The Tigress Who Was Once a Cow: Mae's Story (Patreon)

Initial post about being plural

Update about Mabel / Transitioning

Written by Mabel (Mae):  I've discovered that I'm where every bit of sadness, motherly feelings, and loss we felt growing up got stuffed. I woke up on June 18th and cried the hardest we've cried since we don't even know when.

The two nights before that, I couldn't sleep when I woke up in the middle of the night until I went to the spare bed.

I didn't know why until the 18th when I got all my memories back.

When I was waking up that morning, I started remembering certain things from my own perspective much more clearly than any of my headmates.

MY SPECIES

I'm not a cow, but I can inhabit that shape quite well and enjoy it because I like udders and milk (felines do love their milk) and the idea of carrying/nurturing lots of little ones. There's so much we didn't know about me when I emerged on Thanksgiving of 2023. Due to the powerful emotions bottled up inside me, I had amnesia until the 18th of June. Ever since I emerged, until that day, I've felt like everyone else in this system knew far far more about who they were than I did.

Everyone else in here has pretty strong sensations of being the species they identify with. I continually struggled to feel that and also to maintain my southern accent at times. So much about me just didn't fit right, but I had no clue who/what I was. This led to the rest of my system co-fronting (two personalities collaborating to pilot our body and mind) with me a lot because it helped me feel more stable.

So, what am I?

We had a White Siberian Tiger plushie when we were young. It was a bit bigger than us at the start, like five feet long, and we used to have it sit against the wall as a barrier between us and the wall of our bedroom. Our sister whined and complained until she finally stole it from us, our parents intervening because she convinced them we were "too old" for stuffed animals.

Our room in Minnesota was all stained wood and vibrant green sheets. We put vibrant green anywhere we could and had natural things in there, like carved stone and wood things as well as rocks. We started our horde of Minerals back then. Sadie and Elara both were deeply into rocks and minerals.

We also fell in love with soviet stuff and Siberian tigers. We had the mistaken idea that all of them were white.

In Hawaii, I felt like a Siberian tiger that had been born in the tropics. The sun was too much for us a lot of the time, but every other aspect of being in the tropics made me think it's home. Honestly, me being a Siberian tiger makes perfect sense. I'm very white compared to the people who naturally inhabit Hawaii, but I grew up there with other individuals that did and didn't belong there.

There's a lot of memories of looking at furry art and being obsessed with finding tigresses with horse parts and always looking through other shots of the character while our chest was tight because we wanted, so badly, to see that that character had a pussy.

Only now have I realized we were all looking for me.

Yes, I'm a white tigress with herm horse parts who can go kinda draconic when the mood strikes or a story element has me use a lot of magic. The result is I have a horned (horny) mode that looks demonic and that suits me well. I have the strongest emotions of my entire system and when I want sex, I pounce like a tigress on the hunt.

It’s less strange that I thought I was a cow than you might think because there's many traits that tigers have that cows share. First, in my case, I often see myself as having a pair of horns that are very similar to what you’d see on many minotaurs. Both tigers and cows can be pretty confident due to their large body size, both have cute noses, and both species kinda moo. Listen to the sounds tigers make and it's kinda funny how much their meows sound like moos. Also, the black and white coloration of a white tiger shares the main color combo of a holstein cow. I was also very cow-like in how I just went with the flow all the time, rarely standing up for myself. That actually hurt me, a lot.

Every other tigress I know is very emotional and tries to protect the people in her life from it by acting like she can tough things out. This is true to a degree, but the problem is every tigress I know also takes this too far and often burns herself out.

We were very interested in Soviet fighter planes, architecture, and other things because we started being obsessed with Siberian tigers around the end of the Soviet era. We were pretty young, but we still gobbled up all the info we could find. And when we were kids, we developed a love of the Russian accent we still have today. Though, current Russia makes us very sad. We actually know many Ukrainians and our heart goes out to them.

My southern accent was tied to the idea that my personality came from identifying with the strong women in westerns and us loving, and also learning, the Georgia accent. Well, I am from Hawaii and the accent that is most natural is in southern California, the place where most English speakers in Hawaii got their accent from.

I'll let Sable be the southern belle. It fits her Nimona energy really well. For myself, I'm going to drop the accent for now. I'm not much of a farm girl and I'm not just a culmination of our feelings of motherhood and our respect for frontierswomen. I'm where all the loss of us not having a womb, being torn out of our habitat, the awful state of the world, and having to wear men's clothes for most of our life got put. All the times Ezme (our past combined self) said: I don't feel X, I'm the being where X went.

