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From a very early age, femininity was something Del didn’t want any part of. Outside of well, being a girl. Being girly was something very different, and something she wasn’t sure she wanted for herself. In the black and white thinking of a pessimistic eight-year-old, being girly was bad. Plain and simple.
“Don’t be such girls,” her father would scold her brothers when he caught them licking their wounds in the living room after a particularly rough game of whatever it was they were excluding her from that week.
“You hit like a girl,” her brothers would tease her when she dared to fight back when they got a little too rough playing with her.
And so, Del saw, in that black and white thinking of an underdeveloped mind, that there were two ways to “be a girl”. One was only by definition, girls who are quiet and sensible, girls that are fighters, like boys, and smart on a whole different level. Girls that wore pants and never any makeup that wasn’t for their lips or their eyes. Then, there were girls that were trouble. Girls that couldn’t control themselves, that wore shirts too low and skirts too high and makeup so thick you couldn’t cut through it if you tried.
But by the time she was in middle school, It wasn’t hard to shake this way of thinking. Consciously, at least. Del’s always been a smart girl, and no matter what the men who raised her had to say, she knew from earlier than most of the other girls in her year that no meaningful feminist advancement would come at the downfall of another girl. No matter what type of girl she was.
Del had a new philosophy. That “femininity” as she knew it was something conceptualized by men to keep smart girls unhappy and happy girls dim. It was a gender role constructed, the same as any, under a patriarchy she didn’t want anything to do with. She wouldn’t wear makeup, and donated all her dresses the first semester of sixth grade. She hadn’t worn any one of them in a long while, she wasn’t sure if they’d even fit.
Her mother didn’t have much to say about any of this at any stage in Del’s life. Sometimes she’d raise an eyebrow at her husband for some odd comment Del wouldn’t remember making at the dinner table, and that was about the extent of her involvement in the matter. That didn’t mean she didn’t have any thoughts to interject with, just that she didn’t see it worth the fuss. But when she saw Del carrying the box marked
“Donate”
with all her dresses and her skirts inside, Donna made her go through them one by one with her. The result was the same. The clothes were donated. Del didn’t wear any of those clothes, and she didn’t see herself starting any time soon. She could’ve imagined it, but Del swears her mother looked, well… sad. Almost. Somber is probably a better word.
That weekend, Del let her ma paint her nails. Donna told her often about how she’d always wanted a girl. Sometimes Del felt bad. She wasn’t much of a girl to get.
By the time high school rolled around, Del had this “femininity” business just about sorted. She wore a dress for the first time in however many years at her middle school graduation, and had a great time shopping for it second-hand with her ma. She knew more about the world around her and where she stood in it. And going into high-school, Del was really starting to feel sure of herself.
Then, her ma died. And four days later, she got her first period.
Growing up with brothers, Del had always been “the only girl in the bunch”, but this was different. She’d never dealt with the reality of being the only girl in a household just about bursting at the seams with domineering masculinity. This wasn’t as momentous an occasion as she thought it’d be. She wasn’t shocked, or scared, or relieved when she’d gotten it. She didn’t tell anyone. She just bunched up a wad of toilet paper, grabbed a clean pair of underwear, and learned how to insert a tampon in the bathroom of the CVS down the street from the instructions provided in the box.
Del didn’t touch the lip gloss and mascara her mother had gotten her for her fourteenth birthday for months afterwards. This had less to do with her not knowing how to function as a girl and more to do with her inability to function as a person altogether in the months after her ma died. If there was one thing that she couldn’t bring herself to care about in those moments, more than passing or failing her prep exams, more than keeping or losing her friends, was keeping or losing touch with her feminine side.
From then, Del pretty much never thinks about her femininity. She’s herself, and she can be however feminine she does or doesn’t feel like being, and that shouldn’t have to say anything about her. She uses the mascara when she wants. She puts on that same dress from graduation if she needs to dress up. Her favourite colour is pink. It always has been.
This stuff shouldn’t have ever mattered to her. And she’s glad to be rid of the stress.
Del had never been uninterested in boys. Even throughout a surprising majority of what the school counsellor called her “mourning stage”. But her interest was mostly hypothetical. When she was running for class president, a boyfriend was too much stress, and then her incident at the blood drive seemed to kill off her social life entirely, let alone any hope of a love life. She assumed it for the best. Boys seemed more trouble than they were worth at the time. But when Wayne McCullough came stumbling into her life about a year later with a doe-eyed sort of violence and a proposal of a cross-country bike-bound road-trip, the idea of getting out and away from her house outweighed any question of whether she could or should trust any part of it.
The first time Del saw herself with a full face of makeup, she didn’t know what to think. She must’ve looked pretty clueless, pawing cautiously through Jenny’s foundations and concealers and all these other products Del couldn’t name if she tried. Trish had laughed and taken her face in her hands, opening a bottle that looked about Del’s shade before she could say anything about it. Del felt quite silly. Fifteen and needing two near total strangers to do her makeup for her. But they didn’t really seem to mind.
She went to spring fling with her hair in a deceptively low effort up-do and a pink dress that she quietly loved. She danced with her not-quite-boyfriend and thought she might quietly love him, too. After all the dust and the blood in the parking lot was settled, and Wayne was sleeping well enough on the couch, Del went into the bathroom to take her makeup off. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. She paused at her reflection. She felt… pretty. In a weird way she just didn’t know how else to describe.
Wayne would find her clean-faced in the bathroom the next morning. He calls her pretty. She tries not to seem like she enjoys it.
From then, Del doesn’t really, seriously, think about “femininity” for about thirteen years. Until she has her own girl, and there’s a whole new layer to this stuff she thought she had figured out at thirteen.
Femininity is a fragile construct, Del decides, one day, looking scornfully at the prices of pink onesies compared to blue onesies. And though it’s not without some inherent flaws, it’s made up mostly by the individual, much more than it is the patriarchy. Individually, Del’s favourite colour is still pink, she does a light layer of makeup before work every single day. She tells her daughter she’s beautiful as much as she can, and her husband thinks she’s just as pretty in tight dresses as she is in loose-fitted sweatpants.
The first few cycles of her period, when she was living alone, surrounded by her family but alone, really, Del really hated being a girl. She hated it then, getting up to do her laundry at three in the morning, refusing to ask for help but wishing desperately that someone would offer. She hated it when she got teased for the clothes, and the books, and the games she liked in grade school. She hated it when she snapped back to reality a few months after her mother died and suddenly she was fifty steps behind everyone else who used to hate being a girl as well.
Now, Del sits at her dining table, in her home, filled with everything she loves, tapping her nails against the table. They’re the same shade of bluish-black her mother would paint them. She’s quite happy to be a girl as of late.