by Laura June
Like my mother with her own mother, I never wanted anything other than approval. And like my mother, I seemed suddenly, somehow, incapable of getting it. It’s incredibly destabilizing to discover that what has given you confidence for the first time in your new, adult body is also causing your mother pain. But instead of trying to change myself to please her, as she did with her own mother, I went in the opposite direction and decided to please only myself. I decided, then and there, that no one would ever make me feel bad about myself physically.
I look at the photos of myself from then, and I sort of see why she was unhappy. I was a thin girl in what were widely considered to be men’s clothes then, no makeup, short hair. No jewelry. I was her only daughter, and she’d shown me, by example her whole life, what it meant to be a woman who cared for herself. I was mostly clean, but I stopped shaving my legs and I stopped worrying. For me, it was freedom. For her, it was disappointment. And she didn’t hide it well. “I already have three sons,” she snapped at me once when she found that I’d replaced all my underwear with men’s briefs.
The freedom to not give a shit about what other people think of your looks is just that: it was liberating on a level not previously experienced by me, teen Laura. Some days I felt like running through the halls or up the hill behind the school to where my old elementary school was. If I ran long enough, I would eventually hit the path that carried me into my neighborhood and home. I felt almost like a kid again.
I sometimes wish that my mother could have learned from me, a little of my ability to not give a shit with regards to her own mother. I know it doesn’t work that way: she created in me that ability, but still, she could have used some of it herself. She could have benefited greatly from the ability to say to her mother, “Yes, this is what I’m wearing. Do you have a problem with that?” as I said to her. As I grew up, I occasionally felt the urge to defend my mother against her own mother.
But I often wonder now why it was that my mother, an adult, seemed so defenseless against her own mother, when I was perfectly capable as a teenager of standing up to mine.
Mothers and daughters, even ones not dealing with divorce and alcoholism, always have a falling-out point. I know this because every friend I had was fighting with her own mother at the exact same time as I was. There was a lot of sighing and eye rolling. My father didn’t seem to know what to do with the new me, the one who wasn’t comforted by ice cream or a shopping trip or a hug. He backed off, as I’m sure many fathers of teenage girls before him had. But my mother thought—rightfully, I’m sure—that she understood what I was going through.
She didn’t. I soon realized that my mother had never felt what I felt. She never rebelled, and if she ever felt reason to, she didn’t admit it to me. She was a “popular” and beautiful, blond-haired girl in high school. I was uninterested in being popular.
My mother, who I thought of as progressive and smart, was not pleased at this prospect of the new me. She was even more sheltered than I was there in the suburbs. She’d never lived on her own, she’d never been out in the world or lived in a big city. I knew that I was disappointing her, but it also seemed like a superficial argument. It seemed like the fight about my clothes was a battle we were having because we couldn’t fight about what was actually wrong in our relationship. We were talking around the real problem: she was an alcoholic. And once my father had moved out, that fact was front and center. She drank more, more often, and more openly. My brothers stopped going to school some days. I was often late or absent myself, preferring to leave school early to smoke cigarettes. I took to simply walking out of the high school whenever I damn well pleased.
This led to countless long Saturday detentions, where I was tasked with watering plants or shelving books. One Saturday that I remember was the day after Richard Nixon died. Emily and I were assigned to create a memorial for the ex-president in the display case outside the library. “Farewell, Dick,” the display case read in those tacked-up paper cutout letters schools always have, surviving long enough into Monday for students to see it, resulting in yet another detention.
My mom seemed only somewhat aware of my dire circumstances. Mostly, I kept things to myself and still managed to have a pretty good time. I wasn’t actually failing out of school, just floating along, doing the least amount of work possible.
What my mom did care about openly was my appearance. It stood in for so much in our relationship at that time. She thought the fact that I didn’t care meant something, that it was a commentary on or a reaction against her.
At the time, I thought that what I was wearing had nothing to do with her, but now, I’m not so sure she wasn’t right after all. Now, I wonder if I wasn’t making a statement to hurt her.
When I found out that I was in fact going to have a girl, I simply wanted for my daughter to be herself. Two thousand fourteen was hundreds, thousands of miles away from the mid-1990s. Zelda wouldn’t have to argue about if she could have short hair as she grew up, because it’s not as big of a deal; there are more women with short hair now than there were then.
The world into which Zelda would be born was a lot different, as worlds often are about dressing trends. Though I was sure she would eventually find something to irritate her aging mother with, I dedicated myself to the concept that I would never, ever make her feel bad about her appearance. Though my mother never made me feel shame about my body the way her own mother had about weight or diet, she had left me with a bad taste in my mouth about all manners of things dress-related, so much so that, to this day, when I step into a pair of shoes with heels and a dress, I feel the anger of resentment bubbling up inside me. Even when I like the way that I look in traditionally female clothing, I am angry and uncomfortable.
What I guess I didn’t consider was that once I did find out I was having a girl, I might want to dress her like one. I don’t so much mean “buy pink,” because I’m a lover of all colors, even the ones that are stereotypically gendered. I don’t hold anything against pink.