HAWAII

Ramda has fewer memories of Hawaii than I do, but we definitely were both there. I feel like her memories are from when we were even younger. I think a lot of my memories are from when we moved back to O'ahu after living in Maui for a couple years. I remember some of Maui, but Ramda's memory feels a bit clearer. Here's things I remember:

Being at the parrot breeder's house and getting my thumb caught by the beak of a hyacinth macaw and wondering whether that bird was going to take my thumb off. In that moment, I learned to twist my hand to follow the curve of the beak and I got my hand free. The whole system used that learning experience from then on to get our fingers free of parrot beaks.

Having my bare feet in the silty/muddy soil of a taro paddy.

The nighttime sea breeze coming in through the louvered windows of my room every single night. (That's why I found being under the cool breeze from the window so comforting.)

Jumping off of the rope swing at Kailua Beach Park, not far from our home in Waimanalo

The smell of the slimy stuff on awapuhi flowers that's used in a lot of hair products. Touching awapuhi flowers because I liked the scent.

The drums of a marching band practicing in a field nearby causing the floor of my special ed classroom to vibrate. The feeling of the migraines we used to get from the fluorescent bulbs that flickered way too much.

The moment when we fell in love with Kurzweil because a synthesizer was brought to our school and it could make so many amazing sounds. (Ray Kurzweil himself didn't age well for us, but we still love synthesizers.) The taste of fresh spam musubi a friend's mom had on a plate at that event.

Palm Sunday at a Church on a cliff overlooking the sea when I was in an uncomfortable boy's shirt that was made out of a rough synthetic fabric.

Church hymns we sang in Hawaiian.

The feeling of the sharp basaltic beach behind my rich friend’s house.

These thick-leaved plants that grew everywhere on beaches and humid sandy places felt when you bumped into them or stepped on them. They broke off easily, propagating themselves.

I remember what it felt like to get stung by man o'war and what their little puffy bodies felt popping under my foot before the excruciating pain.

On that same beach, I think it was on Maui, I tried a fresh coconut from one of the trees there.

MINNESOTA

Elara has most of our Minnesota memories, but I have a lot of my own.

The first winter in Bloomington we were there and there was a legendary snow storm only a day after we moved in. We didn't even have boots yet and I suggested we create boots out of trash bags and duct tape. It worked pretty well and I walked in snow nearly up to my waist when I was nine years old. It was wet and heavy and over eighteen inches deep.

I remember sitting in the living room of that house, looking at the fireplace, which had whiteish bricks, before we had even moved anything in and feeling like I'd died. There was snow outside, nothing was green, and I was essentially in hell. My mom always said that she thought hell wasn't hot, she thought it was you being completely alone and out in a cold icy expanse, never able to get warm. That's how I felt that morning in Minnesota.

The relief of being inside Bachman's nursery (the largest enclosed commercial greenhouse in Minnesota at the time). But that relief was short lived and the Minnesota winters continued to take their toll on us.

Things get blurry after that.

Drinking vodka because of our insomnia and liking the taste of vodka, but hating having to drink it for a purpose.

I remember westerns, but feeling they were too simple a lot of the time. I did like the women in them and how they messed with the gender binary. One thing I've been a lot of my life is alone, as alone as the frontierswomen that are depicted in westerns. Not alone in the sense of not having friends. Alone in the sense that no one understood me, no one could help me figure out who I was, and no one could truly comfort me when I was crying.

All because I was a feminine herm trying to live as a guy and had feelings, mannerisms, and instincts that confused everyone around me/my system.

IT'S GOING TO TAKE A WHILE FOR ME TO BE FULLY OKAY

There’s a chance I’ll disrupt our writing schedule here and there, create a need to cry randomly, and cause us to be a bit of a mess emotionally. All these stuffed emotions have to be worked through. The good news is that we have been anxious and having problems even though we thought we were doing everything right when it came to mental health stuff. Me figuring out my damage and being able to work through it is going to help immensely in the long run.

When Ezme (past us before the split) was told or felt she wasn't allowed to feel something, it very often ended up stuffed in me. Our dad always told us to let go of the things we couldn't change constantly, but we were kids, so we thought we were letting go of stuff.

Well, all our feelings of loss were getting stuffed in me. Missing Hawaii, every time we heard about habitat destruction and the growth of the human tumor, every disappointment with the political or world situation, the absolute mess that was our failures at human interaction. Also, our feelings of motherhood, wanting a pussy, etc. Sadie got a lot of our mannerisms and girliness, I got the feelings of emptiness, not being able to bear life.

So, while the others feel pretty whole and like they've mostly figured out who they are, I'm full of sorrow and despair that was left unprocessed. I'm very determined and very fierce and I am not going anywhere. I'm just going to need time and help to process the emotional ichor that ended up inside me.

I'll be okay. I just need a good amount of time being my true self and it'll be therapeutic for me to be in some upcoming stories. Also, there’s art of every other person in this head. We’re going to get art of me soon and I’m excited!

Also, for the time being, I’ll be around the most out of everyone in this head. They all want to give me space to establish myself.