I was supposed to be a boy.

On the odd effects of being an unwanted child of the wrong gender in a complicated family. TL;DR: Treat your daughters like people.

Forget appropriate images — have a comfort kitten. This article is hard to read and you deserve it. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

I wasn’t a wanted child.

I know this for a fact. I was conceived right at the tail-end of the communist regime in Romania when neither birth control nor abortions were dreamt of, as my mother so often told us. I’m sure she was making a point about how privileged my sister and I were to have access to these things, but over-achiever that I am, I figured out the subtext.

Cut the dictatorship some slack, though. All that sexual health funding was going to essential projects like this. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

When I had the audacity to be conceived, my dad made the best of it.

By this, I mean he went around making bets that I would be a boy to carry forward the family name.

He’d already had a daughter, so it was his due. All his cousins had had two girls and there was this folk legend that having only girls ran in my family. Somehow, his clansmen always married defective women who only bore daughters. It would be the end of the family name and legacy.

It is. I’m the last to carry that name, and I’ll dance when it dies.

Some of you who are parents should already be hearing serious alarm bells right about now: “Uh-oh. I certainly hope my daughter won’t feel that way about my name.” At least, if you have a decent bone in your body, you should.

Now, my dad went around making bets and making fun of his cousins for months.

He didn’t miss an opportunity to tease them about their daughter-having loser selves and their daughter-bearing loser wives. He put a lot of money on the table. He was convinced, delusionally so, that he was better than them.

Enter, me.

The classy “It’s a boy” party you didn’t get invited to if you only had loser daughters. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

When I was born, as soon as he found out I was a girl, he left without a word. He spent days getting drunk in a back-alley pub. My aunt and grandfather eventually found him and dragged him back home to meet me, and I wasn’t told the story of how the next few years went.

That same aunt, a favorite of mine, is the one who told me all of this. She’s always been a loose-tongued, forward woman. For being a “chicken’s arse country girl”, as she calls herself, she was probably the most progressive member of my family.

She thought it was better I knew what he was like so that I could maybe stop caring so much. So that maybe I could stop wanting him to like me so much.

I don’t think it had the effect she wanted. I’ve always been a little slow on the uptake, and only now, about fifteen years later, am I making the connections between that story, why I was always so miserable as a child, and why I’m so weird and damaged now.

I know lots of you are screaming “obviously” at the screen, but it’s not that simple when you’re in it. It was my “normal” and I didn’t know there was any other way.

Long story short, I was that kid who was always wrong. Always stupid, always to blame, never allowed to do anything myself because I couldn’t possibly figure it out — especially anything handy or mechanical.

Here’s a really embarrassing one.

I was always really good at languages. I’d go to these formal competitions and consistently place in the top three. Eventually, I got to the national level where I placed second in something. I can’t remember what it was.

I can, however, remember my father’s disappointment.

He sat in this horrible brown leather armchair in the living-room we never used for anything other than taking our shoes off because we weren’t a real family and we were barely living, and he frowned at me.

“If you’re just going to disgrace my name, I’d rather you didn’t go at all”.

So I didn’t. I stopped doing a lot of things. Drawing, writing, anything.

I still have a great time starting new things and a horrible time taking any of them to any completion and I can’t help but think that’s somehow related.

What does all of this have to do with the present?

Maybe nothing. Maybe lots. I’ve been reflecting over my last year — I got to do a lot of that throughout nine weeks of isolation — and realized that 90% of the trouble I get myself into comes from the fact that I have an addiction to being wanted and useful and helpful.

Maybe that’s not because I was an unwanted daughter. Maybe it is.

I used to find men who were absolutely terrible for me and spend all the energy I had in making them see that I’m, maybe, somehow, worthwhile. When that didn’t satisfy me anymore, it was a surprise to everyone involved. “But you seemed so happy supporting me. It’s not my fault you never asked for anything for yourself.”

Well, that’s true. It’s not anybody’s fault, not anyone here, in the present, that I’m one wave short of a shipwreck.

Actual footage of my current mental health. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

The men in my life have been visitors in a foreign land that they couldn’t even begin to understand the language of.

And believe me, I’m still paying in big ways for the last handful of people that ran headfirst into me.

You wanna hear another really horrible confession?

Until my late twenties, I was completely unable to listen to female singers, read female authors, or have female friends.

I’m barely just starting to break through now, and I dare anyone to convince me that intergenerational sexism didn’t have something to do with putting those walls up there in the first place.

Because if I’m essentially worthless as a girl, then surely they all pretty much are. Right?

Breaking out of that solitary cell is hard. And even so, I’ll be able to accept that other women are amazing and strong and beautiful long before I’ll ever (if I ever do) believe that of myself.

Every new thing throws me back down the ladder. Being harassed and bullied into a corner by an angry ex nearly killed me, because hearing “you’re scum” isn’t the same when you actually believe it.

Every time I lose a friendship to the age-old “date me or you’re an evil witch” arc, I fall a little further.

I got knocked down another few rungs when my dad came on the phone to say a few words to me during the corona-pocalypse. Apparently, “she might die” was worth an entire thirty seconds to him — and twenty of those were a joke about how I made a dumb choice to be in Italy. It was the first time we’d ever spoken on the phone.

Some things help.

Having friends that look at me like I’m a human being helps. Having men around me for whom my friendship is enough is worth a boatload of gold and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Having women around me who don’t act like we’re in competition makes me feel safe.

Please, take my Thaler and ignore my gender. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

Mostly, being treated like a person — the way I should have been from day one but wasn’t — makes up, little by little, for those early wrongs.

So what’s the point?

I don’t know. Maybe the point is that we’re all people regardless of our gender, our past, our beliefs, or our trauma.

Maybe the point is to treat your kids like they’re wanted.

Maybe the point is kittens.

Screw you, well-adjusted flowers. (Image courtesy of Pixabay)

Stay safe out there. ❤