The Beginning of Something
[Some of this may have appeared in bits and pieces in other columns. I'm working on a book pitch and this is from the intro...figured since I haven't posted a column in a while this would suffice. xoxo, Carol]
When I was around five or six, all of the girls I knew in my hometown of Tarrant, Alabama were joining the cheerleading squad at the recreation center. They would practice once or twice a week and then meet on Saturdays to cheer on the peewee football team. On Friday nights they would show up for the Tarrant High School football games — the biggest ticket in town — in uniform with their faces painted and barrettes with ribbons in the school colors. Their parents let them congregate next to the fence and giggle at boys, rather than sit in their seat and watch the game. Everyone thought they were so fucking cute, and I both hated and idolized them.
Around this same time, I was trying to figure out what the point of being a girl was. I always followed my brothers around, begging them to let me play army in the woods with their friends, roughhouse and watch TV. They were often forced to remind me that I was a girl, and a little girl at that, so I couldn’t hang out with them. The Morgan boys next door who were closer to my own age played with me for a while, that is until they got much more interested in a game called “Go in the Closet and Take Your Clothes Off then Open the Door for Half a Second.” That got old. My status as a female quickly became very limiting. I was either too weak and prone to tears or too potentially naked to be one of the guys.
Someone asked me once what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, “A boy…because girls can’t do anything.” I remember being frustrated when I said this and it wasn’t long after that when I really started trying to figure out what it was that girls did. My sister was eight and a half years older than me so she wasn’t much help; fourteen-year-old girls had a remarkably different idea of what fun was. She did buy me coloring books and crayons though, which, while fueling an artistic bent that would stick with me for years, didn’t do squat for my social skills.
However, my sister also cheered at her middle school. Bingo.
My request to my mother to let me go out for cheerleading seemed wrong the moment it came out of my mouth. It just didn’t seem like something I would ever want to do. Alas, I was a girl. Girl’s wore red nail polish, didn’t play with BB guns and they nanced around in tiny skirts and bloomers, waving pompoms and yelling, “Go!” at pre-pubescent boys wearing shoulder pads. I didn’t know what “gay” was but even then that all seemed really, really gay.
Nevertheless, I was desperate. I needed a purpose, an activity, a social network beyond my hundreds of artistic yet suicidal stuffed animals. (My pink panther, Pinky, a fledgling independent filmmaker, was known for repeatedly throwing himself off the top of my chest-of-drawers. He never succeeded, and often just found himself confined to a full body cast made of my mother’s surgical tape and chopsticks. The closest he came to realizing his goal was an eight-week coma. He stayed in a shoebox in the back of my closet and ate through a feeding tube made of bendy straws.)
Now, you would think that a good southern, Christian mom might leap at the opportunity to encourage her confused, precocious and morbid fourth child to take part in an activity that was so socially-established and gender-specific as cheerleading. After all, high school cheerleaders were always the prettiest, most popular, most intellectually average girls. They were the ones that every mom hoped their son might bring home. And isn’t that what it’s all about? Being the sort of girl someone wants to bring home, the sort of girl someone wants to take to church, the sort of girl someone wants to get head from behind the bleachers in that magical half hour after the last bell but before football practice? Without a doubt.
Nevertheless, when I asked my mom if I could join the cheerleading squad, she said no.
I was shocked. I mean…think about it. I was the fourth child. I got things. With four kids, who had time to deny me? Parents run out of feet to put down when their kids outnumber them, and I was the little accident that could; I asked, I usually got.
But this time she said no.
I may have cried. I can’t quite remember, but I was definitely flustered. I mean, my sister was a cheerleader…this made no sense. I demanded to know why she would deny me of this thing I didn’t really want to do but thought I should try if I weren’t going to grow up gay and atheist.
Her response floored me: “Why would you want to cheer for someone playing a sport when you can just play one yourself?”
Oh.
Well, uh, ahem, you see, I just, uh, never quite, er, thought of it in quite those, uh, terms, and well, I uhhhhhhhhhhhhh…SAY, it’s been lovely chatting with you, ma’am, do call when your husband returns home and we’ll all sit down for a nice meal…FUCKING CHRIST, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT?
I was the first six-year-old girl in the world to feel emasculated.
To be fair, I think my mom’s rationale was specific to me. She had no disdain for my sister’s pro-cheerleading lifestyle. But my mom sniffed me out and knew I had no idea what I was getting into, and she damn well wasn’t going to pay $75 for a cheerleading uniform I might wear once. Like all things, her philosophical stance was part ethics, part economics.
Whatever her reasoning, it worked…sort of. That fall I started playing basketball at the recreation center. They didn’t have a girls’ league so my mom signed me up for the regular one…the boys’ league. Oh, well. I was still a girl who didn’t understand HOW to be a girl but at least now the boys HAD to play with me.
There were five randomly assigned teams and I was the first and only girl to have ever been placed on one. My coach was less than thrilled. He tried to get me kicked out and when my mom threatened he and the entire rec center with a lawsuit, he attempted to cobble together a separate — but equal — girls’ league to get me off his team. I went to one practice with the girls and it was embarrassing. Fundamentals gave way to slapping, scratching and screaming. Within five minutes Mom had me back in the boys league and my coach too terrified to bring the matter up again. After that year, more and more girls started playing basketball and the coaches got used to it. Turns out, girls are great at defense. I was a snatching, grabbing, stalking, taunting prodigy. I could steal the ball from anyone. I couldn’t dribble or shoot well once I had it, but my coach just taught me to pass the ball to a teammate as soon as I got it in my hands. Once, while praising me to a colleague after a win, my newly enlightened coach said, “I’ll tell you what. That little girl right there can pester the ball outta anyone.”
