Part 17 of 29

Monday, September 2, 2013
Labor day. Time for the big parade.

We were up early to get ready for the parade. The living room was full of boxes and hangers containing the costumes when my fellow workers arrived promptly at 8:00 AM to get dressed. Jenny and Beth from the library were part of the group, as well as Audrey.

Every time I think I've gotten the hang of being a woman something comes along to remind me that it's only been a few weeks. I hadn't really realized what it would be like with six women all putting on antique clothing in the living room. (We had banished Grandpa to the Pymm's place where he was donning his costume.) In fact, It didn't occur to me that I was going to be in the middle of a crowd of half dressed women, one of them my mother and another my psychiatrist, until it was too late.

I should have figured it out, having participated in many mass migrations to the lady's room over the summer but when they all started taking off their clothes I was in what could be called a 'delicate situation'. Jenny and Beth didn't know I was not what I seemed and then there was my mother. In a few minutes the etiquette of the situation was going to call for her to take off her underwear with her son standing there, even if I did look like her daughter.

Audrey is a quick thinker and saved the day. I tried not to stare too much as she stood there with her blouse in her hands. "Darn, this camisole is a little too big. I need a safety pin. Angel, could you help me find one?"

Whew! I picked up my drawers and camisole and took her to the spare room with me.

"Take your time, Angel, and let the others get past the embarrassing part. I think your mother was more than a little bit nervous."

"Her and me both! Thanks, Audrey. You saved the day."

"We all have our secrets. I'll turn around so you can put those things on."

I did so. I cheated and kept my padded panties on so I had some hips for the corset to cover. I was wearing the lightest weight bra I could find to keep my forms in place. I hoped it would work because I didn't want them falling out while a million parade watchers were looking on. Once again I was dreaming of having real breasts.

"Are you ready? I don't think I have ever encountered a situation like this with a client, and heaven help me if the medical society finds out. Since I knew you before you started seeing me professionally I'll plead temporary insanity. With Earle and my husband involved it ought to be a believable defense."

We returned to chaos. Even after a professional fitting nobody was all that sure of how to lace up the corsets, and my poor mother didn't even have the advantage of a fitting. Mom was holding up the corset and Mary Ann was struggling with the laces, which seemed to go on forever. Jenny had just about gotten Beth into her corset and Beth was trying to settle her breasts comfortably in the garment. If I was interested in exploring femininity I sure was getting a lesson today.

"You first, Angel." Audrey handed me my corset. "Let's not make it too tight so we can walk the entire parade without fainting. The poor women who had to wear these things all the time were always fainting because they couldn't get enough air!"

I stepped into the loosely laced corset and pulled it up. Settling it beneath my forms, I had visions of pythons in the Amazon as she tightened the laces until I was standing very straight indeed. Audrey stepped into her corset, looking just like those turn of the century corset ads I had been seeing as we put together the display. I started pulling laces rather tentatively, but she urged me to greater efforts and eventually she was cinched up.

It was about then we realized we should have put on our boots first. I suppose the women who actually wore these clothes every day would have thought us hilarious, but we eventually managed to help each other into our footwear with a great deal of giggling.

Once again the strange became commonplace, we were just a bunch of women helping each other and I was just one of the group. The dresses were buttoned (no zippers - they hadn't been invented yet) and wigs settled in place. If you've seen pictures from that era, women kept their hair long but wore it up, often elaborately braided. Other than my mother, who often wears her hair that way the group had shorter hair, the wigs were needed.

Speaking of short hair, my real hair caused a bit of comment, especially from Beth.

"Angel! What happened to your hair!" she sounded horrified. Fortunately, one of the stories I had told Mom the other night was about Jenny asking about my wig and my excuse for having short hair.

"That's my fault, Beth." Mom came to my rescue. "I'm afraid we tried a home permanent for graduation and I did something horribly wrong."

"Aw, Mom! It's not your fault."

"Well, in time I hope to see your hair looking just like it always has." She even said it with a straight face.

Mom insisted on doing makeup for me and Mary Ann. Mom got a case of the giggles and had to stop several times or she would have drawn a black line down my cheek or something. At least she thought it was funny, that's a lot better than Dad's opinion. I still don't want to think about that.

Somehow we finished by 10:30, just in time to leave. I was glad it was a cool day because I was very well insulated when we were dressed.

Walking the parade was fun. We worker ladies handed out literature describing the fire and the need for unions while Grandpa and Chuck and Mr. Pymm played the Big Bad Bosses. They were cool - pinstriped suits with huge gold watch chains, fake cigars and those funny hats men used to wear. Grandpa looked dashing with his Snidely Whiplash mustache. (A classic villain from the period - I even looked it up without asking Grandpa.). The men had manacles dangling from their hands as they attempted to chain us women, who valiantly fought them off as we handed out our literature.

We walked along with a float depicting the fire, with painted flames billowing from open windows on each side of the float. One side even had a woman half out the window with the flames licking at her hands. Whoever did the art was very good, it scared the hell out of you to think of what those women must have gone through.

We were quite a hit, lots of applause from the crowds. Quite a way to end the summer.

The end of summer, but a beginning of a new life. Walking in the parade today I realized that I wasn't Angel the Man or Angel the Woman but Angel the Person. The costume was turn of the century, but I was living life as the way it made sense to me.

I don't know what will happen when I start school on Wednesday, or when Mary Ann and I get married, or when the next problem occurs, but I have love and support and the faith to be what I really am. It doesn't matter if that's not quite the way it has always been done.

Dad says God doesn't make mistakes. I'm not sure I believe in Him any more, but I do believe I'm not making a mistake in living my life the way I am.