No, I mean that I was surprised to find, almost immediately, that I wanted to buy my unborn fetus dresses. Frilly ones. Patent leather shoes. White tights with lace on the butt. Just like my mother had for me. I didn’t know if Zelda would be my only child, but I’d waited a long time for her, and I was overjoyed to be having a girl. I didn’t expect, though, to want to buy her dresses.
But I did. I wanted to do this very badly, and I felt almost ashamed to acknowledge it, after my years of talking about the patriarchy’s rules for dress. I’d raged against this machine so hard. What did it mean to so suddenly want to be inside that machine?
I keep a lot of things to myself. Plenty of people who have known me for years never heard me utter the word “alcoholic” when talking about my mother. But I was not and really never have been shy when it comes to the topic of dress: in this one area, I admit, I have slandered my mother’s good name for full effect, trying to drum up sympathy wherever I could.
She scarred me for sure, though I admit freely that the scars from arguing over whether I should wear men’s briefs or shave my legs were pretty superficial. I see now that, to some extent, my years of telling and retelling, shaping the narrative of the Big Fights my mother and I had over clothes, was a comedy.
I think I did it because it was a story that could have come from any mother-daughter relationship. It was one of the very few falling-outs I ever had with her that was, well, normal. It was a very typical “mom story,” and I didn’t have very many of those.
Thinking of it this way makes me sad even now. Knowing that I grasped every day for mundane stories to tell about my mother so that I would have things in common with the armies of disaffected daughters out there is very sad. I didn’t want to tell people that my mother sometimes berated me incoherently in the dark as I just tried to go to sleep, or that later, when I was nearly an adult but still living with her, she once went out “for a walk, to buy stamp
s” and then didn’t come home for two days. I didn’t want to tell people about my mother taking me for an abortion. I didn’t want to tell them about her sickness.
Because even though there are millions of people just like me out there, with mothers who love them despite their addictions, or people who have it far worse, what I found myself wanting more than anything when I thought of my mother was simply to have things be “normal.” For a person who has always, always prided herself on her lack of normalcy as I have, this is not an easy thing to admit.
So I complained unendingly about my mother’s old-school ways of thinking about people’s looks. I rolled my eyes at her as the years wore on, even though I came closer to understanding her disappointment as I thought about having my own child. I softened my attitude toward her as I sat on my growing, pregnant ass staring at a computer screen, thinking about buying my daughter dresses from Nordstrom.
For I could see already that I wanted to shower her with the best that I could afford and offer. Not just materially but as a blanket policy.
And once she was born, indeed, I found true pleasure in dressing her. In the alternate reality in which I now lived, I cared about clothing and planned outfits a day in advance. Special occasions and holidays always demanded special care. I washed her hair—of which there was perilously little to start—with special shampoo and brushed it gently. I thought about piercing her ears, though I never did. Like every other parent, I filed her tiny, translucent fingernails.
I knew then and know now that I was not special in any of this. But though I always expected to love my daughter, I did not expect to feel so invested in her physical form. Because I mentally shrugged when I looked at myself in the mirror, I very much expected to feel the same about her corporal body.
“I don’t care if she’s ugly or not,” I said aloud to friends when I was pregnant, and I meant it. Of course I meant it: whether we are “beautiful” or not doesn’t matter at all; it never mattered to me.
But I was presented with her physical beauty from the first minute. She was perfect. Her skin was smooth and clear; her eyes were full of joy and fringed by impossibly long eyelashes; her nose was the best-shaped nose I’d ever seen. Everything about her was beautiful.
I’m sure every parent marvels this way; it’s our right to do so. But seeing and loving my daughter’s actual body was my first experience of really caring about something so physical that I wanted to groom and shop for it. I wanted, in short, what my mother had almost certainly wanted for me.
I abandoned my caution. She was too young to decide what she wanted to wear, so I was in charge. Eventually (sooner than I thought, actually), she’d have ideas of her own that I would respect, but until she did, I would not feel guilty about what I dressed her in.
I spent a lot of Zelda’s early life shopping on my computer or my phone and in stores. Though I did often favor what I would call “genderless” clothing—onesies and jumpsuits and pants that any baby could wear—I also found that yeah, I definitely liked dressing her in jumpers and dresses and “girly” clothing.
I found that practical concerns often trumped aesthetic ones, so Zelda wore many kimono and legging combos. She wore a lot of leisure wear. A lot of one-piece ensembles. I found myself becoming surer every day among the racks of clothing in stores, and, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed shopping. Almost.
I was occasionally weighed down with the memory of shopping with my own mother. Can any activity be more boring to a child than clothes shopping? Only the countless hours I spent sitting silently in church and catechism class could beat out the hours spent shopping, sitting in a cart or beside a stroller bearing my brother or, worst of all, walking. Nothing, nothing could make me forget the sensation of burning eyes from the fluorescent lights of shopping mall department stores, my own personal Vegas-style hell where there are no windows and there are no clocks. I wandered, with a dry mouth, noiselessly through the racks, not allowed to explore very far, nor allowed to touch anything, nor allowed to even speak too loudly.
