A Series of Photos from When I Was a Girl
Ronan Tomaselli
There is a photo I love of me and my mother laughing. It’s a candid shot, snapped in between two less authentic and less happily posed pictures of us. Her arm is around me, hugging me and also holding me up as I lean back full-body laughing. It’s one of the few current photos I have of us together. And maybe the only one of us smiling, genuinely happy for one moment.
Right before that photo, we were fighting. It was tenth grade, and that year, like the previous few years, we were always fighting. I don’t remember what that specific fight was about, maybe it was about something I said or maybe it was about the possible eating disorder I had at the time, but it was only a few sentences before we reached a boiling point when my mom suggested we take a picture together. I refused at first, to be difficult, but eventually I gave in. And that was the pattern. A comment, a fight, a blowout, and then a moment of calm.
And, honestly, it’s always been like that. I have always been the imperfect child. My mother says that I am a bull in a china shop. That I am unladylike. That I am too similar to my deadbeat uncle. That I am stubborn and loud and angry. I wish that she would tell me that I was good.
There is a photo of me at a school dance from eleventh grade. It is Winter Ball, and I am wearing a gown. I am with my date. I look so happy. His arm is around me and the room is dark, the wall backlit by the neon lights flashing from the DJ booth. You can see we were both laughing about how awkward this all is–us being dates. About an hour before that picture was taken, I sobbed in my bathroom at home because I did not recognize myself in the mirror. I was not this person. This person was not me.
But I did this every day, a ritual of makeup and bras and clothing that showed off curves I was secretly ashamed to have. Talks of boys and dates and dances and dresses, insisting that I didn’t have a crush on anyone at the moment (but coyly so they all thought that I did). It was exhausting. I had friends. I was beautiful. I was doing well in school. I was doing things I seemingly enjoyed.
Why wasn’t I happy?
Why was I miserable?
Why did I want to peel away my skin, layer by layer, until my bones and muscle were exposed?
My mother was so happy, though. So happy I had friends. So happy I was beautiful. So happy that I was doing so well in school. The day I cried in the bathroom she was confused when the tears began to flow, when I told her that this was not who I was, that I hated how I looked. She thought it was my dress, or my makeup, or my hair. And it was. Sort of. My mother didn’t understand. She never did and I do not think she ever will.
There is a photo of me in a brightly lit dressing room. I am posing stupidly, with one hip popped out and holding a thumbs up on my hand that wasn’t holding my phone. I was shopping for my senior prom. That year I would wear a suit–a bright pink, obnoxious suit that would proclaim that I was proud of who I was. Proud enough to wear the most atrocious suit ever known. We are in the store. I am once again almost in tears; nothing looks right. It’s too wide, makes my already large body look worse, more obtuse. My mother says these suits make me look “too manly.” My heart flutters at that, and the tears magically stop. I try on more suits that are similar, even though the sight of my stomach and my thighs in those pants make me wish I am dead. Later, as we look for a button-up shirt, she asks me, point blank:
“Do you want to look masculine? Is that why you want to wear a suit?”
I blink, stupidly, as though I have no idea what would inspire that comment. As if I did not try on every single suit that made my shoulders look broad, and my biceps look big, and my waist tapered. I deny these claims. I continue to deny these claims until I graduate.
There is a photo of the sky, I took it out of my father’s car. You can see my reflection in the window. There are tears streaming down my face as I sob silently in the backseat. Right before this, my parents and I had been discussing Elliot Page. He had recently come out.
The conversation between my mother and I grows tense on the way home from the mall. It’s the end of my senior year, and I needed to buy a dress for graduation. My parents don’t understand it–the pronouns, the changes, the publicity of it all.
My mother says, “It’s not that hard for people to come out these days. I wish they wouldn’t make it such a big deal.”
I argue with her for a bit. I insist that she will never understand what it is like, she will never understand the pressure or the anxiety. She, as always, refuses to listen–asserts that she is right. The weight of this conversation sits in my stomach. I feel bloated and overfed. This feeling refuses to come up no matter how hard I shove my fingers into the back of my throat. I replay this conversation in my head regularly. I am silent the rest of the ride home.
There is no photo from the day I told my parents I wasn’t a girl, only a tearful video of me in the aftermath as I recount what happened to my friends hundreds of miles away. Only ten minutes before I had anxiously called up my mom, the boulder still remaining in my stomach from almost a year before. We say our hellos and she asks me what is wrong. I spit it out. The words tumble out of my mouth awkwardly, as though I had never said them before.
I reintroduce myself.
The line is silent.
I wait.
When my mom finally responds, she is choked up. She asks me if that’s all, and when I say yes, she says goodbye. I hold my breath. I stare blankly at my phone. I had done everything right. Maybe it wasn’t the best time, or the best way to do it, but I had done everything right. She calls back a few minutes later.
This time, I can hear her re-organizing the kitchen–a nervous habit–and as she slams containers and pots and plates on the counter, she asks me, “How could you make such a major life decision and not include us? Me?”
I stutter out that I didn’t mean to make her upset, that this is just who I am, that I’m sorry this is so upsetting to her. She asks me what I wanted from this. What did I think would happen when I told her this? How did I want her to react?
I wanted her to tell me that she loved me. And that she would try to adjust, but it would take some time. And that she was sorry for ever making it feel like I couldn’t tell her face to face.
I whisper that I don’t know.
My mother’s concern was my photos.
What should she do with them?
How does she commemorate a person that doesn’t exist?
I tell her, “I’m still that person. Don’t do anything with them. That is still me.”
She replies that the person, the girl, in those photos is a fallacy–a false memory. That the girl held too many secrets and too little truths. That the girl in those photos is dead, along with her name, and her hair, and her everything else. The conversation escalates until my voice is hoarse and my mother is on the verge of tears. The only thing on both sides of the line is breathing. She says that she’ll call me soon, that she loves me, and she says goodbye.
A fight, a blowout, and a moment of calm.
My mother decides to keep my photos.
Ronan Tomaselli is a second year English major from a tiny town in South Jersey. They are hoping to graduate in 2025 and pursue a career in writing, hopefully for the screen. “A Series of Photos from When I Was a Girl” is their first published piece, and they hope to continue to produce pieces that they are this proud of.
“A Series of Photos from When I Was a Girl” was produced in Professor Furhman’s Intro to Creative Writing class. Furhman selected the work for inclusion in WHR.