Baby Barbara Sleeping with Cat & Daddy

Here I am as a baby on a blanket on the floor sleeping next to my papa, snuggled up with a kitty cat:

A closer look at me peacefully napping as a baby with a cat laying on me. I was at most six months old, but probably younger than that.

The cat still looks pretty baby-ish, too.

A closer look in my mom’s photo album:

I love the ambiguous gender of babies and cats, where those labels are irrelevant. I was a very androgynous child. Honestly I think being born into the seventies there was a lot of drag costuming on television — everyone wearing makeup and sequins was in some form of drag, like Cher — so I perceived as a child that gender (the way people seem to view it) was almost all an optional costume that people wore to go on Merv Griffin or Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

Though I dress and fix my hair like a blonde “femme” (I think they call it these days) and I was married to a man (rest in peace, sweetie) I don’t feel like these convey any real fixed truths about who I am as a person. I don’t know why there is such a big argument about it. It used to be on The Love Boat tv show (that really introduced cruising) and on many cruises we went on back in the days, drag and “cross-dressing” were accepted as part of the entertainment and fun adventure of being on the open seas, crossing hum-drum boundary lines with free-spirited ease.

At my essence I am not a woman or a man: I am a spiritual being.

Looking at these pictures of me as a baby next to my dear daddy, curled up together on the floor with a cat, I believe that is all we are all, and all that matters; I am a child of God.

That is all we all are: children of God, and animals like cats and all of the other creatures.