ROCKY ROAD

One of my earliest memories is getting rocks for Christmas because I was a lesbian.

Unbeknown to me, my parents used rocks from the garden to hold the Christmas tree up and, of course, the rocks were wrapped in Christmas paper to keep in with the theme. This particular year I was a little anxious about my past behavior, and like any other four year old naiveté I whole-heartedly believed that Father Christmas, not God, was the omniscient judge of morality. I asked my grandmother in a nonchalant manner what one might expect to receive if one had gravitated towards naughty rather than nice and she promptly replied, “rocks”. I was devastated but readied myself for the inevitable outcome.

That Christmas eve I hardly slept. Over and over again three scenarios played themselves out. One – I’d destroyed two pairs of underwear by painstakenly cutting out all the little blue flowers and then tried to convince my mother that they were already like that. Two – I’d refused to hold a boy's hand for the end-of-year kindergarten photo and insisted on holding the exotic Franca’s instead. Three – I’d been caught in my Grandmothers bedroom, naked, holding a tray of tea. I was about to pour for ‘big doll’, who was in the bed, naked, lipstick smeared all over her face and both her plastic legs bent behind her head.

Even though I wasn’t punished for these strange misdeeds, I was convinced there was something ‘wrong’ with me, and that the only person who mattered knew – the man with all of the presents.

My night of torture continued, and in my crazed state I thought I heard sleigh bells ringing. I crept out of bed and headed straight for the tree. In the half light I could see something at its base, and as I got closer my heart skipped a beat as I saw these objects were wrapped in Christmas paper. ‘It’s ok’, I thought, because who in their right mind would wrap a rock? I sighed with relief and as I turned to go back to bed I thought, ‘what the hell, I’m here now’.

I knelt on the floor, one hand scratching away at the paper, one eye on the door in case an adult decided to crash my party. I turned to the partially unwrapped ‘present’, and there it was, brown, rough, and hard – a rock! I fell back in horror, shielding my eyes from the awful thing in front of me. I scurried back to bed, berating myself for my wicked ways. I didn’t know what was worse, the fact that I had done the things that I had done or that someone actually knew.

A few hours later I awoke to the annual cry of, “He’s been, he’s been”. I of course knew he had, and was not going to humiliate myself in front of the whole family by unwrapping rocks and possibly outing myself.

I actually got a trike and a Tonka truck that Christmas and when I did out myself twelve years later no-one was surprised, especially not Franca, who I ran into at the local lesbian bar. We held hands for old time's sake.

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