The summer I turned five, my mother sewed me an outfit. Her own mother had been a former art teacher who, in marriage, funneled her creativity into elaborate domestic projects, sewing dresses and skirts and blouses for my mother and her sister. As a young woman, my mother rebelled against this laborious femininity, mostly wearing jeans and loose men’s shirts. But although her mother’s clothes had often felt restrictive, she had also understood them as a communication of love. With a daughter of her own, she decided it was time to try making clothes herself.

She found patterns for shorts and tops—nothing with zippers, because she wasn’t confident she’d be able to pull it off—and bought plain fabrics, inexpensive and sturdy poly-blend. She sewed me two outfits, using the same pattern for each: loose shorts with an elastic waistband and a top with a square neckline and short, squared-off sleeves. One set had dark blue shorts and a lighter blue paisley-print top, the other had tan shorts and an olive top. Around my fifth birthday, that June, she presented them to me to wear at summer camp. I don’t remember exactly what she said about them, but I do remember her eagerness and her transparent anxiety that what she intended as a loving gesture might not be received that way.

This was a reasonable worry, as I was an ornery and particular child. I did not like dolls, I did not like other girls, I did not like any kind of play-acting that involved princesses or babies. I hated dresses, screaming and trying to rip them off when my parents forced them on me for holidays. I loved, to the point of obsession, dogs and books. This was the summer before I started kindergarten—a year when I isolated myself at school, hiding under what I called my “sad tree” at recess, and was sent to a therapist. The therapist asked me to draw myself, and I drew a boy—a boy running away from home. She asked me to select one of the dollhouse dolls to indicate myself. I took a boy doll out of the dollhouse, and I built it a fort on the other side of the room.

You might conclude from this that I was feral and also, not a girl. Not being a girl, however, wasn’t a concept that existed for that therapist or for my parents in 1986, not even in the liberal Boston suburb where I grew up. My friends who have trans children today have books and social media communities and in-person communities and online courses and so many other ways to figure out how to support their children. My parents had none of this, nor even basic language to understand transness—nothing but instincts and empathy. So my mother made me these clothes and gave them to me with a look that mingled pride and pre-emptive apology.

I wore the blue set once or twice and then discarded them. The polyester cloth was scratchy on my thighs, the fit inexact. But as soon as I put on the olive and tan set, I felt a frisson of excitement. They were camouflage colors, like a Boy Scout uniform or the pelt of an animal. Looking at photos now, I can see the more feminine touches—the neckline, the sleeves—but at the time, for me, they were boy clothes. My mother had unwittingly sewn the first clothes that gave me a powerful sense of gender euphoria.

In that outfit I felt both visible in a comfortable way, and also invisible—blending into my natural surroundings like the forest creature I knew myself to be. My parents’ house was on a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill, accessible by crossing two neighbors’ yards, stood a tall pine tree, with evenly spaced, stout branches going all the way up. In my boy clothes, I would climb up as easily as if it were a ladder. Sap sticky on my hands, legs scratched from the rough bark, I would perch on the highest branch strong enough to hold my weight and look all around me.

Down the hill, I could see squirrels chattering, the neighbor’s white house, someone mowing the lawn, the barbecue they left out all year so in the winter it would be just a round hump of snow. Up the hill, my house and yard from a different vantage point: the plywood treehouse my father had built was weathered grayer on this side than on the other, my mother inside was just a flash of light-colored hair in the breakfast room window. Sometimes they’d let our dog out, and she’d track me to the base of the tree and bark and bark, despite my panicked shushing. Apart from the dog, I truly believed that no one could see me, and in that invisibility I felt so safe, so calm.

Climbing back down into the normally ordered world, running up the hill to my yard and my house in its ordinary aspect, I would feel diminished—the magic gone. But the tree was always there, my mother always up for washing my boy clothes overnight so I could wear them the following day. In photos from that year’s album I have that outfit on nearly constantly: cuddling my grandmother, dancing maniacally with my then two-year-old brother, holding up an enormous slice of watermelon like it’s a fish I’ve caught. At the end of the summer, too, I cut my hair short for the first time, a sort of Prince Valiant-ish bowl-bob. No one in my family can remember why we chose this cut. I like to think it was the freedom kicked up by the outfit, a new sense that I could allow my body to follow its desires, even if what it desired was to be anything but a girl.

Eventually I grew out my hair again, worked harder to fit in. My childhood as a boy was treated as a tomboy phase and then forgotten, and it took me nearly 40 years after that summer to recognize that I was trans. Narratives around transition—that you’re “living your truth,” etc.—discredit the life that went before as less genuine. It’s hard for me to accept that framework, because I lived a whole adult life before transition, and it was a good and real one, with meaningful work, beloved friends, a family, kids I adore. I was no more depressed than your average middle-aged working parent.

But I also felt cocooned from my life as if by a thick gummy skin, both self-protective and deadening. Over time, I came to understand the skin as something like scar tissue built up from years of my desperate, flailing battle to be the woman I thought everyone needed me to be. My life was, and remains, full of beauty, but I couldn’t directly experience any of it until I sliced my way free.

Transitioning later in life has its unique challenges, and one is the accumulation of documentary evidence suggesting that you’re probably not trans at all: a whole life, decades of photos, demonstrating that you’re capable of living in the body you were born with. In the first hyper-alert months of transition, my brain humming at a new and strange frequency, I turned to this pile of evidence with investigatory zeal. I perused photos from the years when I was fighting so hard to be a girl—were my eyes glazed over, could you see my internal discomfort? Sometimes yes, but just as often, no; the social media convention of displaying a dead-eyed photo of yourself pre-transition next to a glowed-up post-transition pic would only work for me if I were highly selective about both.

On a trip home that year to visit my parents, who still live in the town where I grew up, I spent an hour going through old albums. There I found the clues I’d been searching for. Me in party dresses, hunched and wary. Me as a twelve-year-old, when, panicked by the onrush of female puberty, I cut my hair short again and bleached it so I looked like a tiny Leonardo DiCaprio. Me at five in my olive and tan suit: fierce, free, alive, in electric contact with the world around me. Me—unmistakably, blatantly, not a girl. A child I had lost for years, but could now feel in my body as resoundingly as my own heartbeat.

There’s both comfort in finding myself in that child’s face, and also sadness. I don’t grieve my late transition in itself, I’m grateful for my life as it is. But I do grieve for that child, who lived at a time when the adults around me didn’t have the words to say aloud: We believe what you say about who you are, and we love you for it—words that might’ve made sense of my experience, stiffened my backbone to persist in it. My parents, whose reaction to my transition has been blessedly undramatic and kind, have expressed some guilt around this. I know they wish they’d had those words. Without language, they built out space for me through gestures: like my mother sewing the olive and tan outfit, like my father teaching me how to arm wrestle and whittle and play chess. Those gestures may not have been fully enough for me as a child. But now, looking back, they’re more than the world.

Benny Peterson is the author of The Maidenheads.

Hand Me Downs is a series, with a new essay appearing each day through Mother’s Day, celebrating the gifts—tangible and intangible—that our mothers give us.