How to Forgive My Residual Womanhood Gifted by Blood(line)
by Len Luminosity
My mother firmly believes that her ex-husband cheated on her with her best friend.
She is still best friends with that same woman. Says she’ll never bring the suspicion up, leave it for a deathbed “I know” at most. They talk frequently, probably mention him once in a while, just like any other significant event of the past more than 30 years of friendship.
It’s not my place to tell her how to feel or what to do or anything of the like. Older equals wiser and all that. Plus, I guess I’ve never been in a similar situation to judge what I would do against my mother’s actions.
But…
I guess this is a safe enough place to say that I firmly do not get it.
Forgiveness, yeah, but what about trust? What about burns? It’s hard to see beauty in friendship that I think would hurt me.
Maybe I have too much of my father in me to weigh in on such gossipping manners, his transferred cleft chin trading off for the part of the brain that “just gets” things like this. That went to my sisters, though they got the chin too. So I wonder what they missed out on as a tradeoff that I get to keep. The easy answer would be autism, but I think the real answer is probably some sort of related-yet-separate generational scar/understanding that has yet to carve itself into them and probably never will.
Gender, maybe?
But, no, because I write like a girl because I grew up like a girl and because I am more than close enough with my female mother to hear the way she talks about her female mother and her male brother. To hear the slight bitterness when she talks about how he sold arrowhead crawlspace tours and tricked her into eating rocks. To hear the muted sorrow in her voice when she tells of the way her mother–my grandmother–cooked and cleaned and “did the right thing for the time,” but not what was right for her.
And, no, scrap that again–I write like a girl because I grew up like a girl and maybe still am kind of a girl because of the way I carry these stories inside me, in tandem with my own. How could I ever be told to take the gummies out of my “inappropriate” breast pocket and not end up at least a little bit a woman? No matter how I try to morally wiggle my way out of it or posit constructed discomfort as a shield, there is a burned womanhood in me that no amount of testosterone could beat out. Through memories I try to pretend aren’t there and through “is it bald?” and through trying to make thin thinner, I have earned a twisted claim to a gender that I fought passionately to justify myself away from. So even though I do not understand why my mother’s best friend is not forgone by “girl code” and my mustache shines bright and “she” in any real way makes me cringe, there is a lot of womanhood in my blood and bones and family history. There is enough that if I were to extract and concentrate it, I could make a glass of juice, thickly clotted and gutting my stomach like that first day in seventh grade. And after my grandmother denounced the institution of christianity for its blight on women, rising the tension in that scolding, one-floor home like the Arizona heat it sits in, because only my grandfather still goes to church, how could I not accept a piece of being female? When Pop Pop dies first and Namee finally moves to the city she’s always dreamed of, any city at all outside of the country he loved, that hardened tile that she built her gender from will shatter dramatically, years of cracks finally intolerable.
At this moment, I will pat her on the back. Gentle.
Then I will sweep up the pieces of tile, noting the tree-like layers of grout from decades of home upkeep. I will throw most of the pieces away, but one will be saved to be fastened into my heart, sewn atop it like the last group project of an ill-intentioned home economics class.
There will be a next time that I hear someone ask: “are you a boy or a girl?,” because for visually identifiable freaks like me, that question is as ceaseless as the Saturdays of my hormone shots.
That next time will be difficult because I will have to answer “a boy” to protect my carefully molded identity, and because I never really could run away from explaining myself and telling the truth more than was ever needed. But that next time, no response of “so why are you wearing makeup?,” or the immediate “girllll” will hurt as bad as the decaying stitches in my chest, a dully aching reminder of the women who came before me.
I will not forget them, never never never, but I can’t say the insistence away from their identity does not give a creeping worry that I am betraying the collective traumas of my sex. I know it isn’t quite rational, but it clings to me like a friend who misses the sexual gag of my old voice a bit too much. Sometimes it overwhelms me, the idea that I have given away something precious, and quickly that overwhelm is replaced by a new type of guilt for building and equating womanhood by suffering and oversexualized body parts. And then that guilt takes over, snapping at my fingers like the itchy cold while I write out metaphors some overactive part of my brain has decided are as evil as the way I slashed my breasts.
At the moment, I don’t have a cure for any of it–the guilt of transition, the guilt of morality, the guilt of poetry. Oh, so much guilt. And for what? To have a vagina I don’t even desire to use as anything more than a joke, a fun fact? A piss poor consolation prize, if you ask me.
But I have a proposed solution.
My mother firmly believes that her ex-husband cheated on her with her best friend, and yet the two are still best friends, neither having ever spoken of the incident(s) nor planned to. There is a forgiveness there that, though I do not understand it fully, I wish to give to myself. I trace over the bare patch on my thigh, hairless evidence of how much I hated what I had been given, and I put that forgiveness into the way my finger rubs the wrinkling scar. We don’t have to talk about it, me and my body and my boyhood and my womanhood and all the baggage that comes with all of that. But we will be friends despite the way we all backstab each other, chasing after husbands through sulci lines in cerebral cornfields.