A Girlhood by Carolyn Hays

Author:Carolyn Hays
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blair

Part III

AFTER

21

MIGRATION ALONE TAKES ITS toll. The Red Knot is a migratory bird that weighs around 220 grams, less than half of a pound. The Red Knot breeds in Siberia and migrates to the west coast of Africa in winter, with some traveling as far as South Africa. Its migration isn’t easy. En route, it loses almost half of its body weight. Our own migration north took a toll on us. It hit each of the kids in different ways. It stripped us down a little, but we landed.

Years have passed since all of this. A breathless blur of them.

Things got better for us, all in all. During the Trump years, things got worse all around. Or maybe America has simply been exposed for what it’s always been.

While writing this book, there have been moments of such sharp disconnect. For example, you were on the sun porch sewing a dress for a Mrs. Maisel – inspired photo shoot that you dreamed up while people were filing lawsuits and protesting and honoring the trans people who have been murdered this year.

How do I explain to you the firestorm around your body?

How do I explain that and yet also protect you and your body?

I’m still figuring things out. This landing would give me time to process what had happened and to try to begin to understand gender, its place within us, and its artful presentation—from its gimmickry to its rules and how they are sometimes brutally enforced to its liberated expression—and how gender plays out everywhere, all the time. It is relentless.

What follows will be fractured and messy. But that fractured messiness is how form meets function. It is the most honest way to say what I have to say. How I’m going to tell the rest is a reflection of how I cannot make sense of this for you, how I cannot put it in order, how I cannot find the overarching narrative that holds it all.

The only thing that I am sure of is you.

And here, in this new place, you could be an ordinary girl, whatever that means. I could say, “You fit in with the other girls.”

But you were also very you. I remember around this time, you were playing with your Thomas the Train set with its wooden tracks and magnetized train cars in the upstairs playroom. After a while, you found me and your father in the kitchen. You showed us what you’d made. You’d taped two wooden bridge pieces to your feet with clear mailing tape, fashioning a pair of high heels. This was genius of course; we knew genius when we saw it.

Another time, you walked into my office holding a drawing. “I drew a picture of Lady Gaga with Martin Luther King shoes,” you told me.

I looked at the drawing. The shoes were a cross between ballet toe shoes and hooves, with no heels. “I think you mean Alexander McQueen, not Martin Luther King.”

You did. We stuck the drawing to the fridge with a magnet.

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