During these early shopping trips with Zelda, who was more often than not strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, blissfully unaware of her dire shopping circumstances, I was sometimes overwhelmed with my sense that what I was now enjoying had dogged me for most of my life. It’s good to relearn sometimes. Sometimes we can change.
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I don’t know what Zelda will end up looking like. When I return to the photos of her from six months or a year and a half ago, there is deep recognition and familiarity there, even though she has changed so much. I recognize in the short videos of her baby mumblings the sound that ultimately became her current speaking voice, and I see in her past faces the face she now has, more formed and solid, more human than to start.
I stand by my long-held belief that looks aren’t very important. That love and attraction and affection are based on other things. My daughter’s personality is far and away the best thing about her. The way she reaches up out of her crib at night while she lays on her back, drinking her milk, her wide eyes dozing off, to touch my hand. I know her mannerisms and emotions and tics better than I really ever thought I would know anyone. It’s an incredible joy to know her and an incredible journey to watch her become herself.
In this way, I have come to respect and sympathize more with my mother, though I still believe she chose the wrong battle. Why it mattered to her wasn’t in her control: she was simply going on what her own mother had taught her. That self-respect could be found in the way one clothed their body is not in fact untrue. It’s just that it’s also possible to have self-respect and not care about clothes or how you look. I know; I’m living proof! I’m almost forty and I still don’t give a shit how I look beyond being clean and sort of well-groomed. I don’t care if my socks match or if my pants are torn. I don’t really know my dress size.
One Saturday morning when I was in high school, probably hungover, I was eating a giant plate of fried eggs and toast with butter, shoveling the food in like I’d been starved for days, though I never missed a meal.
“Someday you’ll regret eating that way,” she said, sounding like a mother straight out of The Group. I hadn’t read The Group yet and didn’t even know who Mary McCarthy was. “I’ve never lived a day in my life not watching what I eat.”
I looked up at her, stunned. What did she mean? Had she been dieting all this time, all my life, and I’d never noticed?
Kids are fucking myopic, and my mother kept her secrets close. If she was dieting all the time, she never told anyone that I know of. She didn’t keep a notebook or something, the way that I would after Zelda was born, trying to lose ten pounds for the better part of a year.
“What do you mean?” I asked, mentally trying to go back in time over all the things I’d ever seen her eat. Did my mother eat? Of course.
I’d seen her sit on the couch eating sleeves of Saltines. I knew that she liked BLTs and didn’t really like cheese. She liked cottage cheese, black tea, canned tuna fish, dry toast, hard-boiled eggs, and grapefruits. She liked, I realize now, what I can only call “’80s diet food for women.” Loved it. Or did she? Did she simply avoid eating most things because she didn’t want to get fat? Did people live that way?
“You’ll regret eating like that because you’re not teaching yourself to moderate. You won’t always have your father’s metabolism.”
That turned the conversation. I didn’t want to get into some weird, upsetting conversation that circled into “your father” territory with her.
But I thought of this conversation a lot after Zelda was born. It was, if I recall, the only direct conversation the two of us ever had about dieting, but, more important, I snapped out of my oblivion.
It wasn’t just the teenage girls I knew who ate candy and spit it out, not wanting to ingest the calories: it was all women. If my own mother had been watching what she a
te for her entire life, what was I supposed to be doing?
My teenage self rejected her concern. But after Zelda was born, I realized that my mother had four kids and remained very thin. I got sort of fat from one baby. What would four do to my body? And as someone who cared deeply about how she was seen, how did she process that?
I didn’t worry too much or rush to lose the weight, although I did briefly consider the completely demoralizing prospect of buying a food scale. I was still fairly stubbornly confident, even if my body seemed so changed. But I do feel differently about some of those conversations I had with my mother. I hope to learn from them, to not repeat them with my own daughter. But, in the past few years of learning what it’s like to actually care and be responsible for another person’s body entirely, I understand completely how the illusion of ownership can arise.
I don’t kid myself that I own Zelda. But I want to teach her to truly own herself.
CHAPTER 9
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The true start of my teenager-dom was in the summer of 1992, when Emily, Vanessa, Ellen, and I got dropped off at an outdoor amphitheater twenty miles from home that was that day hosting Lollapalooza. It was the first time I remember really being allowed to go somewhere alone for basically an entire day with my friends. Ellen’s father drove us the forty-five minutes to the venue, dropped us off, and said, “I’ll see you back here at eleven thirty tonight, get out.” It was 11:00 in the morning. Twelve-plus hours alone with my friends in a giant crowd was unimaginable freedom.
We were there to see a dizzying array of bands that included the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Ice-T, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and Ministry. It was a real ’90s cornucopia. I was there primarily to see Ministry. This was the beginning of the Goth Laura phase and only a few months before that phase dipped into the androgynous-bad-dresser-fighting-with-her-mom phase. The first band that played that day was a British band called Lush. Lush was led by two women, one of whom had flame-red hair. I’d never heard of them before, and I’d never heard music like that in my life. I fell in love instantly, and that day, mostly because of that band, changed my life.
