We had our first parent teachers meeting a week back, and life is not the same after that. My memory has been behaving in a very weird fashion and i dont know what triggers it but i seem to get near perfect recalls of what happened years back. Oh ya it could also be an impact of the "memory man" series, but not helping at all. I get dropped off at school and pick two tokens to meet two teachers. I sit down in front of the first and and she hands me a sheet. It has about what felt like a zillion rows and each row being hand marked with a tick that could mean excellent, good, can improve and learning. Like every normal parent, my eyes just focus on the fourth column. There were a couple and one that caught my eye (and my mind) was "can identify himself/herself as a boy/girl". I take a deep breath, sign my name in the end and return the sheet. "Mam do u want to take a photograph of it?". "No i dont, thank you". Because that line is etched deeply in my mind.
My mind races back decades (sigh am old) to the time the world was waiting for me to reach puberty. Yes thats how it felt, because everyone in my class had already reached there and i was one of the last (okay two of us). I remember those school days when everyone used to talk behind my back in hushed tones. As you all know I dont have the athletic or aesthetic curves and this has always been a hot topic for everyone around me in school. I have been put through constant bullying shaming and what not, but sometimes i feel im a hard nut to crack. I always used to laugh at them with those mundane jokes calling me an iron box or a lizard and never took them back home or to my heart. One half the 13 year old me thought it was a disability and the other half believed they would come, like in those fairy tales when fairy god mother would sprinke dust all over me.
The wait was a very difficult phase. The taunts every day, the hushes behind me, the pain. God am I a girl? To me, it was the biggest problem in life - to have breasts and to get a period. I used to hate myself every day, I used to hate my body and the state it was, i used to get so frustrated it was not happening. I faced neglect in school, I used to be withdrawn, I had trouble talking to boys with a constant fear of being verbally assaulted. I was enclosing myself into a tight circle, loathing myself. The only question that kept running in my mind was - what if my period never came? What if I was not whom I believed to be all these years. I felt sick at the thought, frustration pulling me further down into a deep abyss. And yes, obviously, one day my period came.
Zooming back into the present, I hear the teachers voice coming back into focus. "He's independent, tries to make friends and very creative. Nice meeting you mam, just one help. If you could just teach him that he's a boy it will be helpful". I smile at her, stand up and push back the chair into its place. I look ahead and walk like the world depends on it, without ever looking back. Dear Mam, I will not. But yes, I will teach them to embrace their choices and believe in them with conviction, teach them that the body will make them what they are meant to be, teach them to love, respect and be loved and respected for who they or others are. And by then, I will grow up all over again with them, and perhaps, probably then, my hard etched memories shall be replaced by new ones.
Cheers,
Hopie
