"It’s a girl!"
The doctor handed me to my mom, wails filling the room.
Not my wails. My dad’s. That’s what I imagine, anyway. I can’t be sure. I was too busy marveling at my first time being naked in public.
My mom had begged him for a third. Stretched thin with the son and daughter they already had, he’d refused. Until she came up with a foolproof plan. She promised him another boy. Pretty sure it was law back then: if you were a man, you had one job: to make more men.
My dad wasn’t—and still isn’t—a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination. Girls just weren’t really a thing yet. Plus, they already had a daughter. Why on earth would you want two? What’s next, domesticated animals inside the house?
He agreed to the plan, and excited, they picked a name: Gary Michael. (Isn’t it weird to imagine a newborn Gary? Garys seem like they should be born in their 40s.)
Then, surprise! Out I slid, baby-lady parts proudly on display.
They scrounged up a leftover name from when my brother was born, Tina Michelle, and dragged me home by the foot of my forlorn blue racecar onesie. A disgrace! Do girls even know how to say VROOM?
Again, I can’t be sure if this is exactly what happened. You can’t be a reliable source if you don’t have the neck strength to hold up your head.
One thing became clear in my ginormous noggin pretty quickly: if I wanted these people to accept another daughter into the family, I was going to have to entertain the shit out of them. I’d make Gary Michael wish he’d never never existed!
My first attempt at proving myself came a little later when I was a toddler.
"MO-OMMMMMMM!" Brian bellowed. The two of us were in the basement playing.
Four years younger, I was thrilled to be in my big brother’s presence. We lived in the country with no gang of neighborhood kids. He let me hang out with him sparingly, and only because he had no one else. To impress him, I’d happily play whatever he wanted. Like "smash," where—the rules are complicated, so read this slowly—you smash toys together until they break.
“WHAT?” my mom called from upstairs, annoyed at both the length and volume of his plea.
"TINA PEED HER PANTS!" He screamed with the adrenaline of someone breaking a top news story.
I howled, tears streaming down my face, consumed by the unfairness. As a recent and successful potty trainee, I was insulted. I had not peed myself! How dare he?
Brian pointed to the wet spot forming around me as my mom came down the stairs. Confused and wracked by embarrassment, I froze. I knew the puddle wasn’t pee, but I didn’t yet understand what it was: the after-effect of an even more humiliating event from a few weeks before. My first disastrous attempt to entertain my way out from Hypothetical Gary’s shadow.
My mom always tried to convince me that I didn’t remember that night. I couldn’t possibly, she argued. I had only been three years old.
But when your childhood trauma is DIY? That shit sticks.
The five of us were lingering around the homemade fire pit in our backyard, a dug-out circle surrounded by large rocks gathered from the woods behind our house. We might’ve just finished roasting hot dogs. I probably ate mine raw, as I preferred, and covered in grass. You try spinning in circles with a hot dog flopping in one hand!
We all watched as the fire slowly burned itself out. Finally, the flames gone, only a pile of gray ash remained. My mushy brain lit up with a revelation: fire was red, and red meant hot. I knew that. But what if I showed my family that I was a color savant? That I also knew gray meant cold? That’s genius-level. Gary Michael could never.
With all the unearned confidence of the boy I was supposed to have been, I proceeded to march through the firepit barefoot. What I didn’t know was that under the gray ashes, there was nothing but red embers. No one had taught me the concept of “embers” yet! Nooooo. It was all still just a bunch of “What does a cow say?” bullshit.
I remember—vividly—the screaming. I can still hear it, as though it came from someone else. The shock. The pain. I remember one of my parents scooping me up and racing me up to the faucet on the back side of the house, running cold water over my feet. From there, my memory cuts out.
I know from family lore that they raced me to the emergency room, where my feet were heavily bandaged and I learned I would have to be carried everywhere until they healed—a devastating blow to the independent lady-toddler I strived to be.
"Gary would never," my dad hissed at my mom as he carried me out of the hospital. Probably.
My memory picks back up in the basement, weeks later, to the sounds of Brian’s disgust. Me sitting helplessly in my little puddle of shame.
I know now that I hadn’t peed myself; that what happened was in fact through no fault of my own. The blisters on the bottoms of my feet had finally popped. The liquid was enough to form a dark circle on the carpet.
Thankfully, Mom explained this to both Brian and me as she readied me to head back to the hospital, where the dead skin on my feet would be cut away. And I would be allowed to start walking again.
Physically, I was healed. Underneath, the embers still shimmered with shame. I would make it my life’s mission to prove myself to this family, dammit!
Gary Michael could burn in red-hot, feet-leaky hell.
Classic ol' Gary Micheal.
"With all the unearned confidence of the boy I was supposed to have been..." Bwahahahahahahaha.