unprodigal daughter
Today, the other side of the world is not far enough away from my homeland or from my birth family.
I have always been a stranger in my family. I look like them, I sound like them. I went to the church, I memorized the verses, I sang the songs.
I cried for my sins, I tried again. I loved the crazy people raising me, teaching me, punishing me. I loved them, I accepted them. I went to their alma mater, listened indulgently to their professors.
I gave it a serious go. Really.
I was 7 or 8 when I understood about the physical punishment. They meant it when they said they were doing it for my good and that it hurt them too. They were honestly doing their best and I Realized it. I put up with it for another 4 years after that.
I never fell in love with Jesus. He was never my type. Too popular maybe. But I tried anyway. I'm not sure who I was praying to during my childhood, but it wasnt him.
I was an awake girl child finding that everything about my sex identity made me unwanted and unimportant and weak. I was a born leader in a body pre-determined to be a sidekick. I was born strong with an expectation to feign weakness. So I did what seemed like the only option. I denied anything that seemed to me to be feminine. I lamented for years the onset of puberty.
Later, I have realized it was all as truly feminine as feminine can be to want to be dirty, to want to communicate with animals, to spend every day outside, to run wildly, to climb trees and to love plants. I have realized that understanding connections and being assertive and strong and persistent IS feminine.
I hated my species as a child. I learned later that my tendencies to be undomesticated were in fact wholly human.
I am the unrepressed, the embodied, the throwback. It has meant I get to travel between the rules and duck underneath limits.
It also means I do not belong to those I belong to.
I miss having a canine to remind me I do belong to this planet, that I am inextricably connected to the breathing creatures in this perfect beautiful world.
I like to take things as far as they can go. I want to see what breaks and what holds.
Now I know. There is no going back.
I am not the son who returns from his abandon. I am the daughter who stays gone and accepts her nourishment from the wild.
I have always been a stranger in my family. I look like them, I sound like them. I went to the church, I memorized the verses, I sang the songs.
I cried for my sins, I tried again. I loved the crazy people raising me, teaching me, punishing me. I loved them, I accepted them. I went to their alma mater, listened indulgently to their professors.
I gave it a serious go. Really.
I was 7 or 8 when I understood about the physical punishment. They meant it when they said they were doing it for my good and that it hurt them too. They were honestly doing their best and I Realized it. I put up with it for another 4 years after that.
I never fell in love with Jesus. He was never my type. Too popular maybe. But I tried anyway. I'm not sure who I was praying to during my childhood, but it wasnt him.
I was an awake girl child finding that everything about my sex identity made me unwanted and unimportant and weak. I was a born leader in a body pre-determined to be a sidekick. I was born strong with an expectation to feign weakness. So I did what seemed like the only option. I denied anything that seemed to me to be feminine. I lamented for years the onset of puberty.
Later, I have realized it was all as truly feminine as feminine can be to want to be dirty, to want to communicate with animals, to spend every day outside, to run wildly, to climb trees and to love plants. I have realized that understanding connections and being assertive and strong and persistent IS feminine.
I hated my species as a child. I learned later that my tendencies to be undomesticated were in fact wholly human.
I am the unrepressed, the embodied, the throwback. It has meant I get to travel between the rules and duck underneath limits.
It also means I do not belong to those I belong to.
I miss having a canine to remind me I do belong to this planet, that I am inextricably connected to the breathing creatures in this perfect beautiful world.
I like to take things as far as they can go. I want to see what breaks and what holds.
Now I know. There is no going back.
I am not the son who returns from his abandon. I am the daughter who stays gone and accepts her nourishment from the wild.
posted by hymenoptera's honey at 2:53 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home