Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  At thirteen I went to work on my mother, convincing her that being forced to stay in school sucking up a conventional education would be a waste of my valuable, artsy-oriented time. I was itching to enter the realm of adulthood, to be autonomous, to embark on adventures. I didn’t know it then, but my desire to grow up fast was about the fact that in many ways I’d already been forced to. It was a reaction to the pain of powerlessness, to having endured a childhood entrapped by the vicissitudes of adult madness, but if I imagined independence as freedom from all that, it only proved to usher in another set of traps.

  So it was that I left school one day, not yet fourteen, simple as that. I showed up at administration with a note saying we were moving to Perth (a bald-faced lie). My mother was busy working her office job, so I took an old English man called Ernest along for company and effect (he posed as my uncle). He lived in the flat below Heidi’s, and afterwards we went back to his place, where I bummed his smokes, drank his beer and passed time playing cards, as Heidi and I frequently did. The condition my mother had set for my leaving was that I was to do a secretarial course at a private college in the city, with fees paid for by my hard-working grandparents. I was then very much like many of my students are now: studying at the behest of family, undisciplined, unready, uncommitted and oblivious to the sacrifices being made by those who loved me. I befriended a girl a few years older and we soon developed a daily ritual of meeting up at a city cafe near the college for a brunch of lemon sugar pancakes before spending the rest of the day skiving at the Hilton Hotel rooftop pool or window shopping. During the evenings and on weekends, I spent time with my new friend’s circle: sexually active teenage girls, and young men with acne who drove their panel vans lightning fast. Those young men were products of their gender conditioning and generation, but they were good guys and I remember them fondly. I don’t recall being sexually pressured and I was treated with a baseline of respect. I was still a virgin, but when I took one of them as my boyfriend, we passed many evenings heavy petting in my bedroom.

  I was underage, but I often spent Saturday nights at Chequers disco, run by Chinese businessmen with underworld connections and rumoured links to the American Mafia. I would dress up in stilettos and jeans so tight I had to lie down on the bed, breathe in and have my mother pull the zip up with the end of a coat hanger hooked through it. The men there were older, leerier, less respectful than my acned buddies, but despite moments of unpleasantness, many reasonably happy hours were passed dancing and drinking before catching a cab home in the small hours. I remember my father’s disconcertion when, years later, I told him my mother had allowed me to go out until all hours at this age; while I shared his incredulity, I wanted to ask why he had so little idea about the life I was leading at the time and whether he ever took pause to reflect on the dilemmas faced by a traumatised single mother in raising a headstrong, manipulative and traumatised teen.

  After many months at business college I had failed to learn shorthand and Dictaphone, but I did manage to learn touch-typing in the occasional class I bothered to attend, which now serves me well. I drifted from that circle of friends and took up art classes run by an eccentric blowhard in the underground bowels of Haymarket. This experiment was also paid for by my grandparents. Though I had a firm conviction regarding my artistic destiny, I wasn’t yet sure what kind of artist I would be. The painting classes were an attempt to explore whether I had any talent in the area of visual arts. I didn’t, unmoved by the mixing of paints and the highlighting of trees on stock-standard landscapes. The most exciting thing to happen during my time there was the announcement of an art tour of Italy, Greece and Egypt, which I became instantly obsessed with. I campaigned and nagged my family to fund my place on the tour. My first overseas trip followed and I visited world-famous artistic sites with a small group of sundry Australians, the youngest a decade older than me at twenty-four. In Egypt, I was told to cover up in certain buildings and on the streets. Dressed in my western teen girl attire, I was ogled and taken for a whore. By then, I was used to being noticed by men, but I wasn’t used to the unbridled overtness of the smutty stares or the cultural assumptions that amplified the objectification.

