Howdy, my (hopefully) many new friends.

I won’t tell you how old I am, a new privilege of my new gender, but I have lived like most of you on both sides of a long picket fence, painted white and frequently resharpened. It won’t be news to most of you that nothing ever seemed to fit, not my clothes, not my toys, not my body, not my mind.

Still don’t, those things. But better. Am I happier now? I would say yes, but I have been inherently female long enough to know that happiness is beside the point. Ours is a life of small, and sometimes huge, satisfactions. They liked the brownies, he called when he said he would, the baby was born healthy(!), that woman at the PTA held her tongue for once, and I wasn’t embarrassed parking downtown for once. For once. We use that term a lot, don’t we?

Our lives are made up of little things, which is also true of men. They just don’t know that little things are little or that they can mean the whole world in the morning light.

These are the kinds of things I want to talk about with you all, toasters and divorce and why pantyhose always gets so twisted, why we spend so much time pretending, at church, and in the bed, and with children we cannot comprehend, let alone like, even though we love them like some ailing limb of our stricken bodies. 

Not trying to bum you out. Just to promise honesty. Which is hard to come by these days. And some of us are privileged to have lived on both sides of the fence and know that everything I’ve mentioned is not unique to us but a common human condition. What differs in us is perspective. We’re not like everybody else. Never mind that nobody is like anybody else. But we might just be enough like each other to understand some unique pains and pleasures. Life offers us both. And we should take full advantage.