Redefining realness: My path to womanhood, identity, love, & so much more

Mock remembers their father teaching her and Chad how to ride bikes, just like their father taught them how to swim and throw a football and share a house with strangers. Chad excels, but Mock is terrified. Mock believes that Chad would have been better off without her, having to deal with “his older sibling breaking down during an afternoon bicycle ride because he was such a sissy” (30). Mock remembers sissy being one of the first harsh epithets used to describe her, both by members of her family and later by strangers. Mock remembers her father using fear and intimidation to squash her femininity, and how her femininity contrasted with Chad’s easy masculinity, causing friction between Mock and her father.

Mock’s father threatens to cut her hair off, and she decides to ride down the hill. Mock, distracted by thoughts of her mother, forgets Dad’s cautions about the brakes and begins to careen towards a busy intersection. She ends up crashing into a mailbox instead of going headfirst into traffic, but she is terrified she will get in trouble for ruining her new bike. Her father catches up with her, picking her up and expressing relief she was not hurt. Chad hugs Mock as well.

Mock remembers their house on a hill, and how she and Chad would eat berries from their backyard. One day, they light a bunch of ants on fire. A neighbor tells their father, and he beats them with a belt. Mock refuses to give his dad the satisfaction of crying. Mock remembers watching television with her brother, the life lessons of which always seemed to easy: “Unlike a sitcom, life’s lessons weren’t always so clear-cut, and discovering them often took longer than thirty minutes” (34).

They live with their dad’s diabetic girlfriend, Janine, and her teenage son, Derek. Mock clings to Janine as a stand-in mother, brushing her hair at night which his father does not approve of. Mock feels separate from Janine and Derek, although everyone in the house has their own special relationships to one another. Chad looks up to Derek, but Mock doesn’t like when Derek’s friend, Rob, comes over to hang out because Rob is fat and refers to Mock as “‘The Fag One’” (36). Dad helps Mock with her homework. When Mock’s teacher asks what the students want to be when they grow up, she responds with secretary because she feels the hyper-feminine submissiveness of movie secretaries aligns with her desires, although Mock now sees how much media depictions limited her conception of womanhood. The teacher makes the class applaud Mock for knowing what a secretary is, and sends a note home to Dad, who is upset that his son wants to be a secretary. Mock reflects on the subjectivity of parental expectations of children, especially when they are tied up in gender norms.

One day, while Derek and Mock are watching television together, Derek suggests that he show Mock something. He puts Mock on her stomach on the floor and grinds his pelvis into her, then gets up and leaves. Mock is confused but believes that this is what she gets for acting like a girl.

Mock remembers A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, how she was “both enamored with and disgusted by” (43) Freddy’s pedophilic attentions towards Nancy. She reflects on how Derek used her vulnerabilities to victimize her, and how they both pretended that nothing had happened over breakfast, but Derek looks different to Mock now: “the manifestation of a secret I wasn’t equipped to keep” (44). Mock likes Derek’s attention and intimacy, although she later realizes that this is how predators isolate their victims: “Over a third of all sexual abuse against children is committed by a minor” (45). Mock now feels empathy towards Derek for his emotional immaturity but does not feel like this excuses the pain he inflicted upon her.

A few nights after the carpet incident, Derek comes into Mock and Chad’s bedroom, taking Mock back into Derek’s bedroom. Derek undresses and lays down on his bed, and then uses Mock’s hand to masturbate, eventually pushing her head down to fellate him. He orgasms and tells her to leave. This nightly ritual continues for two years, from when Mock is eight until she is ten years old. As a child, Mock believed it was her duty to make Derek feel good. She spent many years believing her self-worth was tied to sexual acts which were shameful and to be kept secret. Derek didn’t have to tell Mock to keep the abuse secret; she saw it as part of her own secret girlhood, blaming herself for attracting him.

Derek grows tired of Mock, and Mock looks to others to fill the void Derek has created. She finds Junior, the oldest kid in their playgroup and “kind of an asshole” (47). They play husband and wife with the other kids, and Junior kisses Mock in secret, awakening a sexuality that causes her to fellate him. He tells her he wishes Mock was really a girl and that he’s not gay. Mock believes she is also not gay because she thinks of herself as a girl. She tries to tell Chad about how she feels different from the other boys, and Chad says that he knows, although neither of them seems sure exactly how Mock is different yet. Later, Chad apologizes for never doing anything to stop Derek although Mock thinks it is ridiculous that he should feel guilt. Mock admits to being worried about writing about her sexual abuse because she does not want people to associate her abuse with her desire to be a woman: “As if my identity as a woman is linked to some perversion, wrongdoing, or deviance” (50). She reflects on the difference between sexuality and gender: “Sexual orientation has to do with whom we get into bed with, while our gender identity has to do with whom we get into bed as” (50).

Mock remembers receiving many awards in the third grade, including class leader, placing them where her father would see them. Her father has lost his job, and she and Chad wore the same clothes year-round because they were poor. One day, Mock finds her father smoking in her and Chad’s bedroom. She thinks it is cigarettes, but it turns out to be crack. Their dad calls both Mock and Chad into the room and tells them to never smoke crack as he takes a hit. Mock does not find this amusing and sees her father as weak: “His search for pleasure and power in a pipe made him pathetic” (53). Mock feels disconnected from her father and wants to ask him questions, but then realizes how her father’s actions affect Chad and is furious. She feels like he has eliminated their sense of safety.