  After returning from my European sojourn I lost all interest in art classes. I spent days wandering around the streets of Glebe, visualising my possible futures and pondering my seeming stuckness. I don’t recall whose idea it was, but before long I had enrolled in a beautician course at Madame Korner’s in Potts Point. Yet again, my grandparents footed the bill. For months, I dutifully donned the crisp white uniform and practised my facial massage technique, eyelash tinting and make-up application on the postmenopausal ladies who came for cut-price student treatments. I was learning the tricks of the trade.

  I come from a family of beautiful women.

  This short, simple statement raises immediate questions: why am I so sure? How to define this ‘beauty’ I lay claim to regarding my womenfolk? And most importantly, how does it relate to my exploration of patriarchy and trauma?

  I am certain the women in my family are beautiful because I look at photographs of them in their youth and see that they embodied the cultural ideals of beauty in their time: white, evenly featured, clear-skinned, slim to curvaceous, conscious of their sex appeal, stylish. I also observed others’ responses to them over decades. I witnessed the dedicated, daily feminine labour of my mother and my grandmother. My aunts have been celebrated for their beauty and my cousins admired for theirs. And I have been an apprentice to the great project and burden of appearing beautiful.

  Definitions of beauty are often debatable and socially specific, but if declarations of appreciation are proof of beauty, the physical appeal of the women in my family is well established. My mother was born during the Great Depression in 1934, the only child of a buxom and statuesque knock-out named Gladys.

  Glady was a well-put-together working-class woman blessed with a gorgeous face and an hourglass figure. Family members who recall her younger years tell tales of the desperate measures to which men were driven to win her favour before she finally chose a husband from among them. She never did say why she accepted George, a short, unremarkable Dunlop factory worker, over the advances of a suave and wealthy Italian named Sammy (whom she spoke of for the rest of her life), but I imagine Sammy may have had a wife stashed away somewhere and that my grandmother did not see herself as mistress material. In addition to her lucky genes, Glady was a talented dressmaker with a flair for fashion. I fancy that had she been born in my generation, and been given the opportunities I had, she might have become a fashion designer. As a young woman Glady went from brunette to redhead before morphing into a blonde, her trademark incarnation in which she became positively Monroesque. Photographs and family lore testify to the fact that Glady – even during the Second World War, when she worked factory jobs, and items like stockings were a rare luxury – always dressed up and looked a million dollars. Despite her famous flirtatiousness Glady was ‘frigid’, at least according to my mother, and I do recall her freely admitting to not enjoying sex. The union of Glady and George was not the happiest of marriages, though he was not a violent man nor a drinker, and it ended in divorce well before I was born. Glady took comfort in her cherished, sickly daughter, Dawn, with whom she was, let us say, overly concerned. She would doll her young child up like little Shirley Temple and the two of them made a darling pair.

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  When my mother spoke of her youth, she described a childhood and adolescence outshone by Glady’s awe-inspiring voltage. She had spent her childhood in bed reading books and watching films from Hollywood’s Golden Age, star struck by the glamour of her favourite actors. It can’t have escaped her notice that her mother was both beautiful and alluring enough to have been one of them. My mother described herself as a plain child and an ‘almost pretty’ teenager. This statement is supported by her wedding photos, taken when my mother was twenty; it is
a middle-aged yet luminous Glady who seduces the camera. But in an incredible evolution that my father, long divorced from my mother, still recalls with wonder, a new Dawn emerged, quite organically, in her late twenties. Around the time I was born, the pudgy ‘almost pretty’ face of the woman he married metamorphosed into a visage of delicate loveliness. My father, who was working as a photographer at the time, took a series of photos of my mother and me in the garden in the period immediately following her transformation.

  I am a chubby toddler and her slender arms hold me firmly. I am touching her, kissing her, and gazing at her with what looks like overwhelming fascination and admiration, as if I understood, even then, the power of feminine beauty. My mother’s eyes are downcast. She is hard to read. There is something in the expression on her face I have returned to again and again.

