A Jen Too Many

My father thoroughly enjoyed tormenting, umm, teasing his children when I was little. He would tell us the most outrageous things, and we, being little and assuming our parents were omniscient, fell for it every time.

The joke I remember the most clearly was the time he told me that I was going to grow up to be a boy. I was aghast. I hated boys. Boys were swamp fungus. Boys were icky. Boys were everything that was gross and disgusting and utterly repellent.* Turning into a boy was the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to me!

I didn't believe him at first. I'd been fooled by him before and I was suspicious. Besides I'd never heard anything about this, and you were what you were. Right? You couldn't change from a girl to a boy. Could you?

Absolutely, my father told me. In fact, he, himself, had been a little girl when he was a child, and turned into a boy when he grew up. And Mommy had been a little boy, just like my little brother was going to grow up to be a girl.

I was so horrified I didn't know how to react. No sound or movement I could make could possible convey the depth of my alarm and dismay. My mother attempted to pop Dad's balloon by reassuring me that it wasn't true, but I wasn't entirely sure. After all, Daddy said he'd gone through it himself! Surely he would know what had happened to him in his life!

It wasn't until Dad reassured me, laughing the whole time, that he'd only been teasing that I started to breathe again.

Of course I wasn't going to turn into a boy. I knew it all the time.
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*All boys except my father. I loved Daddy. I hated boys. Therefore, despite the technicality of Daddy's gender, he wasn't really a boy. He was Daddy, and daddies didn't count on the disgusting scale.**

**Little brothers did, though.