closer i am to fine

When my mother was pregnant with me, she was walking through Piedmont Park in Atlanta when she found a balloon that had lost its way. It was pink, and read “It’s a girl!” She had not found out the sex of the baby from the doctors—I suppose she wanted it to be a surprise, or maybe it was just that she knew How It Should Happen. Not in a white room while dressed in a paper smock from the mouth of a doctor for whom it isn’t magical. Not like that, but with signs, intuitions as subtle as a kick against uterine walls. Like a balloon blown across your path as you and your unborn unsexed baby walk through the park in the waning summer sunlight.

Fast forward 24 years and my mother’s two daughters are going to Piedmont Park together, for Atlanta Pride. Their mission: to see the Indigo Girls, Doria Roberts, and Michelle Malone for free. We’re not on the lookout for prophecies; there are no pink balloons proclaiming “It’s a girl!” But there are girls. Hundreds of them. Old ones, young ones, butch ones, femme ones, girls with funky T-shirts spouting left-wing axioms and girls without T-shirts, wearing nothing but bikini tops or, in one case, stickers in strategic places proclaiming she had donated to Keep Pride Free. Girls who are parents and brought their children, and girls who didn’t tell their parents where they were going when they left the house that afternoon. And they all love each other.

I stand there watching, wondering what it meant to my mother when she knew I was going to be a girl. What were her expectations? Did she dream of the dresses I would wear, the dolls I would cherish, the heart-to-hearts we would have as I got older? Did she imagine the people I would love in my life? Did she dream of my wedding? Did she have any idea how many ways there are to be a girl, and what kind I would be?

I’m standing in the place where I was first proclaimed female, and now, on the cusp of adulthood, I’m finally able to be proud of it. I’m here mostly for the music, but I’m also here to celebrate my molting: my juvenile feathers, which showed my insecurity and fear, which wished for my body or face or mind to be different than they are naturally, which valued other people’s approval over my own, have flown away. I started crying as they sang Galileo, because it’s been so long, and my soul has finally gotten at least some of it right.