It was all an illusion. It was all fantasy. In short, it was nothing but a dream. Unfortunately, it took me four years to wake up. Then I realized that it was all a nightmare.
I was the weird kid at the end of the lane. I was the kid who ate his lunch at the table next to the dumpster. I was the kid taped to the flagpole.
Yeah, I was that kid. It was easy to understand why. I never had a father. I mean, obviously there was a sperm donor somewhere, although my mother denies it. To her, men are evil. She's tried for years to rend the evil from my soul and my body. So, I spent grammar school in pedal pushers and frilly blouses to avoid toxic masculinity. Basically, I spent my childhood with a target on my back.
My mother was a religious fanatic. She tried every religion out there, from Catholicism (my grandparents' faith) to Pentecostal, but none of them were stringent enough for her. She eventually began her own cult, a twisted blend of serpent handling, the Holiness movement and second works of grace (alternatively called second blessings). Overlaying all that was her own brand of feminism.
The funny thing was that I later learned that my mother only knew those terms and never really understood what they represented or meant, not even feminism. She just made up her own meanings for everything. For example, the second work of grace was a female orgasm. Male orgasms, on the other hand, weren't blessings of any kind since they were the original sin and led to procreation and little monsters like me. Male ejaculations came from the Devil. My mother insisted that it was no coincidence that the word sperm and spawn, as in the spawn of hell, were so similar. Sperm was the way that Satan sent his spawn to earth, and only the efforts of the righteous that stunted the male ability to climax, making it difficult for males to repeat the act too often. Female orgasms, on the other hand, could repeat endlessly (according to my mother) and roll on, one after another. That was the ultimate sign of God's grace and the reward for the natural state of female purity. And a woman could climax repeatedly without fear of procreation unless the evil snake from the Garden of Eden was involved. Yes, to my mother, feminism equaled lesbianism equaled righteousness.
My house was always filled with fat, slovenly women accompanied either by a Sapphic partner or by a pale, skinny, totally dominated husband. That was my mother's congregation. Her followers were mostly women who embraced her hatred of masculinity. I found out later that one of their beliefs was that the male beast could only be tamed by voluntary castration. I became religious myself when I learned that tenet of my mother's beliefs. You would have become religious too, were you in my position. I thanked God daily for that "voluntary" part of the tenet. I'm sure my mother would have removed my "seeds of temptation", as her doctrine referred to testes, when I was a child, had she not thought that God had included the "voluntary" clause to that tenet. As it was, my mother made many different offers throughout my childhood, promising great gifts if I would just agree to a small operation. I was terrified of doctors as a child and never would agree, although that pony was sorely tempting when I was nine.
As it was, my own Reverend Mother preached at me constantly to embrace God and submit my sacrifice at his altar. My refusal led my mother to put me on enforced fasts and nights spent on my knees while I was supposed to pray for God's gift of enlightenment. All this blended into the misery that was my childhood and it never occurred to me that mine was unusual, outside of the clothing my mother forced on me. I thought everyone spent hours fasting and praying.
I remember having friends in kindergarten, at least once I began going. My mother tried to avoid sending me to the den of evil that for her was public school. The school district made her send me to school when they found out from a worried neighbor that I existed. I'd missed the first half of the school year, so once they sent me, I was already the stranger. Everyone else was already over their initial shyness, so I was alone at being the scared newcomer. Plus, I had never been around another child because my mother had kept me secluded. I'd never had a playmate; other than the ones I made up in my head. And they were nothing like these kindergarten kids.
But eventually classmates reached out and I learned the joys of companionship. That lasted through kindergarten, while our school hours were different from the other grades. We came later and left earlier, and our playground times were separate from the bigger kids, so we were sheltered from them.
That ended the first day of first grade. Once the bigger kids saw me, the never-ending ridicule began. It was never to end. And it cemented my existence as a pariah.
The problem was my mother's efforts to "save" me from the evils of masculinity. She put my hair, which she refused to cut, into curls that Shirley Temple would have been proud of. And while she didn't put me in dresses, my clothes were the frilliest and most feminine she could find. She never bought me jeans; instead, I was dressed in capri pants or pedal pushers. I remember thinking that all pants had a zipper on the side. My shirts were girls' blouses, all in pinks and pastels. My underwear? Let's just say that I was well into high school before the question of boxers or briefs had an opportunity to arise.
The school recognized that this was not the best look for me and requested social services take up my case. Mrs. Ormark was my case worker. She was also a deacon of my mother's church. The school was told to mind their own business, that my outfits were part of my mother's religious freedom. No one at the school cared enough to challenge that and soon everyone became used to the "little freaky gay kid." I didn't know what gay was until I reached puberty, and it became obvious that I wasn't, much to my mother's consternation and horror.
By high school I was able to avoid wearing the frilliest of the clothes my mother bought for me, when I was able to scrounge or earn enough money to purchase jeans and T-shirts from the local thrift store. A kind woman at the Salvation Army store took pity on me and let me buy enough clothes to get me through a week without wearing any dirty ones. I repaid her kindness by donating all the clothes I would no longer be wearing to the Army for her to sell. My mother made me kneel, pray, and fast the entire weekend when she found out, but she didn't replace the clothing. I was allowed to dress in the secondhand clothes that I'd purchased. The evil manly clothing.
But it was too late to help. After years of being shunned, now I couldn't blend in or make friends. I was the weird kid with cooties in elementary school and the freaky gay weirdo in high school, who was shunned even by the real gay students. By then I'd stopped trying. The humiliation was too great. I wasn't even allowed to partner in class after the Shawna debacle. That was the first day of Freshman year Physical Science. Shawna and I were paired as lab partners, over her loud and stringent objections. I think, "Not with the Freak" was her kindest comment that day.
Then when we went to our lab station, I saw that her stool was dusty and thought to brush it off with my hand, unfortunately right when she decided to sit down. My hand and her ass met. Although it was the back of my hand that touched her butt, she jumped up and was very loud and vocal about my "attempt to grab her ass", as she phrased it, repeatedly. She would remain vocal about what a pervert I was for the next three years (until I left that school), solidifying in everyone's mind that I was a pervert. My mother's church, with her now infamous "Castration Revelations", as her sermons were known, didn't help me overcome that image. Parents of my classmates demanded that their children not be forced to associate with me. So, no lab partners, no study buddies, no team sports of any kind, no gym class. Throughout high school, I sat alone, worked alone, existed alone.