Sigh…baby steps.
When I was around five or six, all of the girls I knew in my hometown of Tarrant, Alabama were joining the cheerleading squad at the recreation center. They would practice once or twice a week and then meet on Saturdays to cheer on the peewee football team. On Friday nights they would show up for the Tarrant High School football games — the biggest ticket in town — in uniform with their faces painted and barrettes with ribbons in the school colors. Their parents let them congregate next to the fence and giggle at boys, rather than sit in their seat and watch the game. Everyone thought they were so fucking cute, and I both hated and idolized them.
Around this same time, I was trying to figure out what the point of being a girl was. I always followed my brothers around, begging them to let me play army in the woods with their friends, roughhouse and watch TV. They were often forced to remind me that I was a girl, and a little girl at that, so I couldn’t hang out with them. The Morgan boys next door who were closer to my own age played with me for a while, that is until they got much more interested in a game called “Go in the Closet and Take Your Clothes Off then Open the Door for Half a Second.” That got old. My status as a female quickly became very limiting. I was either too weak and prone to tears or too potentially naked to be one of the guys.
Someone asked me once what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, “A boy…because girls can’t do anything.” I remember being frustrated when I said this and it wasn’t long after that when I really started trying to figure out what it was that girls did. My sister was eight and a half years older than me so she wasn’t much help; fourteen-year-old girls had a remarkably different idea of what fun was. She did buy me coloring books and crayons though, which, while fueling an artistic bent that would stick with me for years, didn’t do squat for my social skills.
However, my sister also cheered at her middle school. Bingo.
My request to my mother to let me go out for cheerleading seemed wrong the moment it came out of my mouth. It just didn’t seem like something I would ever want to do. Alas, I was a girl. Girl’s wore red nail polish, didn’t play with BB guns and they nanced around in tiny skirts and bloomers, waving pompoms and yelling, “Go!” at pre-pubescent boys wearing shoulder pads. I didn’t know what “gay” was but even then that all seemed really, really gay.
Nevertheless, I was desperate. I needed a purpose, an activity, a social network beyond my hundreds of artistic yet suicidal stuffed animals. (My pink panther, Pinky, a fledgling independent filmmaker, was known for repeatedly throwing himself off the top of my chest-of-drawers. He never succeeded, and often just found himself confined to a full body cast made of my mother’s surgical tape and chopsticks. The closest he came to realizing his goal was an eight-week coma. He stayed in a shoebox in the back of my closet and ate through a feeding tube made of bendy straws.)
Now, you would think that a good southern, Christian mom might leap at the opportunity to encourage her confused, precocious and morbid fourth child to take part in an activity that was so socially-established and gender-specific as cheerleading. After all, high school cheerleaders were always the prettiest, most popular, most intellectually average girls. They were the ones that every mom hoped their son might bring home. And isn’t that what it’s all about? Being the sort of girl someone wants to bring home, the sort of girl someone wants to take to church, the sort of girl someone wants to get head from behind the bleachers in that magical half hour after the last bell but before football practice? Without a doubt.
Nevertheless, when I asked my mom if I could join the cheerleading squad, she said no.
I was shocked. I mean…think about it. I was the fourth child. I got things. With four kids, who had time to deny me? Parents run out of feet to put down when their kids outnumber them, and I was the little accident that could; I asked, I usually got.
But this time she said no.
I may have cried. I can’t quite remember, but I was definitely flustered. I mean, my sister was a cheerleader…this made no sense. I demanded to know why she would deny me of this thing I didn’t really want to do but thought I should try if I weren’t going to grow up gay and atheist.
Her response floored me: “Why would you want to cheer for someone playing a sport when you can just play one yourself?”
Oh.
Well, uh, ahem, you see, I just, uh, never quite, er, thought of it in quite those, uh, terms, and well, I uhhhhhhhhhhhhh…SAY, it’s been lovely chatting with you, ma’am, do call when your husband returns home and we’ll all sit down for a nice meal…FUCKING CHRIST, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT?
I was the first six-year-old girl in the world to feel emasculated.
To be fair, I think my mom’s rationale was specific to me. She had no disdain for my sister’s pro-cheerleading lifestyle. But my mom sniffed me out and knew I had no idea what I was getting into, and she damn well wasn’t going to pay $75 for a cheerleading uniform I might wear once. Like all things, her philosophical stance was part ethics, part economics.
Whatever her reasoning, it worked…sort of. That fall I started playing basketball at the recreation center. They didn’t have a girls’ league so my mom signed me up for the regular one…the boys’ league. Oh, well. I was still a girl who didn’t understand HOW to be a girl but at least now the boys HAD to play with me.
There were five randomly assigned teams and I was the first and only girl to have ever been placed on one. My coach was less than thrilled. He tried to get me kicked out and when my mom threatened he and the entire rec center with a lawsuit, he attempted to cobble together a separate — but equal — girls’ league to get me off his team. I went to one practice with the girls and it was embarrassing. Fundamentals gave way to slapping, scratching and screaming. Within five minutes Mom had me back in the boys league and my coach too terrified to bring the matter up again. After that year, more and more girls started playing basketball and the coaches got used to it. Turns out, girls are great at defense. I was a snatching, grabbing, stalking, taunting prodigy. I could steal the ball from anyone. I couldn’t dribble or shoot well once I had it, but my coach just taught me to pass the ball to a teammate as soon as I got it in my hands. Once, while praising me to a colleague after a win, my newly enlightened coach said, “I’ll tell you what. That little girl right there can pester the ball outta anyone.”
Sigh…baby steps.
posted by Carol at 10:33 AM
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