... I had a lot of questions. Questions that never got asked because there wasn't anyone willing to have that conversation and there weren't the answers then that I might have gotten these days.
At that time, you were a girl or a boy, period. The only alternate state, for a girl who liked to do boy things, was "tomboy" (there was no socially acceptable alternate state for boys who liked to do girl things). A tomboy was clearly a girl, identified as a girl, but liked rough-and-tumble play, preferring to run around with the boys instead of staying home and playing with dolls. The tomboy story, though, always seemed to culminate in the day when the former freckle-faced little gamin in braids made her debut at the prom, all long gown and smooth hair and chic poise and all the boys who had been her playmates stood there with their mouths hanging open and then stumbled over one another to ask for a dance.
I wasn't confident and extroverted enough to be the classic tomboy, nor did I harbor any illusions as I got older that I'd blossom into a glamorous sylph. I didn't feel like a chic girl who had it all together. I wasn't going to ever be a boy, either, I knew that.
So what was I?
The only things I could say with certainty about myself at that tender age were:
- I was an avid reader.
- I was a maker of things.
- I was creative.
- I liked the outdoors.
- I was messy.
- I hated pink.
- I liked blue.
I was not what my mother had ordered, something I would feel ever more strongly as I grew older and less and less inclined to follow the path she'd so meticulously planned out, which she seemed to take as a personal affront. But that core "me," whatever it was, however non-traditionally-gendered, was a stubborn Old Soul that refused to budge in the face of societal and motherly pressure.
I knew, even when the youth of the 60s were hitchhiking across Europe or meditating with gurus to "find themselves," exactly who I was. It was that solid sense of self that would be my saving grace, what would literally keep me alive, in the maelstrom of my young adult years.
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