She laughs. “You’ll be like that pope with his little black demon following him around.”
Spending the past few days immersed in a grown-up’s version of arts and crafts has been great. Not just because it’s fun skimming magazines and saying, “Yes please,” to whatever tickles my fancy, but because it’s nice to feel excited about the future again. Feeling unanchored is one thing, not knowing why I felt that way is another altogether. This trip’s clarified, specifically, what wasn’t working for me, and I feel like a horse behind the starting gate.
My mom gets up from where she’s been working and walks over to study the images I’ve chosen. Many are lifestyle-related, friends laughing while hiking, countries I want to visit, a beautiful city apartment, photos of the kids in Rabin’s SOS Children’s Village Jorpati, in Kathmandu, to represent organizations I want to be involved with, an artist’s studio, a library, a chic couple eating at a scenic restaurant, words like “adventure” and “excitement.” Other images evoke feelings I want to regularly experience: a woman riding bareback on a galloping horse, a woman relaxing at a spa looking comfortable in her own skin, words like “relaxed,” “joyful,” “inner calm.”
“What?” I ask, noticing my mom’s skeptical expression. “Why do you have that look on your face?”
“Well,” she says, squatting down beside me, “I love all of it, it feels very you, but, remember how you pointed out—quite wisely, I should add—how my map was missing a big section?”
“Yeah,” I say slowly, sensing an impending lecture.
“Tell me if I’m missing it, but where’s your career? You know, the part about how you’ll finance all this stuff.”
“Oh, that,” I say matter-of-factly, reaching for a picture of a bedroom that looks particularly inviting. “I’m skipping it for now because I don’t know what I want to do yet.”
“Shouldn’t you be thinking about it? Travel and fine dining aren’t cheap.”
“Mom,” I sigh. “Why do you have to make everything so serious? This is supposed to be fun, I’m not thinking about career stuff.”
“This isn’t an arts-and-crafts project, Mia. It’s an exercise in creating an intentional future for yourself. You don’t want major professional regrets, and financial stress feels terrible, trust me. Not thinking about retirement funds when you’re young almost guarantees you won’t have one when you’re old. But, mainly, doesn’t a successful career excite you? Don’t you envision that for yourself?”
Here comes the lecture.
“Of course I want a successful career, but I have no clue what I want to do. I’m not about to cut out publicist pictures since I don’t want to do that long-term, and I don’t want to paste a giant question mark, so I’m just skipping it.”
“Mia, you’re not ‘skipping’ anything, nonaction is an action. You’re making a conscious choice to omit it. You don’t know where you want to live, but you cut out pictures of interior décor and pretty bedrooms, right? Do the same for your career. Forget the exact title, just think about the elements you want in a career. What excites you? What do you gravitate toward? Do you see yourself in a busy office or working from home? What qualities do you want in your colleagues? I saw some great images of professional women in beautiful offices. Why don’t you—”
She interrupts herself a second, bends down, and squints.
“Is that Tinkerbell??”
I look at the winking pixie in a cloud of fairy dust and feel somewhat sheepish.
“I happen to like Tinkerbell—she’s a perfect symbol of feeling lighthearted and free.”
“Honey,” she says, looking at me, “you’re an accomplished and wise young woman.”
She walks back over to her area, sits back down.
“But in some ways you really need to grow up.”
I look down at my map, which isn’t really even a map yet but just a pile of images I now feel like tossing out the window.
“Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly nice afternoon!”
I walk out of the apartment, closing the door loudly behind me, and stomp my way downstairs to brood on a bench in the park across the street. Throughout the park, people are papering tree trunks with posters advertising upcoming plays.
Every July is Le Festival, a monthlong theater festival that typically draws some hundred thousand people, and it’s all anyone’s talked about for the past few weeks. Bar les Célestins rolls in large shipments of wine and beer every day, and new faces are increasingly peppered among those we’ve come to recognize.
By the time flyers for The Penis Monologues have been strung above me like popcorn garlands, I’ve cooled off enough to see my mom’s point. I initially avoided adulthood because I associated it with the loss of carefree, childhood fun. Within the past two years, however, I think it’s less to do with fearing adult responsibility (it’s not the most fun thing in the world, but I know how to live responsibly), and more to do with fearing I don’t have what it takes to succeed. There weren’t images of professional women because I often don’t have faith in myself as one. I’m bored with publicity but it came easily to me and I know I can do it. If I switch fields, (a) I have to figure out what else to do and (b) I may be terrible at it.
Until about two years ago, it never seriously occurred to me that I could fail. Not failure along the lines of borrowing a hundred bucks from your parents to make rent, but really, truly, failing. I spoke to my mom about this, expecting her to be sympathetic and regale me with anecdotes about times her idealistic bubble burst, but she was rather amused. Of course I knew I could fail, she said, we all did, we’d failed plenty as kids—we got flunked, we got detention, we didn’t get picked for teams. It was a lifelong reality that motivated us to work hard.
