Embracing The Inner Sissy

Looking back, I don't think my parents gave us the impression that boys were better than girls. But I got it from somewhere, and it took a long time to shake it off.

Maybe because I wasn't small and dainty, I decided, in self defense, that whose who were, were inferior. I played with dolls and teddy bears, sure. But I was also a fearless tree climber. Kitty W, our neighbour, used to holler out her window at me, as I roosted with my book in the tree at the end of our garden ---

"You be careful Molly Bawn! One of these days you're going to fall out of that tree and break your arse!"
I never did.

I was also a nimble dancer-over-rocks at the seaside; avid explorer of tide pools; tireless collector of seashells; builder of sand castles and enthusiastic sand dune runner. At home I threw my rubber ball endlessly against the wall outside our kitchen, sing-songing the rhyming litany of tricks to do on each throw, before the ball came back to my hand, whilst my mother yelled intermittantly about the fate awaiting me when I broke the window. Maybe my tall gangliness seemed more suited to a boy. Maybe I was secretly jealous that my mother made cute smocked dresses for my baby sister, but it never occured to her to make such pretty things for me .....

Maybe I dreaded, worse than death itself, that the boys in the neighbourhood might call me a sissy. Boys had all the power and all the freedom. To be considered a sissy by them meant you were a very low life-form indeed. Or so it seemed to me.

Things did not improve when I started to develop what, years later, my youngest daughter would call "pokes", as opposed to full blown bosoms. Oh, the mortification of it all! And the very last straw was when I had my first visit from "Auntie Jane". Not a child given to tantrums, THAT caused a meltdown of mammoth proportions. I still remember standing on the stairs, shouting at my poor bewildered mother about how unfair it all was. How come boys didn't have to endure such indignities? And what do you mean it's going to come back every month for the rest of my foreseeable life? Just kill me now and be done with it....

Of course, in time, I simmered down and resigned myself to my miserable fate. What choice did I have? What choice did any of us have?

Being female meant you were at the mercy of men. Only the most wanton of hussies would dare to ask a boy out. So one waited and hoped. I despised those of my peers who gussied themselves up of a Saturday afternoon, to wander into town and swan around, and sip coffee, which back then, was a very sophisticated beverage, and hope the young lords would notice them. It seemed demeaning to me somehow, like being a heifer at a cattle mart.

So I'd wander off, "lonely as a cloud", to walk along the banks of the Shannon, no doubt harboring a vague dream of meeting an equally lonesome, misunderstood soul of the opposite gender along the way. He would, of course, be stunningly handsome,in an understated sort of way, because, as shallow as I wasn't, that was the top priority. Hmmm. Of course the chances were slim to none anyhow, as the "happening" place was not among the lonely reeds by Shannon's banks, but in town at the Savoy cafe.

Once in a while, in town, some older man would smile at me and say "Hey handsome!" Blushing furiously, I feared I was being made fun of, because women were supposed to be pretty, not handsome. Further confirmation that I was falling way short of society's standards. Besides, of what use were the opinions of grown men, when the ones I pined after were snot-nosed adolescents who didn't give me a second glance?

"Youth is wasted on the young," my Dad used to say. I think he may have been right.

It was marriage, that finally set me on the road to enjoying being female. The long discussions, way into the night, with someone who let me see a side of him that no-one else saw, and who seemed to understand me in a way that no one had before.....That, and having children. That rush of fiercely protective love when I first held my babies in my arms. The wonder and awe as they learned to talk, and walk, in spite of having me as their mother. The realisation, when you have sons, that boys are just as sensitive, just as vulnerable, just as much in need of love and protection as girls, since society still expects them to be more stoic about life's little vicissitudes.

I have finally embraced my Inner Sissy. Since all my children are tall, I sometimes even feel small! I glory in my sissiness. I love sissy clothes. I don't care if my husband and son laugh at me when a romantic movie makes me cry. I'm not embarrassed to have to ask them to open those confounded jars for me.

Because I'm strong in ways that they are not. For which the OC gets some credit. He always expected more of me than I thought I was capable of. He came to me from a mother who was an uber-hausfrau, cook and baker extraordinaire, deft juggler of home, family and job---an act so impossible to follow, that, had I been less naive, I'd have run for my life. He took an enormous leap of faith, considering that I couldn't boil an egg when we got married. A few years into it he let slip, truthful to a fault, that even though I wasn't exactly beautiful, I had a nice face..... And great hips for bearing healthy children.[I didn't have a cast-iron frying pan handy at the time...] Gee, so it wasn't, after all, my stunning beauty and incisive wit? Someone teach that man to lie for God's sake!

Everyone has regrets in life and I am no different. But being a woman is not one of them. I wouldn't trade my Inner Sissy for all the tea in China.