“Nonsense” as Margo’s mother’s term

“Nonsense” is the code word Donna Fairchild uses for her daughter Margo’s gender expression and identity. What begins with an eleven-year-old trying on his mother’s blue ruffled bathing suit becomes a lasting family euphemism: a way to name what Donna has seen while refusing to discuss what it means. Its persistence, including after Margo has transitioned and is living as a woman, makes the word a measure of the distance between a mother’s denial and her daughter’s insistence on being recognized.

Origin in the bathing-suit incident

When Margo was in fifth grade, she still thought of herself as Mark. Hoping for a day alone at home, she pretended to be sick. Donna, a second-grade teacher who had previously stayed home when her child was ill, decided this time that Mark was old enough to manage on his own. After Donna left for work, Mark went to her bedroom and found the blue bathing suit with a ruffled skirt in the second drawer from the top. The choice was not casual: Margo later recalled loving the suit, and said that touching it was not enough.

At eleven, before a growth spurt, the suit fit surprisingly well except at the chest. Paper towels stuffed into its padded bra cups changed how it looked to her; in Margo’s recollection, it then looked amazing. She wore the suit outside, relaxed in the sun and music, and fell asleep. Donna had come home on her lunch break, worried about the child she believed to be sick. Instead, she found Mark asleep in her clothes, presenting as the daughter she did not know she had.

Donna stared and shook her head before asking whether the clothes were part of a joke. Margo later understood that her mother wanted her to dismiss what had happened as playacting. Frightened and ashamed, however, she told the truth: “I love this bathing suit. It’s my favorite.” Donna ordered her to take it off and never touch it again—or any other article of her clothing. The word “nonsense” would give that prohibition a longer life than the incident itself.

A family code for silence

The bathing-suit incident was never discussed directly. The family’s silence did not mean Donna had forgotten it: she had seen something that frightened her, and the episode remained present through an indirect vocabulary. When her parents left Margo home alone, Donna warned her not to get up to any of her “nonsense.” When Margo looked sad, Donna asked whether the sadness was about “that nonsense.” The same label thus covered both an action Donna had forbidden and an emotion that might disclose its continuing importance.

The word’s vagueness was useful to Donna precisely because it avoided naming what was at stake. Rather than ask what Margo felt or acknowledge the meaning of the bathing suit, she could treat the matter as an ill-defined misbehavior. Margo’s recollection shows the code expanding beyond clothes: Donna invoked it when Margo was sad, and later, when she became engaged, expressed the hope that marriage meant she was finished with it. Each occasion made the euphemism do the work of a conversation the two did not have.

The word persists into adulthood

Donna continued using the term even after Margo had transitioned and was living as a woman. On her deathbed, she looked at Margo and asked, “Are you ever gonna stop with this nonsense?” The question carries the old pattern into a radically changed circumstance: the child who had once been ordered out of her mother’s bathing suit is now openly her mother’s daughter, yet Donna still describes that identity as something to stop.

At the talk, Margo addresses her mother’s photograph directly: “I’m sorry, Mom. I can’t stop my nonsense. I’m your daughter and I love you very much.” Her reply turns the inherited label into a declaration rather than an apology for the identity it was meant to contain. She refuses the demand to stop, names herself as Donna’s daughter, and expresses love in the same breath. The scene does not suggest that the estrangement has been resolved; it places Margo’s affirmation beside the memory of a mother who never relinquished her euphemism.

Significance

“Nonsense” compresses a history of recognition withheld into one ordinary word. Its recurrence links a specific childhood episode—the drawer, the suit, the order to take it off—to later moments when Margo’s sadness, engagement, and transition might have prompted direct acknowledgment. Instead, the label makes those different experiences sound like repetitions of one childish phase.

Margo’s account gives the word a second meaning as well: not a description she accepts, but a name for the family’s inability to speak plainly. By telling the story before Donna’s frozen photograph and then answering it aloud, Margo makes visible what the code had obscured. The suit was not merely a forbidden garment to her, and her adult life was not an episode she could outgrow. Her closing statement preserves both the conflict and the attachment: Donna’s refusal remains, but so does Margo’s love for her mother and her certainty about who she is.