Mock remembers how crack jokes were ubiquitous in Oakland in 1992, but they were usually associated with maternal addiction, as many fathers were absent: “Before seeing Dad take a hit from the pipe, I thought crack was a ‘yo mama’ problem, not a ‘yo daddy’ problem” (54). Mock remembers her friend Maddy defending Maddy’s mother, who was also addicted to crack, although Mock felt none of this empathy towards her father. She remembers how her father used to take care of his friend John’s Cadillac because her father loved that car and wanted to live vicariously through John. One day, while Charlie, Mock’s father, is working on the car, John explains to his other friend that he gives Charlie a twenty here and there for his labor because Charlie is a crackhead. Upon hearing this, Mock realizes that her father is an individual, and deeply flawed at that. Mock remembers how prevalent crack was, both as a reality and in songs and the media, growing up in Oakland in the 1990s. Maddy’s mom dies of AIDS complications, and Maddy moves.

Mock remembers how she dreamed of being reunited with her mother, and how her relationships with her parents were anything but normal. When she goes to grad school, she feels lonely because of the relationships her peers have with their parents. She doesn’t remember being poor as a kid because her friends were all poor as well. Mock is annoyed at her father’s lack of empathy towards Janine as well as the erratic volatility of his speech and behavior. She does not know how much of his behavior was due to drugs. She remembers some good times, like how proud he was of Mock for defending Chad against the neighborhood bully, or when they went to the Santa Cruz boardwalk and Mock eats too much and throws up in the backseat. Her father tells them that Mock and Chad are his life and doesn’t get mad at Mock for puking in the car.

As a child, Mock believes that there was a quota for misfortune in everyone’s life. One night, Derek gets shot in a case of mistaken identity, and Chad and Mock hide in the closet, “thinking the shooter was following Derek and would find us” (61). Gunfire was a common occurrence. After Derek returns home, Charlie takes Mock and Chad on a bus to their grandparent’s house in Dallas without saying goodbye to Janine. The house is filled with family and Mock never feels like she can be alone to understand herself. Mock’s Grandma Shellie goes to church and believes that suffering and hard work are indicators of a good life, which Charlie rebukes.

Mock is enamored with the women in the kitchen and their gossip, while his father stays a lot with Cindy, his new girlfriend, which causes the women to gossip. Auntie Joyce (aka Wee Wee) asks Mock to help them in the kitchen, which Mock associates with womanhood: “My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood” (65). Mock sees them as prototypes for who she wants to be. Mock bakes a cake and dances around in her triumph, but the cake ends up burning and Charlie mimics Mock’s dance. Mock is hurt and runs to her room crying, while Auntie Wee Wee chastises Charlie and comforts Mock.

Charlie goes through a string of girlfriends, one of whom has a teenage daughter named Makayla. Mock is in awe of Makayla’s treatment of boys, who she views as entertainment. Makayla treats Mock as her secretary, making Mock screen the calls of guys she doesn’t want to date, and eventually Mock pretends to be a girl named Keisha with one of Makayla’s old flames, Alan, among other boys. As Keisha, Mock talks on the phone with these boys once a day, even though Makayla warns Mock that Alan is creepy. Mock makes a friend at school named Veronica and tells her about Keisha. Mock and Veronica dress up Mock as Keisha and go to meet Alan, but Mock is too scared that Alan will realize Keisha is a boy, even though Keisha feels real to Mock. Eventually, Mock“became bored of being a girl on the phone” (70).

Later, Mock’s dad admits that he could not stand Mock as a child. Mock remembers one of the few times she joined the boys in their game of football tag called Smear the Queer, in which Chad excelled and Charlie was very proud. Mock is it and gets tackled before she makes it to the safe zone, scraping her knees and getting dirt in her mouth. Charlie is proud of Mock, but Mock is trying not to cry at her father’s rejection of her femininity. Charlie later admits that he always knew Mock was different, even though he and Mock are so alike: “Like my father, I grew confident in my choice to be true to myself, despite what anyone thought, despite the fear of what was to come” (73).

During spring break of 1994, Mock pretends to be Keisha, swimming in the pool with Jamie, her latest crush. He tells her he likes her hair and touches it: “I wanted to kiss him and ask him to be my boyfriend, but I knew that would be taking it too far” (76). Her cousin, Mechelle, tells her they have to go back to Auntie Wee Wee’s house, where she is living for the time being, and Mock repeatedly makes Mechelle promise not to tell anyone about Keisha, who she has been pretending to be while she lives at Auntie Wee Wee’s house. Mock recounts being envious of Mechelle’s life and wanting to be as beautifully bookish as her mother or Belle, from Beauty and the Beast. She appreciates her aunt’s support of her, remembering how Wee Wee didn’t even blink when Mock picked out a lavender sleeping bag.

She spends more time with Jamie, but eventually has to leave her aunt’s house. Jamie unexpectedly comes to the house to see Keisha off while Mock’s father sits in the living room. Jamie asks to talk to Mechelle, who tries to get him to go away, but Mock’s aunt starts asking questions and Mechelle starts crying. Mock goes out and Jamie calls her Keisha, which gets Charlie’s attention: “Dad wrote Keisha off as some bad joke I was playing, one that had gone on way too long, one that he ensured I wouldn’t play again” (79).

On the drive back to Denise’s house, where they live for the time being, Charlie lays into Mock, asking her if she’s gay, which Mock feels doesn’t suit her. Mock cries because she also doesn’t have the words for how she feels. When they get back to the house, Charlie shaves Mock’s head.

Mock dreams about her mother and watches the OJ Simpson trial. Her mother eventually calls, and Mock “immediately forgave her years-long absence because she was a dream come true” (81). Mock and her mother talk about Mock’s siblings, and Charlie reluctantly agrees to let Mock and Chad go stay with their mother. Charlie tells them he loves them, but Mock is too excited to think about her father or Chad. The next time Mock sees her father, she is 21-year-old Janet, and her father is ecstatic to see her, dancing with her and showing her off to his family.