To My Younger Cousins
I have so much I want to tell you about love, and sex, and what it means to be a girl.

Dear Little Cousins,
You three are more like sisters to me than cousins. That may be because I don’t have sisters, so I don’t actually know what it’s like. In the absence of sisters, though, you are them.
Besides, based on what the friends we grew up with in Florida say — the ones who ask why we’re always doing such and such with our aunts and uncles and cousins — it’s clear our extended family behaves more like an immediate one. We seem to be hard-wired to be a tight-knit family, don’t we? Just as much as we’re hard-wired to be girls. At least it’s always felt that way, hasn’t it?
For as long as you all can remember, Christmas and birthdays were busy swirls of hugs and heated political debate and way too much wrapping paper. But it hasn’t always been that way. Not exactly.
Before any of you were born, I had seven years alone with the adults of the family — with Grandma and Papa, your parents, and my parents (Uncle Ron to you, and Aunt Ann, whom only one of you is old enough to remember seeing at Christmas but who still pins Christmas photos of you on the bulletin board in her entryway).
There was still way too much wrapping paper, but I want to somehow tell you how quiet and intimate it was — what it was like to be loved so much by so many — so wholly, obviously, and unconditionally — to be given so much opportunity.
I want to tell you about being lonely in the family all the same. About looking for love — no, that’s not it, not love. Because the love from the family was clear in an unconditional familial love sort of way. What I was looking for was to be seen, heard, understood.
And, you know, I’m not sure why I didn’t feel seen. At the time it felt like I was just broken, selfish or weird for wanting even more when I knew that I already had so much.
Was I just a weird, emotionally needy kid? Was it completely normal to be a kid and feel the way I felt? Was I just unable to see the ways that I was seen?
I do remember some of the truest, most earnest parts of me being denied — like when I came home excited about environmentalism and was laughed at, or when I declared I was going to be a teacher and was taunted. Was it because the adults had too much of their own crap clouding their vision? They simply couldn’t see? Or were they only teasing and I took it much too seriously because I was a child?
Our grandparents were simply from another generation, one built on judgment. They had had too many years of living by certain unpublished rules, “because that’s the way it is,” and perhaps they felt responsible for molding me into the right kind of person, unable to see that I was born the right person all along — just as they were born perfect before the world told them otherwise.
Your parents all saw me more clearly, girls, and for that I loved to spend time with them. But still there was something separating us…something between their eyes and me.
I think that something was you.
I think it might have been that I was more like a prism to them than a solid opaque me. I refracted the light from their eyes and threw rainbow fantasies of their own daughters-to-be on the carpet behind me, so that they were seeing bright and shiny me, indeed, but visions of you, too. I was at once their only niece — whatever that role is — as well as a rehearsal for you.
I wonder… do you feel seen, heard, and understood by your parents? By our grandparents? By my father?
By me? By each other?
By yourselves?
I sure do hope so, because you are one person you’ll always have.
I wonder. I wonder why it took me so long to see that. That I’m the person I’ll always have. That I am enough.
Was it the fact that most of the free time I had — when I wasn’t studying or with our family — I spent watching Disney movies ? In those stories, the most problematic thing is not that the girl is always a dependent damsel in distress who needs to be saved by an independent heroic boy. No, in Disney movies available in the 90’s (and really all movies from when I was a girl), the most problematic message is that the boy makes you happy. If you’re a girl, then love makes you happy. Not love, really, but romantic attachment. Possession. Saying, “You are the only one. I am yours and you are mine. Forever.” This sort of thing fixes everything, I saw time and time again. It’s the single road to happiness — the only one I ever had modeled.
Is that why I thought I needed a boy to love me in order to be happy?
I want to tell you about how I learned I was a girl. And how I learned what it means to be a girl.
I want to tell you about the other girls my age who did their hair and wore makeup and showed off their curves — who looked like grown women when they went home for Christmas. And how I never did that. I kept wanting to look like a girl as much as I wanted to start looking like a woman.
But “woman” was code in my mind for sexy which was code for… bad, I think? And “girl” was code for good. And so I avoided looking like a woman. I still do. I still try to look like a girl — and not a woman — when I know I’m going to see our family.
I wonder if that’s related to why I avoid looking sexy altogether. Or is that because of what happens with strangers on the street? And because of what happens to my relationships with men I want to take me seriously, and also other women — to whom I want to be that perfect blend of attractive but not intimidating?
It feels like you three might do a little bit of all that, too.
I wonder what all this has to do with our particular brand of family values. I want to tell you about that, too — about our family’s strange moral code. About my dad’s girlfriends, and your parents and our grandparents worrying about premarital sex, or claiming to at least. I want to tell you about all the hypocrisy flying around, the strange silence and contempt around the topics of sex and abortion and love and marriage and heterosexuality and monogamy that had to do with — what? We’re not a particularly religious family, so I still don’t really understand where it all came from or what everyone was on about.
I want to tell you about sex, and the feeling of not being able to separate sex from being seen, heard, and understood. Or, at least, the feeling of using being sexually desired to settle for being something close to seen. At least with sex I would be physically seen, hungered for, and in the deepest throes of those sexual moments, it even looked like I was needed.
The sex stuff wasn’t love, but it was enough. Or it was as good as I could get. At least I thought it was. Yes, that feeling of being needed by a man — a boy — was often the closest thing I came to feeling seen when I was young.
The world of being a girl already seems different for each of you than it was for me. Better somehow. Even though it’s not nearly good enough for any one of you. (At least you have better Disney movies, like Moana and Inside Out.)
But this isn’t about who’s better off than whom. It’s not. It’s about being seen, heard, understood.
I start to write to today in hopes that you will begin to see, hear, and understand me.
And that that will show you that I see, hear, and understand you.
But also in hopes that I will learn through writing to you that being seen, heard, and understood by myself is enough.
And most of all, in hopes that my learning all of that through writing this can help you each know so much earlier in your lives that you are each enough as well.
Now that I think about it, I bet you know already. And that, my younger sisters — that fills my heart with joy.

