Did your Mother dress you?

[Ceera]

Not that I can recall.

My mother often told me that as a baby, I had a head of hair full of big blond ringlets, and she got rather frustrated when others would look at me in my stroller or sitting in the back of a grocery cart and say things like, "What a cute little girl!" Her common reply was to say, "He's a BOY!", in a rather exasperated tone. So I think she actually would have avoided dressing me like a girl. (Yet she didn't cut that curly hair of mine for the first few years. Go figure.) By the time I was three or four my hair was kept cut short, and from that time on my father had a 'house rule' that despite it being fashionable for males in the late 60's and the 70's to have long hair, I had to keep my hair worn short. Tapered in back or even crew cuts. So I suspect dad laid down the law at some point on making me look like a boy and not a girl. I do have a sister, but she's about 5 years younger than me, so any hand-me-down clothes went from me to her, not vice versa. And none of my mom's clothes would have fit me as a kid.

Yet at the same time, there were a few confusing things... My first name is somewhat androgynous. It's the name of a type of bird, and I've met several girls with the same first name. And I don't know of any member of the family that ever had that given name. I know mom chose the name for me, but I don't know what may have caused her to choose it. My 'baby blanket' was pink. And when I was six or so I know I had a pink hooded sweatshirt (I've recently seen it in old photos). As a kid, it wasn't uncommon for my mom to take me with her on her weekly trip to the beauty parlor, and I'd get my hair cut there, if I needed a trim, while she had hers styled. That didn't end until I got old enough to wait for her in the kids section of a nearby public library, reading on my own until she was done. So I have lots of childhood memories of sitting around in a beauty parlor, reading the women's magazines and occasionally getting my own hair cut and blow dried or dried in a bonnet-style hair dryer. Maybe my mom secretly wanted to share more 'girl things' with me, but she never came out and said so. I don't think my dad would have let her do much of that, as he was homophobic.

I don't remember playing 'dress up' with girls when I was little, except a little with my sister, and that normally was me dressing her up, not either of us dressing me like a girl. But I did play with girls a lot. My sister was pretty much my best friend, growing up, and still is quite close to me. I had a little sibling rivalry when she was two or so, but quickly got over that and cherished her from then on. All of my first cousins were girls (both slightly older and slightly younger than me), and my sister and I played with them whenever they visited us or vice versa. I vividly recall being the only boy attending a special birthday party for one of my female first cousins, when we visited them in California. They went to a Mattel toy factory. But it turned out to be a tour of just the doll making side. My aunt apologized for it being such a girl-oriented experience, and said she thought the tour also included how some boy-oriented toys were made. I told her I didn't mind, and that I thought it was neat seeing how things were made - especially how they used liquid nitrogen to make it easier to pierce the rubber part that allowed a baby doll to cry. That made her feel okay about it. I remember it didn't bother me at all to be the only boy in a pack of girls, doing girl stuff.

I played with my next door neighbor girl (a year older than me) much more than I did with her younger brother (a year younger than me), from when I was six right on through high school. (Never dated that girl, though.) Two of the three kids I played with most often when we went on beach vacations were girls that were the kids of family friends who owned a small beach resort. I remember playing with their dolls and doing their tea party games and playing with their stuffed toys, and I brought my stuffed toys to 'play with theirs'. I played in mixed groups with all the neighborhood kids, of course, but I probably spent more time playing with small groups of girls than any of the other boys in my neighborhood did.