I develop a half-serious theory to explain our years of difficult interactions: Maybe a
butch mama usually raises a femme daughter, but then they can’t be buddies. Nor can
they flirt, especially if the daughter is a tall blonde and the mama prefers petite brunettes. And so they stumble awkwardly with each other, as we have done, never knowing where
to put their hands when they stand near each other.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, “Mama”
Both of my parents spent kindergarten through twelfth grade in the same tiny private school in rural South Carolina, this latest brainchild of segregationists built around the time of their births. Both of their own mamas taught there. My mama’s senior year, there were only just enough boys in her class to form the football team, so eventually, the product of team spirit or tall poppy syndrome, it was decided all the guys would play if all the girls cheered. My mama spent every second on the sidelines with a button pin proclaiming I’D RATHER BE PLAYING affixed to the top of her uniform, relishing in the coach’s scowl.
This is one of two pins I grew up hearing the stories of from her youth; the other, from her days campaigning for Reagan in college, proud bulwark against the infant liberalism of her peers. As a child, I both envied and feared her fortitude, her intensity—the white-hot anvil of her teenage muscles as she antagonized the opposing basketball team, itching for a fistfight; the religious fervor I knew her voice reached when she stormed the elementary school principal’s office when my little brother was being bullied. No other hell she spoke of could burn as hot as all that fury and fear beamed into my own scalp and chest. No other power has ever come close.
I’m convinced the only men she ever loved were as queer as her own kid: the senior prom date whose sister tried to tactfully warn wouldn’t want her back, whose later wedding to a man my daddy joked about over the photo album, and my daddy, who recounted from the couch of the therapist they were paying to drag me kicking and suicidal into womanhood how he’d feared himself in love with his best friend at 18. My parents were both proof that my own future in normative society could be achieved and the reason such a thing revolted me; I saw how it suffocated them perhaps more than they did. My mama’s detested Sunday dresses, my daddy’s furtive electrolysis appointments, their eating disorders twin and entwined.
She hated the women’s college she transferred to for him, felt out of place in all these trappings and traditions that meant nothing to her. The pre-season workout for a lifetime taming herself into a pastor’s wife. Growing up, there was a photo in our parlor: her hair shorter than she’d ever let me cut mine, the train of her white dress dusting the ground in lace like snow. For my daddy, she said exactly once; she found the length cumbersome, old-fashioned, but it was what he’d always wanted, been picturing since he was a kid. Took me years to understand most men don’t do that, to stitch together the blasphemy that maybe he longed to be the one wearing it. And you, Mama—do you remember what you would rather be doing?