The year I turned eighteen, I came home one evening to an empty house and felt for the first time a loss of companionship I had never known before.
I clutched my first pay check in my hands from my holiday job with the post office where I lined up with several other students and regular postal employees at the conveyor belt sorting out letters by size and postcode.
It was a heady job for one who was not good with numbers and took me a while to recognise the four digits that signified the differnt suburbs.
It was a job that lasted less than a month in the rush to Christmas following my final year exams but it was a job that after that first week provided a yellow envelope with a payslip inside and a wad of cash, the largest I had ever seen in one place. And it was mine.
I had earned it and wanted only to share some of it with my mother so that I might join the ranks of my older siblings and be yet another helper in her bid to survive. But my mother was still away at work and my other siblings were out somewhere.
No welcoming party. No one to greet me and I cried furious tears at this moment of triumph when I had no one to celebrate with me.
Although my siblings were not with me at this moment, I have learned to hold them in mind for all the years since I left home.
They’re always in my mind, milling around, jostling for position, each trying to outdo the other in our judgments.
My siblings never leave me. Whenever I am part of a group, the people in said group morph into my family and I find myself counting, three, four, seven eight, as long as there are up to nine or eleven including parents we are at full compliment.
I look around whenever I am in such a numerical group and marvel at how much physical room my family took up when we were all grown and sometimes met.
I marvel at the space we occupy on the earth.
Much like my mother once said to me soon before she died, how pleased she was when her seventh great-grandchild had arrived on the earth that none of this would be possible without her.
This puzzled me as if my mother considered it all began with her. As if she had forgotten about her own parents and my father’s parents and the ones who came before.
I am often in a tug of war in my mind between the great chain of links from one to the other and how important we each are to one another and this other sense, my mother’s sense of wanting to matter and fearing that without her none of us would come into being, me and my siblings, who in my mind, never go away.
No teeth yet, he gummed away at the hard breadstick softening the outer surface. When he finally lost interest there was a groove etched on either side as if he’d been sharpening a pencil.
When one of my brothers joined the cadets as a schoolboy at St Patrick’s during the mid-sixties, he brought home some of the army rations they offered the cadets whenever they went on training days at Puckapunyal. These rations contained dry biscuits that were even harder than the rusks my grandson sucked.
My husband asked why bother buying rusks when you could simply cut off the crust from the loaf, he’d baked earlier that day but that loaf to my mind would have been too soft and bits might break off and threaten to choke the baby.
I have the horrors of choking in babies, so I made a quick trip to the local small shops for the purpose of buying the ideal, organic rusks made out of milk and wheat and ever so hard.
Just like my brother’s dry biscuits which we kids bit into and groaned. They were enough to chip even the healthiest of teeth. Mine were not. My brother said we could soak the biscuits in tea and that way get to eat them, but when we did this, we were left with a stale bread taste which made the whole endeavour pointless.
My brother’s cadet uniform included khaki green trousers in a woollen fabric and a khaki thick cotton shirt on top, girded by a wide black leather belt and black leather boots that came up to his ankles. His pride and joy.
Each cadet day morning, he scrubbed his boots till they shone, and pushed aside everything else that belonged to anyone else in order to get out of the door as soon as possible so as not to be late for cadet parade.
My brother was grumpy in those days, grumpy as an adolescent and I found myself wanting to stave off my own growing up if this is what happened to people when their bodies began to change.
All of which puts me in mind of discussions I’ve been having with my daughter of late about JK Rowling’s take on transgender. How people of my generation, the Boomers, though not all, seem to be confused about transgender.
Something tells me much of the anxious opposition from some of my contemporaries arises from fear of change.
My daughter tells me some of this ‘transphobia’ is an offshoot of the second wave of feminism. All those hard-won increases in women’s rights undone, at least in fantasy, by men who want to transition into women and again take away women’s rights.
Again.
Rather the desire to transition might come from a different place where gender is less polarised and more fluid.
There’s also the confusion of sex and gender, sex being your biological determinates as male and female, while gender is constructed.
I watched my brother prepare for cadets and felt a wash of relief that I would not have to join the army as my father had done before I was born.
I did not want to join the military life of regimentation and rules. But even then I thought it was unfair that my brothers could do things like go camping on the weekends and sleep in pitched tents in the darkness when the best we could do – because we were girls – was sometimes in summer join our brothers for a night under the stars in our back yard.
The ground was hard and lumpy but to lie on my back without a barrier between me and the night sky with its scattering of yellow stars was to float into a different bodily sensation one that was miles away from the gridles my mother wore every day and my sister had already told me would be my lot too when I reached her age.
I don’t remember how it was, but girdles went away. By the time I hit adolescence, women were wearing panty hose and even those awful things called suspender belts were fast becoming relics of the past.
Before ten, I too wore suspender belts when in the winter at secondary school stockings were part of the uniform.
The rounded button buds that you took between your fingers and covered with a single tug from the top of your stocking and forced through a loop attached to a strap you wore around your waist, one on the front of your thigh, another at the back had a habit of falling off with age. I replaced them with coins but was fearful that someone might see this abortion of the regulation suspender belt.
Army fatigues for boys, suspender belts and girdles for the girls. Our genders were constrained from the onset. Small wonder as time passes that people begin to rebel against these constraints.
But transgender experiences go deeper than this.
It’s not just about a uniform, or the clothes you wear. It’s about a deep identification with a sense of being in the wrong body and given we tend to think of bodies as being masculine or feminine, small wonder some people decide their body feels wrong.
These days they can think this. They can feel this, and they can get help to transition from one sense of their body to another.
Why does it upset people so? Why does it upset people that other people are not happy with their biological bodies and want to take on another body? They are not hurting people. They’re not forcing this change onto other people. They want it only for themselves.
My colleagues argue that young people are wanting to transition too early before they have a clear sense of identity and that this is a problem if actual radical hormonal and other interventions take place too soon. And this may be so, but I can’t help but think the real resistance is against some fixed polarity of perspective that says girls must be girls and boys must be boys and nothing in between or too divergent from this is okay.
It reminds me of our resistance to gay people decades ago, this idea that it’s somehow not natural.
Who decides what’s natural? The biological essentialist who reckons that just because you have a penis you must be a boy and if you have a vagina, you’re a girl, when there’s so much more to gender than your basic bodily characteristics. Not just body bits but ideas and feelings and attitudes.
It’s tricky territory. New terrain and I want to embrace it with a more open mind that allows people to have the freedom to explore their sense of themselves as they will without being pigeonholed from birth.
Gender is a construct.
There’s more to being in the army than dry biscuits. More to sampling foods as a baby than gnawing at rusks or crusts of bread. And more to being alive than the constructed rules of human existence would dictate.
