Posing for Picture Day in Spring

The elementary school photographer told the seven-year-old boy with the spiky hair to prop a short leg on that fake rock . . . and let it swing. Let it catch an early Spring breeze. Having a little penis and a set of promising testicles is something (indeed) to be proud of! 

Well, no one said anything about the little boy’s little penis and testies; it was, however, subtly implied.

My daughter was next in line.

That morning, she had tried so hard to make herself look pretty for Picture Day – piggy tails, hair clips with neon streaks of fake hair, her new sapphire earrings sparkling, a touch of glittery chapstick. She is a bit artsy-fartsy – a fan of Judy Moody – and she likes playing in front of the mirror and trying on quirky things as much as she likes coloring pictures and scotch-taping them all over my living room walls. That morning, she sneaked into my make-up, just before leaving, and her daddy worked himself into a tizzy trying and trying to wash off – in two minutes – what was successfully marketed as 100% waterproof mascara. He would tell me later (because I had already left for work) that she got on the school bus “lookin’ like a little Ozzy.” 

When my daughter stepped in front of that fake Spring backdrop to be photographed, she (most likely) flipped back a crooked pony tail. I can see her doing it because I’ve seen her do it, just as she has seen other girls – including her 17 year old sister – do it a thousand times. Then (she told me) she threw a leg up on that fake rock because she wanted to look “tough” like the boy before her did. She turned to the camera with her best smile.

Her legs are long – as she is one of the tallest in her class – and she’s a fast runner. Her shins and knee caps are all bruised up because she’s never afraid of falling. She was the only girl in the first grade to submit a project to the school's Science Fair. Her project was on additive and reflective colors, and it kicked ass. She mixed paints and dissolved Skittles and separated the pigments in Kool-aid and made three shades of Jell-O. And when her project didn’t win, she cried. She still cries about it sometimes. She has a fifth grade reading level. Okay, I'll stop there. I promise I am making a point (although, I must say, all this pointed bragging is the most fun I’ve had in days!).

The photographer (a tubby, bald male? a twenty-something year old girl?) likely chuckled a minute, then told my daughter to close her legs and place her hands delicately on her thigh.

And she growled. She told me she did. And I was proud.

But, of course, there was a long line of kids – kids who had been repeatedly instructed to follow the rules lest they be sent to “The Solutions Room” for interrogation; kids who find that wimpy principal in mid-life crisis quite frightening; and girls (like mine) who hold their heads high every time they are handed a golden ticket signifying that they have been a Good Citizen, abiding and assisting the flow of elementary school life rather than adding to the rowdiness. My daughter was easily – understandably – coerced her into closing her legs. She was told to hold it all in, hide it all away, as prudently as possible, that her something (indeed) need not catch a breeze, for it might make others uncomfortable. But she didn’t like it, and she saw the unfairness in it, and she didn’t understand it. It taught she and I both something.

I hope she remembers always, even as life coerces her subtlety into roles and expectations, that she has the right to growl and the right NOT to like such coercions, the right to step out of the roles because, more often than not, they are simply stifling.

Here’s what worries me: will we always see the subtleties? They are certainly sneaky. They are the subtleties that sneak up in the mornings, still, to assure me, yes, I had best keep my bag of beloved make-up. Those same subtleties are likely what piled up to coerce me into growing more quiet as the years crept up, as my legs became freakishly long, so long that I would tower over all the boys until eighth grade, ashamed; and again when my booby buds showed up, poor tender nubs as foreign as tumors; and again when one of the high school boys called me a slut for wearing short shorts then stuck his tongue out at me like some kind of lizard. Those same subtleties made me cry as the skin on my upper thighs split to show stretch marks, imperfections that labeled me damaged, not so marketable. They were what kept me from looking at myself, fully, from understanding all that I was, from exploring myself. They were what let me think both the ends and means were rooted in simply finding a lover; a Prince Charming need only be any man who would have me.

Those subtleties may be what keeps my daughter from taking giant steps in the future, and instead keeps her in some safe-box with a close eye on everyone around her. They may be what makes her heart pound as she considers raising her hand in class. They may be what makes her doubt love of self and so love of others. They may be what keeps her from running for president or what keeps her from being a revolutionary poet.

