Compared

"You have nice full lips," you said. "Look at mine and how thin they are."

"You're so tiny. I used to be that tiny. When I got married I was 5'7" and weighed 120 pounds, and I felt fat."

"I love your dimpled hands," you said. "Look at mine and how gnarly my knuckles are."

"You have a nice jawline. Look how my jawline is, how my chin connects to my neck."

I never realized it before, but you constantly compared yourself to me. You didn't know what do to with a girl. You always told me that Grandma was so happy for you when I was born and turned out to be a girl, but you never told me that you were happy for a girl.

Maybe it's because you didn't know how to be a woman.

"Men notice things like that," you said, pointing to my chewed fingernails. Yet you chewed yours. You bit off skin, rolled it around between your fingers, and flicked it across the room, all the while sitting in the Lazy Boy, rubbing your legs together like a boyscout rubbing sticks together in hopes of a fire.

I don't know how to make sense of all that you said to me. You compared yourself to me, and you compared me with my brother. "Huh," you said, puzzled, "he learned that so quickly." I hung my head at the piano. So I was dumb. I knew it.

I was 4 or 5, no more than 5, and I felt dumb. You made me feel dumb by telling me I was a slow learner, by comparing me with my genious brother, who never had to work at all in school, who learned Greek in a summer by himself, no tutor.

But I tried to prove I wasn't dumb. I won spelling bees, math competitions, poetry contests, and art contests. I tried so hard but felt dumb in comparison.

And in comparison to you, I felt something that I still can't pinpoint. I felt ashamed for being me, feared growing older, and learned that you felt ugly.

I felt ugly too. I wanted men to think I was beautiful, but I always felt like a hairy beast, like an animal - like a man.

In college I learned about hermaphrodites, and I wondered if I maybe I'd finally found the answer to my hirsute appearance. I was a fraud of a woman; I was really a man, but no one knew. 

Except, I am not a man.

I am a woman, and I don't care what men think of me. I do, but not in the way you taught me. I don't need to care for my fingernails so that men will like me. I want to take care of them because I want to look nice - for me, not for anyone else. I reject what you taught me. I reject your worldview.

It doesn't matter what men think of me. It matters what I think of me. I matter.