I was female right out of the box, indubitably, irrevocably. Never wanted to be anything else. Ever. Still don’t. Could do without the boobs, but there you go.
They didn’t figure out I was left-handed until about fourth grade. I was a girl in rural Catholic America, and they didn’t pay any attention to us as long as we kept the house and our mouths clean. They apparently didn’t realize that clean minds might have been a smarter thing to try to entangle us with. But that was like being left-handed: we were girls eventually women, and we didn’t matter, so why notice?
What always surprised me about that was the women acted just like the men: they were convinced women didn’t matter. I often wondered why they bothered to live. I also wondered if anyone else had those thoughts. Did you? Today I wonder if something of that “born inferior” didn’t carry over into foreverhood. Okay, I don’t wonder, I know. Don’t you?
The other thing about that is the boys were shortchanged, too. Why? In Catholic grade school the nuns were too busy drilling us in how to become free-form artists to “The Flight of the Bumblebee” blaring out of a cheap stereo to actually teach us anything. What, did they figure, farming community, all these kids need to know is dirt, or did they just not know better? I don’t really want to know the answer to that question, because I think I do (dirt), and that makes me feel bad for those kids whose minds were limited by prejudice.
Then, too, those nuns who taught us were preoccupied. By nuclear war, of course, it was that time when it seemed very real, when we cringed in our beds at night whenever a plane flew overhead, because a bomb might come whistling out of the sky. I remember many drills, the nuns showing us the proper way to survive nuclear war—by crouching over a milk carton in the school hallways. I remember that as one of my first open rebellious moments: as Sister Whozit passed, her black robes swishing around her ankles and her rosary bouncing off her apparently ample hip, I sat up and peered at all the kids’ butts pointing skyward and wondered how sane adults really were. We would never make it through nuclear war on one small carton of milk, and why would I radiate my body to protect it in the first place? Who were these people who had my butt in the air and my free-spirited rebel heart’s nose to the grungy linoleum?
They weren’t my people. My people loved life, relished it, dealt in kindness. Mostly they were animals, and trees, and mountains, and my salvation the ocean, and one or two who might have thought me strange (my father) but who got me nevertheless (my earth mother). They are all still with me today, in one way or another.
At some point I actually became an adult, and just as I was ready to break free at last I became handicapped. Ironic, isn’t it? Free to run, and I couldn’t walk or stand for long. Still can’t, all these years later. But I learned to run and walk in different realms, instead, to cross time and dimensional borders as an intuitive, to write about those journeys, to invite others to explore with me. But still, physically, I’m handicapped.
Names live, they have power: female, left-handed, handicapped. Everything they tried to do to disempower me simply made me stronger. Eventually. The power of three, Triune America. Where everything wrong comes out right, in time, where memories serve as thoughtful reminders of how small-mindedness can harm, where disability is a workaround.
Mindset matters. I just didn’t give up, no matter what label got attached. I would still change some of the circumstances. Would you change yours?
© Robyn M Fritz 2013