Sing a Healing Song, Chapter 7

I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window. Had I really asked my mother if she’d take me shopping for feminine clothes? It sounded so unreal - “I’ve just been transformed into a girl, I shall immediately start wearing the most feminine outfits imaginable.” Who would willingly do that?

And yet I could see the mall getting closer and closer.

I had been relieved when the goddess had told me this girl I had become was a tomboy. Tottering around in heels and hose, having to worry about people seeing my panties if I sat wrong, slapping make-up on my face, or basically trying to be a life-sized Barbie doll didn’t appeal to me at all.

And still we got closer to the mall.

Then I sneaked a peek at my mom, and I remembered why I was doing this.

I could feel that despite the deeply hidden pain that she had never been able to share the joys of femininity with me, but according to my new memories, she had never let that pain show. She hadn’t tried to push me or manipulate me or do some passive-aggressive crap at me to try and make me more girly. She had simply accepted I was a rough-and-tumble tomboy who loved running, sports, and doing stuff with her dad, and tried her best to be as supportive a mother as she could be.

From my perspective, the hole in my life where a mother should have been and been retroactively filled, and I was so grateful I really wanted to do anything I could to make her smile. If that meant I spent a day being girly, I could cope.

And to be honest, I was a little curious what I would look like made up.

But don’t go spreading that one around, okay?

We arrived at the mall, and my mom went up to the second level of the parking lot to find a place to park. Then we went into what was once the largest mall in the world ...

The place covers several city blocks, and has everything a normal mall has, and a lot of things no normal mall has room for. And probably some things no sane mall would even want ...

I honestly didn’t know how my mother was going to walk around this place in heels ...

I could give a store-by-store, outfit-by-outfit account of what happened at the mall, but honestly, who’d want to listen to that? I tried on clothes, I argued with my mother over fashion, and I came home with a couple of bags worth of stuff, what more would anybody need to know?

It wasn’t horrible. For one thing, as a person who had needed a cane and then a wheelchair to get around for the last couple of years, just being able to stretch my legs and walk was a delight. Most people take mobility for granted, but I was relishing in the ability to move without aid, and I vowed to myself to not be like them, even as I realized that I probably would .

But the best part of the whole deal was my mom. Seeing her smile, watching her laugh, just being with her ... I’m not saying my dad hadn’t done his best raising me, but what I experienced was sort of the opposite of the old saying “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone”. For me, it was “You don’t know how much you’ve been missing until you find it. ”

We went home, I put away my stuff, and we had scrambled eggs for supper (Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that!)

Then I lived up to my promise to my dad, put on a set of earphones, and put my IPod on shuffle before crawling into bed.

Even still, I heard noises coming from my parent’s room, and I gathered that my dad was showing my mom just how glad he was to have her home ...

Not that I could blame him. I had felt the grief he’d carried because she had died, and in his place, if it had been the love of my life who was dead and then brought back to me, I’m pretty sure I would have had the same response.

Still, I fell asleep wondering if I was gonna have a baby brother or sister in nine months or so ...