I enjoy being a girl!
 

Wednesday, September 4
I'm not sure I don't want to be back in high school. High school had one big advantage - it was in one building and wasn't spread out over a large campus. So there I was on my first day, map in one hand, schedule in the other and wishing Mary Ann was with me.

I was a little nervous, this was the first time I had been out alone as Angel the Girl for more than a few minutes. Mary Ann or Grandpa or Eve had always come with me if we were going somewhere.

Nobody planned it that way, that's just the way it happened. Besides, I like spending time with Mary Ann. It's going to be weird to be going to different schools and doing different things all day from now on.

After more than a few minutes of wandering around, lost in spite of my map, I began to regret not listening to Mary Ann. I was comfortable as Angel the Girl after a couple of months being her, but I was still new at the whole scene of presenting as a woman. Girl. Whatever.

I have to admit I pattern my taste in clothes largely after my mother - what daughter doesn't? - at least before the rebellious stage sets in. Mom always wore dresses or skirts. Dad thinks that's how a proper woman dresses and I think she really does enjoy wearing dresses and skirts.

Obviously, so do I.

Also obviously, not many of the girls on campus do. I kind of stand out in my lemon yellow blouse and orange striped skirt. After the summer as an intern I had gotten used to dressing as a young professional, not the done thing on campus. Wearing pantyhose and moderate heels was not one of my better decisions.

Mary Ann had tried to warn me. She was wearing sneakers and socks for her first day at the University. My mother's abhorrence of sneakers with a skirt is still too strong in my mind, I just don't want to do it.

I now know better, tomorrow I'll be more practical. Tomorrow I will try to blend in. Today I'm wishing my feet didn't hurt.

There was another advantage to high school, Mary Ann was there with me. Now she was at the 4-year University while I was a last-second student at the community college.

Things changed a whole lot over the summer. Mary Ann and I are living with her Grandfather. We had done an internship at the library that was very rewarding, had met the members of The Liar's Club (Grandpa was the Liar-in-chief). I had gotten engaged to Mary Ann and my father had disowned me, trashing my college plans. Oh yeah - I graduated high school as a boy I matriculated in college as a co-ed, which was why my father had disowned me.

Maybe I should go into a little more detail. After all, the class I was wandering around campus to find was English Literature, and the professor seems to be big on reading for comprehension and trying to extract the more subtle levels of meaning from the writing.

Subtle point 1: the word co-ed. Having discovered I am far more comfortable presenting as a female, I have become very conscious of how sexism is inherent in our language. Having been thoroughly indoctrinated into doing the research when you have a question after my summer as a library intern, I naturally looked up the word.

Not much information there. The dictionary says co-ed is short for co-educational. You would think that 'co-educational' would be a gender neutral term; both males and females are students, right?

Nope. Co-ed only applies to the female student. Subtle implication of language: being male is the norm, the standard by which all things are judged. Education is the default for the male, the female needs to be separated and compared to the male.

Horse-pucky! I defy you to differentiate horse-pucky from a female horse as opposed to horse-pucky from a male horse unless you were there to observe its emergence from the horse and had time to see what's under the horse's belly.

Unsurprisingly, the term dates from the 1880s when sexism was the done thing. If firemen are now firefighters and policemen are now police officers, then why can't people use the perfectly gender-neutral term student? I've lost count of the times I was referred to as a co-ed during the day.

The whole horse-pucky bit brings me to subtle point 2 by three distinct paths. 1) my father, 2) foul language and 3) what's under the horse.

Path 1 - I love my father but he is a religious fanatic and a very rigid man. He knows what's right because the Lord told him so. Finding me presenting as a woman was the reason I got disowned. Fortunately, I'm not homeless because my fiancee's Grandfather is happy to have both Mary Ann and Angel (that's me) live with him and his fiancee, Eve.

Path 2 - foul language. After a summer without my father's 'guidance' I am more comfortable with foul language, but I spent eighteen years being told not to swear or use the Lord's name in vain. (There is a difference - look it up if you don't believe me.) Where my fellow interns would have called the whole thing bullshit or more likely fucking bullshit, I sort of default to 'horse-pucky.' Force of habit.

Path 3 - what's under the horse. I despair of trying to get my father to believe there is a difference between sex and gender. My in-home sex education pretty much consisted of an admonition to 'keep it in your pants until you're married.'

That didn't work too well, Mary Ann and I had removed our pants and fornicated before we graduated high school. On her aunt's living room sofa if you must know.

He would call it 'fornication' but we much prefer 'making love.' Not that we haven't indulged in some pretty urgent sex, but it is always based in our love for each other. We've even tried a couple of rather kinky things after Grandpa turned us onto The Joy Of Sex.

The possibility of my father using the word 'penis' to describe what's under a horse is less than a snowball's chance in the Hell he so loves to preach about. He obviously made love to my mother at least twice as there are two children, but mention of how babies are conceived is not a topic to bring up lightly in my family.

If he knew that Mary Ann and I visited Planned Parenthood immediately on living with her Grandfather his flesh would probably scattered in small chunks over several counties. Consorting with Satan at Planned Parenthood would probably be a more grievous sin that me wearing a bra and a skirt.

I will not be asking for his opinion any time soon.

To sum up point 2: I'm working hard to overcome eighteen years of sexism and fanaticism. My father may think I've fallen in with bad companions, but Mary Ann and Grandpa are a breath of fresh air. I am far more of Grandpa the librarian's opinion that life should be lived testing your assumptions against reality and not against some ancient scribbles.