Excuse me, did you just call me a fad?

March 23, 2010 by The Clever Kris
Filed under: Deep South, Everyday, faith, family, life

I learned what the meaning of fad was the hard way.

And I don’t just mean having to look it up in a dictionary. Since, I come before the mandatory use of home computers.

I had a personal encounter with the word.

It’s surprising, though, what one’s personal history of fads says about oneself. For me, in retrospect, my string of passing fancies was equivalent to that annoying solid beep of an emergency broadcast—“ in the event of an actual emergency, contact information will be provided.”

That second part there, that never happened.

Some of my “interests” were rather unique to me and me alone. Aside from the veritable sexual deviant scream of my addiction to jelly bracelets, in third grade, and the cheerleader-look of a Scrunchie bunched up on the top of my hip, right or left, holding a wad of a paint-splattered or tie-died T-shirt, I also went through a phase of wearing bells knotted at the end of various widths of ribbon necklaces.

Just because, I guess…

God, the praying my family must have done behind my Bugle Boy button-up back.

It got worse, though.

I wanted charms for my bracelets; I rarely left any day of the school week during the early 90s without a tight-roll to my blue jeans; and I believed with my whole heart in color coordinating my swatch watch with my slouch socks or, on fun days, with any of my enviable collection of Hypercolor shirts.

My fads were cries for help. Loud, in-your-face, gossip-creating cries. I see that now.

Granted, I never did fall for the love-you-and-leave-you lure of a fanny pack, but really, is that any consolation, considering the above-mentioned atrocities?

I suppose, looking back, one could argue that I was merely trying to bridge the brokenness in the wake of having no parental influence from either of the two people who, having come together after some football game, “worked together” in giving me life.

I think I was just secretly a greedy child. I liked attention.

Even if it came at the expense of name calling, as it did that confusing afternoon in which a young boy said something along the lines of “You’re a blah blah blah, and a something else yadda, yadda, yadda, fad.” Or, so, that’s what I thought he was referencing.

It turns out that it wasn’t.

What’s the point, here, you ask?

Last night, while channel surfing, I came across a National Geographic special on intersexed children. It’s much more of a biological occurrence than you might at first think.

I found it both difficult to watch and too engaging not to.

I think I found this to be the case because it’s such a grossly misunderstood occurrence, and not just for intersexed children—for any that are different, be it from Nature or Nurture. My heart bleeds a lot for the infirm, unfortunate, and overlooked. It doesn’t take much to get me “on your side.”

Keeping me there, though, usually involves a free meal, and/or a bottle of Marco Negri.

What disturbed me the most, though, and thus has led me to this discussion of fads, was the story I saw last night of a young seven-year-old boy who told his parents that he was supposed to be a “girl.”

Instead of arguing with him, they said, Fine, OK, you’re a girl. And, living in Japan—they’re an American military family, no less—they have allowed their son to become their daughter. The child is happy, thoughtful, mannered, and despite the unbearable amount of verbal abuse this child has put himself through at school, seemingly well-rounded.

Perhaps that last comment has you perplexed.

I speak, though, from a place that knows. Because for many, many years of my life my whole purpose of being, my every prayer, was predicated on the off-chance I might go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning, a girl. It reached such a pinnacle of anxiety and self-hatred that two things emerged: a very, very uncomfortable confrontation involving U.L., Salathiel, the late Uncle Jerry, a young Hispanic man named Gabriel, and Uncle Jerry’s unsuspecting next-door neighbors in Pocatello, Idaho; and, an admission to myself of a real truth: I was unhappy in my own skin…and felt very alone.

I used to also pray at night for cancer, instead, because at least that could be removed. Or treated.

Nothing floats with quite the same consistency as truth. It, more than almost anything else in the world, will always rise to the surface, and when it does, it’s about as heavy as a paper plate.

The internal struggle of identity is beyond description, whether it involves the pressure to play sports when you’d rather read, or the precarious balance of being a boy when you really, truly think you’re not one.

I imagine puberty will be a living nightmare for this child.

And I know that psychiatry would argue against such parental white-flagging to what may appear as the misled whim of an adolescent. But, deeper still, is the fact that I believe we’re drawn, as early an age as two or three, perhaps, to the things that shape us. No matter what we do to hide them, pretend they’re Nothings, overlook them as valid, they are there as signposts, warnings, or words of encouragement.

How much easier it would be for all children, who struggle with identity and social placement, if we (as the proverbial outsiders, since it “always happens to someone else,” right?) just took that knowledge in stride. Fads are important barometers, but barometers aren’t meant to be alarming. They’re meant to gauge pressure.

I’m not saying fads force us into being the shape we appear to be born into. Rather, they let us know what we’re capable of becoming; they’re indicators, decisions, options. And the only thing that has to pass…is the moment, if needed, or the awkwardness of realizing something’s not quite right, even when it doesn’t feel wrong.

Fads are an invitation to the party. They’re gifts of permission. Saying, OK, so you’re a boy who likes dolls. Well, go for it. Ride it out.

And, though, it’s usually best done in the privacy of your own home; sometimes, you gotta go to Idaho.

I know this is just a theory, but it works…on me. I just have to recall the things that I found myself most drawn to throughout my childhood to see that the picture I’ve painted for myself was an extremely colorful one, albeit with some really heavy lines and a little too Olan Mills.

It was a piece of art, all the same.

Fads are totems of Identity, our growth as a person.

For my cousin Mikey, in fifth grade, it was a bolo tie or bust. While I snuck a cameo out of Tigi’s jewelry case and wore it over my breast pocket. He had the entire Ewok Village; I had an Easy Bake. He collected Garbage Pail Kids cards; I framed the adoption papers of my two Cabbage Patch Kids. He preferred Aerosmith and Poison; I bought every single Amy Grant ever released, as a crossover pop-artist, as well as the one-hit wonder and brief tastemaker that was Karen White. He played in the mud and looked for worms to go fishing. I made mud pies and served them to the ants.

And my family, they had to know. One Christmas, Aunt Ruth gave him an envelope with money in it. To me, she gave a doll that she’d crocheted.

I guess they just assumed it was a phase.

As if.

But, now, it’s not like I didn’t do boy-things. I did. I loved to go fishing; I grew my own vegetables (still do), and on more than once occasion, I’ve aimed and shot a BB gun.

It’s just that as I got older, I was more inclined to buy acid-wash jeans that had BB bullets sewn down the leg in a swoop design. Remember those? That didn’t last for long.

I was an unavoidable totem, too tall and obvious, until the windbreaker made its debut. And everyone had one.

Thank god for the windbreaker, though.

Otherwise, I’d never know how much I didn’t want to fit in.

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