Prompt: A character gets someone wrong

I’d always felt misunderstood by my mother.

My siblings she got along with fine—they fit squarely into boxes she could comprehend, never challenging her perception of what was acceptable, what was permissible. But I was a different story.

I read once about a study on gender from the 50s. When assigning gender to intersex children, doctors would examine a child’s behavior, seeing if the child gravitated toward “boy” toys or “girl” toys. It’s a study from a long time ago, one that to me feels laughable in regard to its gender assumptions, but markers like these are exactly the kind of thing my mother still clings to.

Sarah Beth and Marcus checked all the boxes in this regard. Sarah Beth played with dolls, dressing them, coddling them, pushing them around in miniature strollers. She would steal white tissue paper from the gift-wrapping storage box in the closet, draping it over her ringlet curls and clutching a small bouquet of flowers she’d pulled from Mom’s garden as she walked down the hallway. I waited at the end, dwarfed in Dad’s jacket, the lapels hitting near my thighs—a stand-in for whoever her future husband may be.

My brother meanwhile was my mom’s idea of the perfect male child—unsentimental, involved in too many sports and getting into just the right amount of mischief, receiving a soft scolding for setting off fireworks that caught the neighbor’s boxwoods on fire because after all, boys will be boys.
 
My mother doted on them both and seemed to love them flaws and all—my sister with her stubbornness, my brother with his quick tongue and mean streak. But somehow her inability to understand me the way she did them was a flaw she couldn’t see beyond. It was as if my aversion to dresses, makeup and heels were a personal afront—and one she took on as a challenge, as if there was still time to fix me, still time to influence me.
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“This skirt would look nice on you,” she tilted the phone in my direction. I nodded but I didn’t respond.