Granted, I can’t help that failure was hardly part of my generation’s educational vernacular; most of us were taught early on that we could do and be anything. Praise, meant to foster high self-esteem, was the staple of many millennials’ upbringings, both at school and at home. As Jean Twenge wrote in Generation Me, we were applauded just for turning our homework in and frequently told how smart, talented, and special we were. Is it any wonder we anticipated relatively easy and immediate professional success?
But when rewards aren’t tied to results, I think it actually fosters insecurity. Kids aren’t dumb; on some level you know you don’t deserve the accolades and you start questioning your abilities, in part because you’re never sure exactly what they are. I’m sure that’s partly why, after a few rejection letters, I stopped submitting articles altogether. I often give up when things don’t come easily to me, a pattern I want to change. Sometimes I feel like my self-esteem is similar to a beautifully constructed house of cards; the slightest of shakes and everything falls flat.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Avignon
If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother
April 4, 1671, in a letter sent from Madame de Sévigné to her daughter:
I told you the other day about Madame de Nevers’s new coiffure . . . this hair style is just what will suit you, you will look like an angel and it is quickly done . . . Now, imagine the hair parted peasant-fashion to within two inches of the back roll; the hair each side is cut in layers and made into round loose curls which hang about an inch below the ear; it looks very young and pretty—two bouquets of hair on each side. Don’t cut your hair too short, because the curls require a lot of hair as several ladies have found out and are example to others. Ribbons are arranged in the usual fashion and a large curl on top which sometimes falls down the neck. I don’t know if I have explained it very well. I shall have a doll dressed with this hair style and send it to you.
November 1, 2007, in an e-mail sent from Claire Fontaine to her daughter:
While at the hairdresser, why not get some soft highlights put in? It’s kind of mousy now and some brightness in your hair will light up your whole f
ace. Your eyes and eyebrows will pop more . . . Also did you ever buy new foundation? That’ll help with rosacea and breakouts because yours has got to be laden with bacteria (from your fingers to face and back to bottle, yech). I’m ordering the copper cream today and the mineral powder foundation will be my gift as well.
Some things never change.
I’ve just met my mom at Bar les Célestins with a freshly cut head of hair and she’s aghast.
“It’s not great, I know,” I say, pulling up a chair. “They cut hair really bizarrely here—she used a man’s electric razor.”
“Not great?” she says, getting up to see the back of it. “Mia, she totally botched your hair. Why on earth didn’t you tell her to stop when she pulled out a man’s razor?”
“I figured that’s just how they cut hair here.”
“Of course it’s not, the French are known for their great cuts, and even if it was, should that matter? You should have left.”
“Whatever, it’ll grow out.”
“No kidding it’ll grow out, but what are you going to do until then?” she asks, brow furrowed with genuine concern.
“Mom, why do you care so much? It’s my head and the haircut was your idea!”
I was sixteen when I first realized my mom was more concerned about my appearance than I was. I had broken my nose, and the next day I was called out of the classroom and told to go to the director’s office. Nervous (when you’re in a boot-camp school, it’s not quite the same as the high school principal calling you in), I walked in the room and heard my mom’s voice on the other end of his phone yelling, “Her nose is in the middle of her fucking face.” As if he didn’t know.
Sometimes it’s nice that your mom cares about details that no one else would, like what you ordered to eat on a date or what errands you have to run today. But that same eye for detail is also why I’ll be talking to my mom and realize she hasn’t heard a word because she’s studying my face to see if the foundation I’m using is a good match for my skin tone.
Last week I snapped at her after she reminded me—for the third time—that I should get my teeth whitened when I’m home because of how much coffee we’ve been drinking here. It seems like there’s always something I need to improve, my nails, my weight, my hair, my clothes. I told her living with her was like being attached at the hip to John Madden. Who’s he? she asked. A football commentator, I replied, who evaluates a player’s each and every move. Emphasis on every.
YEEOOOWW!!”
“Oh, stop being a baby!” Mia barks as she tries to grab a half-attached wax strip from my upper lip.
I slap her hand. “Get away from me!”
With the weak dollar, Jolen Creme Bleach here is twenty-five dollars. Hence, I let my daughter talk me into waxing. She tries to grab it again but I duck and turn.
“No! I’ll melt it off or something! You lied, it hurts like hell! You just want revenge for the haircut!”
She suddenly starts yelling, which makes me turn back to see what that’s all about and—RRRRIIPPP! A sneak attack!
“Owwww!! You little bitch!”
Both our jaws fall and our eyes pop. We burst out laughing hysterically. I start crying at the same time because my upper lip is on fire. “That was so not nice, Mia . . .” blubber blubber waaah waaah.
“My God, what a baby! Nobody bleaches, Mother. A blond mustache is still a mustache. You’ll get used to it.”
“No, I won’t!”
“Oh, please, it’s a teeny ping and it’s over. You should get a Brazilian, then you can complain.”
“Oh, of course! The moment I get home! I can’t wait for Ludmilla to rip my pudenda and then slap it!”
My girlfriend Chris and I first learned about Brazilians when we went out with our daughters for sushi and sake one night. If the girls hadn’t corroborated each other, we’d never have believed that women let a complete stranger first rip the hair off their labia and then slap it to ease the pain. Then they make them flip over on their side and stick a leg in the air so they can rip the hair from their hind ends, all the hair, even around the. Chris and I were laughing so hard we practically slid out of our chairs. The sake didn’t help.
