Okay so I got back from work last night with a migraine of sorts and couldn't really focus myself to post on Reddit, naturally. I'll take a shot at relating the story now even though I'm currently kinda numbed out of the emotional context that spurred me to offer.
I've probably told this story before on here in some capacity, so apologies if you've seen it before. But the incident that haunts me ... Well, there's one, and it's very distinct in my memory. In fact, it's one of very few memories I have at all from before maybe age 9.
One evening when I was about six or seven, mom took me with her to watch a football game at the high school. Dunno why, probably a family friend's son was playing. Anyway, naturally very few of the kids who were there with their families actually gave a fuck about watching the game. So the kids would go off and play around on the big hill next to the bleachers. I didn't actually go to that school system (private catholic school on the other side of the county instead), so I knew none of the other kids there, and I was kinda out of the loop on who to try to insert myself in with. Most of the boys were doing stuff like playing football themselves, roughhousing, whatever. I... really just wasn't interested in that. And I was pretty intimidated by the idea of talking to them, besides.
But there was this girl there! I don't remember how we started talking, but we discovered that we really got along. So she and I played with each other. To be honest, it was partly because I found her really cute :P And she was. I actually think years later she ended up working as a model for a while... But basically, I just really felt comfortable interacting with her. And we played dumb, maybe-more-girlish-than-I-remember games out there on the hillside beside the bleachers. And we ran back and forth and chattered at my mom and chattered at her parents and told them about the silly stuff we were doing; just things like that, that little kids who are about six or seven do. It was great. And yeah, total instant first-grade-crush on her.
Everything was fine until later. I really think it was on the way home from the game, but it might have been the next day? Mom ... fucking exploded. Tore into me about how weird I'd been acting, how I didn't do the right things for a boy my age. She asked: Why couldn't I play with the boys? Did I know how it looked to people? Did I know what people would say? She reminded me how many people had seen me and that girl running around together, acting the way we were acting. Playing the games we were playing. Screaming. In the way that only mom, out of everyone I've ever known, can scream. That I was "embarrassing her in public" -- "do you know how much you're embarrassing me?" That people would think there was something wrong with me. That I was shaming our entire family. The insistence that I really remember, that I can still hear in my head verbatim: "You're supposed to do BOY things, not GIRL things!"
That's probably the first time I remember having a total emotional collapse over something. I've cried, and cried, and cried about this memory for most of my life, for over a decade before I even understood why it hurt so much. I remember being thirteen and bawling my eyes out to my few online friends who I trusted enough to tell, over how clear and sharp and painful that memory was.
(And spoilers, I never hung out with that girl again after that. I saw her a rare couple times around town, but from then on I always regarded her as something forbidden to me, and felt that it'd probably be weird to try to talk to her anyway).
Honestly? The more stories I hear about myself as a little kid, the more I begin to wonder about the motive behind mom's reaction. When I was a teenager, and didn't know trans people existed, I assumed out-of-hand that my mother reacted that way because she thought I was gay; mom frequently accused me of being gay and hurled homophobic slurs at me in arguments all the way up through the end of high school. Hell, she still does sometimes. She seemed mortified by the possibility. But now that I've been able to wrap my brain around and accept my transness, all that evidence from early life looks different. I remember the stories (which she'd retell to friends in public, seemingly to try to humiliate me) about when I was in preschool, and I'd fight with the little girls for control of the kitchen playset (lol). And yeah, I remember distinctly begging for an EZ-Bake Oven. I actually think I got one. It was at my grandmother's house. ... I think my grandmother may have been a lot more tolerant of my "strangeness" than mom was, but that's just speculation.
Essentially? I think that mom knew, or had a strong inclination as to what was up, even though I didn't. People I told the football game story to used to be as baffled as I was, as to why she'd overreact to such a degree to that one little incident. But with everything else considered, I'm pretty sure that was just her breaking point after years of raising someone who was by all accounts a very overtly feminine child.
Hey, it worked for her. I buried that shit.