My younger years

Not much happened during my younger years, except that I kept everything hidden and made sure I didn't spend too much time in the bathroom and have another incident like the one with my grandfather.  My mom did catch me a time or two, but didn't make a big deal about it.

My closest friends starting around this time were three girls, two of which were sisters.  I was around them as much as I could be.  Our parents didn't see anything wrong with it.  The one friend, Vicky, was kind of a tomboy and insecure, which matched my insecurity.  We didn't do much except play pool in her garage and talk.  She would also come over to go swimming after we got a pool built.  The two sisters, Robin and Michelle, became like sisters to me.  Their parents kind of adopted me and would invite me to go places (until puberty hit). We would sometimes play house, where I was either the husband or the child, or play dolls (it happened, but rarely), or just hang out and be kids.  They remained my only friends until the sixth grade.

The Beginning

On a Monday afternoon, in the summer of '69, I was born.  My name was already picked out but my dad had to have it his way and have his name first in my name.  My dad was not your normal dad, not by far.  He would throw tantrums, and would eventually state that God told him to kill me, an act that quickly led to my parents' divorce.  Yeah... He was mentally ill. In fact, he had paranoid schizophrenia, an illness that he and his family had kept hidden from my mom until after my parents married.  Shortly after my parents divorced, my dad went away to a psychiatric hospital and my grandparents moved in with us, which helped my mom pay the bills.

Somewhere around the age of four or five years, I realized I was different.  I wanted to be someone else, or at least in someone else's body...a girl's body.  I started putting on any of my mom's clothes that she had left in her bathroom.  And to this day, I have a memory of playing with Barbie dolls, yet my mom adamantly says I never had any.  Who knows, maybe it was at a friend's house. Apparently other people noticed something was different about me as well.  I can remember picking up a barrette at my preschool and one of the teachers came over and put it in my hair. What I can't remember is if she just did it, or if she asked if I wanted it or if I asked for it.

Also somewhere during this time period, I got caught by my grandfather wearing one of my mom's bras.  He yanked me by the arm and pulled me out of my mom's bathroom, which was in the back of the house, all the way down the hall to the livingroom and said, "Look at our little girl."  I wrestled out of his grip and ran back to my mom's bathroom.  My mom came in a couple minutes later and simply said to take the bra off and get dressed.  From that moment on, wearing cross-gender clothing was my deepest secret.