Whatever happened to a bikini-line wax or a shave and trim? I personally was never a fan of hairy armpits or the Jane-of-the-jungle look in the nether parts, but come on.
How is it that one of the things we most feared when we were young—being seen as unattractive—causes our daughters more trouble now, instead of less? We are the first female generation with media influence, our own money, political clout. Shouldn’t we have made it better for them? Instead, the trauma, trouble, and time women expend in the name of feminine allure has grown exponentially.
Girls wear more makeup and sexier clothes and do more to their head and body hair in junior high than most of us ever did in our twenties. And as mothers we’ve allowed it. We’ve modeled it. We’ve sold them down the river—we’ve actually bought them down the river, because we often finance it, even as we lament it.
Where’s the Whole Foods mentality for our girls? We support organizations and have whole branches of the government to keep our land and water clean. We censor what they dump in the lakes but not our kids’ minds, and our girls are paying. And we do have the power. Corporations and the media are loath to offend mothers, who do most of the buying in the country.
Then again, why would we insist on something for our daughters that we accept for ourselves? Most of us have bought into the same mind-set. We’ve always seen ourselves as an ongoing self-improvement project, first for vanity, then to keep our jobs. Being seen as older isn’t just a social hazard, it’s professionally dangerous.
What difference will all the Take Your Daughter to Work days, getting more women elected, and achieving professional equality, make if we teach and model “not enough” in the most basic, gut-level way? How do we expand the definition of beauty for our daughters, and sons, instead of narrowing it?
Given my mom’s shock at Brazilians, I’m glad I never told her about pole-dancing. Not that I did it for any length of time; it took me all of twenty seconds to clamber up a few feet, cling desperately, and—because a pole is a slick, cylindrical object and I am not a tree frog—drop like a rock.
I’d been curious about pole-dancing for a while and when I saw it listed on the classes offered at my gym, I thought, Why not? Home stripper poles had been featured on Oprah; Teri Hatcher and Kate Hudson touted pole-dancing’s firming benefits. Maybe it’d put an extra bounce in my step, make me turn a paler shade of green when passing one of Manhattan’s many gorgeous models.
So, after a day of negotiating with Elle editors, NPR producers, and other people that reassured me my student loans hadn’t gone to waste, I found myself flanked by a mélange of sweating and panting professionals, performers, students, and stay-at-home moms. As it turns out, the pole itself is only part of what’s included in a pole-dancing class; the rest of it involves lots of hip-thrusting, hair-tossing, crawling on your hands and knees while making bedroom eyes at the mirror, and, as I was learning, floor-humping. When the perky instructor ordered us to lie on our backs, go spread-eagle, then flip to our stomachs and hump the floor, some went at it with reckless abandon, others mimicked the instructor in earnest, and the rest, like me, flip-flopped like fish gasping for air on a slippery deck.
Two thoughts, meanwhile, were running through my head. One, my mother (who only ever let me play with Doctor Barbie) would die if she ever saw me like this. And two, am I seriously humping one of the germiest surfaces in Manhattan? A surface, by the way, that I pay ninety-five dollars a month to have the privilege of humping.
But I took the class for me! To unleash my inner beast, as the course description promised, because being sexy feels fun and powerful! Leaving the class, however, I felt anything but, and as I walked home I wondered how I actually came to think that crawl
ing on my hands and knees would boost my confidence.
I may have fared better in the era of salons, when a woman with the quickest wit drove men wild, and less was considered more. Or rewind several hundred years earlier, to the days of courtly love, of troubadours and ardently delivered poems and window serenades.
Actually, courting rituals like that originated close to where my mom and I are staying in France, and were pioneered by a mother and daughter. Courtly love was already a growing tradition in Western Europe, but it was under Eleanor of Aquitaine, the powerful twelfth-century French queen, that the movement became famous. Eleanor set up her court at Poitiers and, because courts hadn’t previously existed in that region of France, her younger courtiers were as unruly as college freshmen. Running a kingdom being time-consuming and all, Eleanor called in her daughter, Marie de Champagne, for help.
Peer pressure has always been an effective means of coercion and, recognizing this, the savvy Marie changed the culture to one where it was no longer cool for young men to be bragging and boorish, and young women to be swooning and promiscuous. Rather, the most enviable women were the ones with mannered, chivalrous, and respectful men pining after them.
Marie accomplished this by hiring a prominent cleric to write a rule book outlining new codes of behavior concerning love. The book was modeled on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Loving), but while Ovid told men how to dress, approach, converse with, and toy with women, Marie’s book placed women squarely in control, advising them of the rules they should set forth for suitors and exactly how and when to judge them.
This came none too soon; during Eleanor and Marie’s lifetimes, Europe changed from a feudal society to a medieval one. While feudal Europe was undoubtedly patriarchal, women there still had legal rights; once the Church came to power in the late twelfth century, we lost the right to own property, and ourselves became the legal property of fathers or husbands.
Have Mother, Will Travel Page 25
