In 2003, my mother had bought me a new dress to wear at a family reunion. It was a pink dress that had yellow flowers on it, but I feel uncomfortable wearing it because of the way I walked. I also thought that everyone in my family would laugh at me and make bad remarks. My mother wanted me to try on my new dress in the bathroom before the family gathering started at 6:00 pm. When I looked at myself, trying on the dress, it looked astonishing on me, but I still felt uncomfortable. When I walked out of the bathroom to show my mother, she was sitting in the living room.
“Awe, you look nice,” my mother said.
“Thank you,” I said, not really content.
“Now let me see how you walk around in it,” she said. I listened to what she told me and rotated around the living room.
“Oh naaw, Ciara. You gotta change that walk of yours,” my mother said with a mean look on her face.
“What do you mean I have to change my walk?” I asked.
“I mean you walk like a boy, Ciara. You gotta change how you walk to a girls walk. You is a girl. You suppose to walk like a girl,” she said.
“I don’t think I can’t change my walk, mama,” I said.
“Well at least try, Ciara. You can change that,” she said looking serious. I did not say anything after that. I just walked back into the bathroom and took my dress off and put back on my night clothes and waited for the time to change for the event.
It was after 7:00 pm when the chef was carrying the food out of the kitchen and setting it on the buffet table. When I had just about everything on my plate I walked back to my seat by the window where my mother and I were sitting.
“Ciara, you still walk like a boy. Change that,” my aunt, Shug, informed me.
“I told her to stop walking like that,” my mother said. I did not say anything. When I was done eating everything on my plate, I realized that I did not get anything to drink. I was nervous that someone would say something negative about me in this uncomfortable dress. I urged myself to get up out of my seat, and my body started to tremble. I ambled up to the cooler and took out a Coke. When I strolled back to my seat, I noticed that my cousins who were sitting at another table were laughing.
“Ciara, why you walk like that?” my cousin Angelic said, laughing.
“I don’t know,” I said walking back to my seat. Throughout my youth I was meditating about the questions my family and classmates would ask me, like why do I walk boyish? Why do I talk boyish? I did not have any idea what they meant. When I had turned 10 years old, I was living at my grandmother’s house with my brother Glenn. One night my brother and I were lying at the end of the bed watching the film, Soul Food, that my brother had on the small black RCA TV on top of the VCR. I only observed their haircuts and clothes, and how the males dressed. When I would watch women in motion pictures, I would get this intense feeling that I never understood. When films would show females, it would be a different interest of how I would observe them. Not just the woman's hair or clothes, but I would perceive their body gestures and poses. In films with sex scenes, I only kept my eyes fixated on the women instead of the men. As a child, I did not know why I found women more appealing than men. I always felt that there was a boy living inside of my body instead of a girl. There were a lot of times as I got older, into my teens, I would always imagine myself altering my appearance to a male appearance. I felt uncomfortable living in my own body.
#lesbian#gay#lgbt#samesex
©ciara1
©cwebb32
C