Different
A West Texas story of the 1950s
… abhorrent, damnable, despicable, dirty, disgusting, evil, faggy, loathsome, nasty, nauseating, perverted, repellent, revolting, sickening, shitty, sinful, sissy, unnatural, (and the list goes on) …
Back when I was just a tyke – maybe five or six – my sister-in-law warned my mother that I’d turn out “different” if she didn’t watch out. Letting me play with dolls instead of footballs would make me a sissy, and it would be all my mother’s fault. (Some of this was not spoken in so many words, but the gist was there, the blanks filled in by assumption and interpretation.)
They never got on easily, I think, my mother and my sister-in-law. Still young herself – maybe twenty-five or twenty-six – she was wife to my much older half-brother, and already had two sons of her own, only a few years younger than I. It was never explicitly stated, but I came to realize down the years that the barrier dividing them had a lot to do with so many sons. There were no girl children in the family, but several boys: me, my half-brother, my sister-in-law’s three – one lost young, perhaps to SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, though most folks didn’t know about that then. Such a loss a crushing blow to any mother. But that’s her story, so I won’t intrude in it.
She’d read Dr. Spock, so she was raising her remaining sons “by the book.” My mother, a generation older, didn’t think much of the approach: just a way to excuse letting them run wild, she thought. Though “running wild” might have been a bit strong to describe ordinary child-exuberances, including sibling tiffs, inevitable when children live as multiples, even in the least wild of families.
Mother, though one of 8 or 9 herself, had only ever contended with one son at a time – and those, “little angels” – so she had little experience, and no patience, for sibling frictions, even those of her own grandsons. Though I did learn far into adulthood, and after her death, that she’d miscarried another son, a year or two after I was born – so I almost had a younger brother, and she, two young sons in the house at once. That might have changed her attitudes considerably – never mind the changes it would have meant for ME! (This news shared by, guess who – my sister-in-law.)
But it may not really have been Dr. Spock Mother objected to. The real start of the trouble seemed to be that she, the brazen miss – I’m talking about my sister-in-law here – had stolen one of my mother’s sons by marrying him and taking him away too soon, an unforgivable transgression. Mother had what she thought were good reasons for objecting: thought they were both too young, at 17 (even though she herself had married first at an even younger 15 – but those were different times, she thought); and he should be going to college; and she (the interloping “she”) should be encouraging him to.
Of course, they married anyway, just as she had done in her turn, even when her own father asked if she was really ready – though, since he still had a wife and son and four other daughters, all of more or less marriageable age, to be housed, clothed and fed on a lean income, his questioning may not have been too vigorous. Mother even missed her first son’s wedding – not so much because she had objections, but because she’d given birth to me just two days earlier. So one son lost in the process of getting another – a sort of sibling rivalry for Mother’s attention right from my start.
Decades later, I would bring mother another son, and not only that, a doctor (he’s now my husband), so he was golden, and so was I for bringing him.
Some things you don’t forget, even after 70 years. Actually, for me that seems to be most things, since I seem to have a long memory. And since my mantra has long been “Never forget, and never forgive,” remembering can carry weighty freight. Not necessarily the best approach, but there it is.
As example, sister-in-law’s comment made 70 years ago, possibly in a fit of pique about something entirely unrelated, and likely soon forgotten by the one who made it. But I never forgot it. And neither did my mother, who, for reasons of her own, related it to me. Maybe to let me know, without saying it in so many words, that it was OK with her that I was different. After all, she never banned those portentous dolls – though I did lose interest in them soon enough – as my interest in other boys, who inexplicably favored footballs over dolls, supplanted them – an interest not understood, unacknowledged for decades, but definitely the “difference” my sister-in-law warned about.
And so she was right, except perhaps about the “turning out” part. Because by then I already knew that I was “different.” That part was no surprise, though I wouldn’t be able to articulate what that difference was, even to myself, for years yet. I also somehow knew even then that it was not just a difference, but something wrong, to be kept secret. So learning, through what she said, that others could see my difference, and make judgements – unfavorable ones – about me because of it, struck like a lightning bolt. And lightning bolts – when they strike you directly – you don’t forget, even when you’re only five or six.
That’s when I first knew it was essential that I hide my secret. Before that, if I even had any secrets, I didn’t know what to do with them but tell them. After, I sensed that to survive, I’d have to hide them. Or, more precisely, to hide IT – that wicked difference.
I’m sure we all have things that we feel we must hide, or that we want to. Hiding is a branch of lying, and lying is grueling work over time. There’s all that remembering of what you’ve said before, and stopping just short of letting everything out. The thinking up of new reasons and explanations. The making it sound sincere and true. Not many are good enough at it to keep it going undetected for long. The ones lied to notice, and being people, they’re likely to assume it’s about them. And they pull away; who can blame them? Why stick around with a liar?
I saw this pulling away in my own life, mostly with family, and the effects have lasted a lifetime. Once you’ve learned the habits of deflection, deception, obfuscation, it’s hard to unlearn them. And once the trust that has to go along with maintaining ties is strained, it’s hard to resuscitate. Even after the secrets are finally all in the open – if they ever really are, and even though they’ve probably been known all along, though maybe unspoken – the pulling away lingers.
I don’t blame my sister-in-law for what she said all those years ago – though I wish she hadn’t said it. If I’d had courage, I might have done things differently, but I didn’t – at least, not enough. And even if she hadn’t spoken, there’d have been some other bolt to sear my difference, and the fears that came with it, into my young consciousness. It’s the way the world was back then. Sadly, I’m afraid, it may be the way the world still is for many who are now five or six, and just learning that they need to hide their difference too.