My Thanksgiving

In recent years, my experiences with thanksgiving have yielded an interesting recurring theme.  Issues of classic gender assignment during holidays that revolve around food (women cooking, men otherwise occupied) have become less important to me with time.  My family gathers in the very small, very homogenous town of Barstow, California.  Every major holiday of my conscious life has been set to a backdrop of death valley during the "extreme weather" months of the year.  Starting in about seventh grade, I decided to keep my hair longer than shoulder length because I had very little life experience at that point in time.  A rather feminine adolescent boy, I was often mistaken for a girl, and couldn't seem to figure out where all the confusion was coming from.  My extended family had known for some time that I was actually a boy, but had a difficult time reconciling common gender stereotypes with my behavior.  I wasn't great at sports like my other cousins, who were all either state champion wrestlers, star baseball and football players, and gifted athletes on the whole.  I was (still am) a gangly, awkwardly built, relatively uncoordinated person who found a home in music rather than on a sports team.  Most concerning of all, however, was that I didn't seem to be as socially confident and outgoing around family gatherings as the other kids in my generation.  After nineteen years of gathering for holidays, I'm just now beginning to find a voice among my relatives that doesn't immediately retreat from the louder conversations that take place.  I'm a fairly shy person by nature, so this allowed for quite a bit of miscommunication to fly way over my head.  I really started picking up on the subtle hints and questions at my sexual preference in the past two years, but I'm realizing that they go much farther back than that.  Questions about my girlfriend of four years that they've never met have become less interested in how we're doing and more interested in proving that she exists at all, since girls tend to come and go frequently in my male cousins' lives.  I've learned to view the confused inquiries as funny, and food for an interesting discussion.  Without a direct statement or affirmation of gender identity, my family needed to place me for themselves to know how to interact with me.  All this aside, I love my family and I realize that they were trying to go about this as cautiously and thoughtfully as they could, which allowed for more frequent incidents of hilariously apparent attempts at subtlety.