  I’ve long considered that my mother approached the classic narcissist, and that much I could identify in these shots. Freud said that the combination of feminine beauty and narcissism was irresistible to men who, though drawn to such women, would find themselves shut out by a cone of self-obsession and therefore doomed to neglect or rejection. I saw in these images that my mother was consumed with herself and could not, in some critical way, register me. Beyond this painful realisation I sensed something else, some elusive quality I could never quite name. One day, when I was in my thirties, I had an epiphany. It was not merely my mother’s narcissism my father had captured in his lens; the photos depict an insecure narcissism, the state of one who sees and is absorbed by a pleasing reflection and yet still doubts it.

  Dawn spent much of her early life playing second fiddle to my grandmother’s charms, so it makes sense that in these photos, taken shortly after her flowering, she is wrestling with a newfound self-image. Her emergent beauty must have been at odds with a deep sense of physical inadequacy. As a young child I was not consciously aware of that sense of inadequacy. I couldn’t perceive that it gnawed at her and drove her. I was aware only that I had a pretty mother, a mother of whom others approved, a mother whose veneer of confidence and sophistication was effective and convincing, a mother whose rituals of beauty mesmerised me as I watched her on so many mornings dressing and applying her make-up at her big brown dressing table, her sense of self and mood altering, intangibly, as she did so.

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  I stand before the mirror of my bathroom, the unforgiving morning light revealing a face alive for fifty-plus years, no longer young. I see the eyes sinking deeper, looking more like the eyes of my mother’s mother as she aged. I see the dark circles and the gravity-laced sagging of the jowl. A spike of fear pierces my mood as I remember the St Bernard–like jawline of my once-handsome paternal grandmother in her last decades, glimpsed, with a stab of portending apprehension, in my father a few years back when he impulsively shaved off his beard (he instantly regretted it and promptly grew the beard back). I think back to my vicious self-assessments of the past and to the relentless comparisons to other women and I try to breathe through the fear, to relax it, to bring gentleness to this moment in which I encounter myself falling short of the myriad youthful ideals of beauty feverishly produced and promoted by a constellation of industries and media, surrounding us like an expanding universe fuelled by the dark energy of our own self-loathing.

  There’s a freedom in growing older and caring less about beauty. As a young woman you hear a lot about how hard it is to ‘lose your looks’. No one tells you how liberating it can be to age. And no one tells you how women are, in the words of Michelle Smith, ‘set up to fail’, because very few of us relinquish caring altogether. Smith, a research fellow at Deakin University, published an article in The Conversation in July 2017 titled ‘Double standards and derision – tracing our attitudes to older women and beauty’, in which she discussed older women as damned if they do and damned if they don’t, caught between a trying-too-hard rock and a not-trying-hard-enough place, walking a fine line between ‘looking acceptably young and unsettlingly unnatural’. Mature women face increased ‘policing of their clothing and cosmetic choices’: we are harshly judged – and often disadvantaged socially and professionally – for not ageing well, yet we are also ‘imagined foolish and vain’ if we seek to improve our appearance. I don’t claim to have risen above the attachments and investments that drove my mother and grandmother, and if I enjoy a greater sense of release from them as a result of several decades attending to my traumatic symptomology, I still tread that fine line of which Smith speaks as I make my way through my days. I notice it most when the stakes are high or in times of stress, when my defences are down and the old spooks come out to play. The hard-won sense of self that now cores me weakens and distorts, slides back into a preoccupation with how others see me and what others think of me, shakes with jelly-like fear at my centre, giving way to critical superego-speak and paranoid thoughts.

  Russell Meares offers an insight into the way trauma affects self-image, describing distorted perceptions of appearance as informed by affect bound to trauma: ‘Trauma, whatever its kind, has the effect of impacting upon the psychic system like a loud noise.’ Elaborating, he goes on to say that when a trauma occurs the ‘sense of inner life is knocked out’, by which he means trauma involves a temporary obliteration of the inner life, the identification of ‘me-ness’ at the centre of the sense of self. ‘The feeling of “me” shrinks as a function of the intensity of trauma,’ and since it is impossible to separate selfhood from the body the shrinkage of me-ness manifests as altered perceptions of the body. Generally speaking, these deformed perceptions will have a negative cast; the self will be experienced as insubstantial or flawed.

