Birthday Girl in a Boy’s Suit

How lucky Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are to have each other. One character uniquely different from the other, and possibly because of that difference, they enjoy a level of intimacy few friends find. As a child, I wondered if it was because they were boys. I also knew Mark Twain would have been, and was, someone I wanted to know. I could hear him in those pages; and even though Huck’s voice was surely his own, I’d done enough writing by the time I was nine to know the author was lurking nearby, both overtly (as in Tom Sawyer) and covertly (as in the first person voice of Huck Finn). I wanted to befriend both the boys and their boyish creator.

Could there be anything better than being a lad with a friend to climb, fish and go adventuring with? My own challenges scaling 30 ft. pine trees and balancing on fifth-floor rooftops were all met with the boys I wanted to BE when I was six. But I also had a weakness for dresses with frilly collars, and long puffed sleeves tied at the wrist with velvet ribbons. I loved playing with similarly attired dolls; a fact the boys I knew couldn’t make any sense out of, any more than the girls who were my friends could accept my woodland adventuring with pocket knives and axes; and boys.

Knowing my weakness for Mark Twain, you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover Sam Clemens and I shared the same birthday! Surely that was fated. Then I learned Winston Churchill also came into being on that day; he who once stated history would be kind to him because he intended to write it! Surely Fate was pointing the way for me with a sure, straight hand. Author Jonathan Swift, and 18^th century marvel was also born on my birthday, and recently I noticed C.S. Lewis was born just the day before me, and knowing how imprecise mothers can be about the timing of childbirth, I felt there wasn’t enough of a divide between the hours of our birthdates to quibble over. How telling it is that all these authors share the date of birth and writers’ gene with me…and, oh yes, they all happen to be men.

That revelation brought back the disquieting memory of my early prayer to be a boy instead of a girl so I could dress up as Hopalong Cassidy whenever I wanted, [plastic] pearl-handled guns at my hips. Or, if dressing up was in order, perhaps Little Lord Fauntleroy would be a costume I could keep forever.

“I don’t get it,” one of my earliest childhood friends said at my 9^th birthday party where my Fauntleroy velvet knickers and vest ruled the day. “You’re such a girly girl; except when you’re pretending you’re a boy!”

Quite frankly, I didn’t see any reason for her anxiety. It seemed perfectly natural to me to enjoy both roles, and so I did. I always chose the boys’ parts in plays in our all-girls school because they were more fun, assertive and outspoken, less submissive to authority figures and wore better costumes; at least from a nine-year-old point of view. But there was certainly no one, then or now, who would call me masculine, just as I never found the boys who enjoyed dividing their games and time with me effeminate in any way. It seemed so obvious that we all shared some gray region between the sexes that was neither one nor the other, like the area in a graph where two circles intersect before they go on their circuitous routes.

Facing another milestone birthday very soon, (they’re all milestones at this point), I find myself thinking about those other male authors born on my day and how much we have in common. I’m also still blessed with male friends who feel no shame in the company and conversation of women, and feel no discomfort in that fact; just as I still enjoy the greater outdoors and the men who often prefer that environment, too. Cultural biases aside, there’s something of ‘the other’ in each of us if we jettison the prescribed gender roles. We find we’re like the area which is common to those two overlapping circles, called the lens. Why is that?

Well it’s always seemed to me that since mammals first grow through a bi-potential stage, during which time they are neither male nor female, there’s every reason on earth to celebrate our shared characteristics, which is surely why I felt so comfortable in a boy’s suit on my birthday. Perhaps I’m just returning to that childhood we’re all warned about as we get older (very much older), or maybe I’m just more willing to throw off stereotypes and explore what’s real in me, also because I’m ‘more mature’.  But whatever the reason, I’m delighted to share my birthday with the likes of Twain, Lewis and Churchill, and if I’m finally getting old enough to enjoy fairytales again, as Lewis suggested, then let the celebrations begin. I’ll bring my birthday suit.