  I’ve thought about beauty a great deal, and I’ve thought about trauma a great deal, and it seems obvious that the business of beauty – our observations, convictions, vulnerabilities to manipulations, and emotional contagions – can manifest as an expression of trauma. There are, in other words, profound connections to be made between the more troubled aspects of our preoccupation with beauty and the web of patriarchal traumata.

  I hope you don’t think me a wowser, a body-negative prude bent on neutralising beauty and its syndicate with power and sex. It’s not that being beautiful, enjoying beauty or participating in beautifying activities is inherently wrong or problematic. It’s a law of nature that youth is, generally speaking, more pleasing to behold than age in terms of physical appearance, and that beauty, at any age, is compelling: it makes you want to look. It’s human nature to respond with delight and admiration. But modern-day beauty involves sufferings upon sufferings, lethal methodologies and outright tragedy. And these warrant deeper considerations than the stock-standard knee-jerk criticisms of the media and cosmetic surgery, which are routinely tagged as the ‘cause’ of women’s obsession with beauty and associated complications, such as epidemic eating disorders.

  Western beauty customs and procedures are often criticised as a sign of societal ill-health, but of course many non-western and pre-modern cultures have practised no less invasive or extreme beautification rituals. Numerous cultures, from China, where women bound their feet over many generations, to the Maasai tribes of Kenya to the ancient tribes of the Amazon have subscribed to radical bodily modifications. Though some have ritual and ceremonial significance, many are motivated purely by a desire to conform to that society’s notions of beauty. In Sudan, Dinka children are facially scarred by the local sorcerer and the marks are considered signs of identity and beauty. Kayan women in the north of Thailand stretch their necks with brass coils. In Mayan cultures, teeth that were sharpened to a point, sometimes with designs etched into them, signified a citizen of high class, and historically lip plates (worn to stretch out the lips) have been used in various locations, including Sudan, Ethiopia and Ecuador. It is thought a handful of social groups in Africa and Amazonia still use them. What, then, do we make of the Kayan women? Do we judge them for their ‘vanity’
in desiring a long neck? Do we assume Africans wearing lip plates suffer from crippling ‘low self-esteem’?

  How do cultured assumptions stack up here in the west among those who spend considerable time pondering and researching body modification and cosmetic surgery? ‘I generally try to steer clear of connecting cosmetic surgery to psychological trauma,’ says Dr Meredith Jones, a reader in gender and media studies at Brunel University and author of Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery. Jones sees this trauma-as-motivation link to cosmetic surgery as a party line among psychologists, but tells me it ‘doesn’t bear up in the interviews with real people’.

  Even where associations are made between body modification and trauma, it’s not always negative. Sociology scholar Dave Paul Strohecker notes that ‘[m]uch has been written about body modification as a form of self-empowerment for women’ before citing reports that the three waves of modernist feminism have been associated with an increase in women engaging in tattooing. Such research suggests that ‘body modification serves as a means of stress management for the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the subordinated’. Strohecker draws striking correlations between body modification and trauma in discussing the work of Victoria Pitt, who reported tattooing as a coping mechanism related to ‘various forms of oppression (gender, sexuality, race, class, etc.)’, and whose research with women with histories of sexual abuse concluded the ‘tattooing ritual helped them to overcome these traumatic experiences and locate their bodies once again’. Modification is not all or nothing; rather, we all modify to some degree. It’s just a question of how far we go, to what ends and with what motivations. And after all, questions of ethical production aside, is there really a substantive difference between having one’s brows shaped or one’s hair cut and coloured at a salon, which many women do without thinking twice, and having a facial peel, a laser treatment or collagen injections?