Of course, her pictures still turned out lovely. Her straight back. Her wide smile full of new teeth. Her blackened eyelids in Heavy Metal fashion. And yet, the backdrop behind her is slightly tilted like it might fall over, the whole world of Spring – the sparkling lake, the budding trees – fabulously off-kilter.

We Girls, Girls, Girls

I confess: my expectations of girls and women are conflicting. Over the last few weeks, I paused to consider the expectations I was imposing and bitching about, scratching my head about, allowing myself to become depressed over, and – of course – the expectations I was setting myself up for. I have more confessions. Maybe this can be a “Name That Conflict” kind of game, for I am trying to answer for myself how these things fit together (or not). I see potential problems – maybe your experiences are similar? – but, in this world and as a strong woman hoping for a professional career, I’m not sure how to move myself around them. For now, there may be lines to be drawn . . .

 . . . in football?

1.       At the bus stop just outside my apartment, I stood staring up at a pair of billboard-sized, posterized cheerleaders as they hovered above the Sullivan KinderCare, flaunting their cleavage and belly buttons for the Arena Football League, the “SpokaneShock” Games. The text on the board read in big orange letters: “MORE THAN just a game.” And I thought to myself, “Now what the hell does THAT mean? Are they offering something beyond the usual football cheerleading like End Zone pole dancing?” Then a bus appeared with an ad for Busty’s Top Espresso plastered across its broad side. There, larger life, rolled up two more sets of women’s perky knockers in push-up bras, i.e., bikini-clad baristas serving Spokane’s top coffee. I made some snark comment to no one, but then I let the bus wisp me away to the downtown bus Plaza where I always feel overdressed – even a bit floozy – in the mornings in my v-neck blouses (a more womanly attire?) and with my lipstick fresh.

2.     I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, but I went on a mad search for Madonna’s NFL half-time show after the fact. I was a child of the 80’s, and by the early 90’s she was teaching me super-details about sex, and I loved her for it. Her boob cones were fantastic. She has orgasms on the concert stage, I liked to say as though I had actually bore witness. After I watched the entirety of the her half-time show, I smiled for the World Peace thing at the end, but then bitched that the show was surprisingly modest, as if Madonna had somehow digressed. I said it was probably because she was now a mother or maybe because she’s over 50, but I couldn’t talk myself out of being a little pissed.  

 . . . in girl talk?

3.       We have new neighbors – a set of three young girls in the apartment just above us. The three young girls have replaced a set of three young boys who partied every weekend, having turned their bay window into a fully stocked liquor cabinet. When the boys were here, they revved their pick-up truck/tank every morning before daylight. Their partying friends liked to steal our assigned car port. We dealt with the boys but not without griping – once even mentioning the thumping bass to the management. But the girls, since they had moved in, had been so stompy and loud and bass-thumpingly annoying that they might as well have been doing the Dougie on our last nerve. Finally, they piled up in the stairwell one night – a school night – near to midnight, laughing and squealing and calling out to each other between the levels. They were stumbling over each other, having a good ole’ time, keeping every last toddler awake in the building. It takes a lot for me to work up the anger/courage to let someone REALLY know how I feel, but often times I’m good to go once I have convinced myself it’s for a higher purpose. I did it for the sleeping babies – including my own. I let them have it. I marched out into the stairwell and told them there were people and children trying to sleep in the building and then I told them they needed to shut the fuck up – five times. I surprised myself. The cute red head responded with “Calm down, honey,” and I told her to shut the fuck up again. She’s lucky I didn’t break her nose. My partner practically grabbed me by my waist and pulled back in to our safe haven. He was a little shocked . . . and scared. We argued over this a little, but he insisted the boys were far worse than these girls had ever been, and I never once attempted to let THEM know how I REALLY felt. He accused me of taking on some “boys will be boys” level of tolerance that I wasn’t willing to extend to the girls. He was right.

4.       Another true story: a few weeks ago, a drama between two love-strewn high school girls via Facebook resulted in a flash mob of teenagers anxious to view a predicted cat fight at the Spokane Valley Mall (by the Orange Julius, just beyond the dark breezes of the Hot Topic). A boy had broken up with the younger girl to start dating the older girl (“Because what high school freshman doesn’t want to date a sophomore?” I thought and then kicked myself for it). Although much of this is the result of rumor (the result of having a daughter in a local high school and having a keen ear on the bus), it was said the boy was beside his new older girlfriend when older girlfriend pulled out a knife and stabbed the younger old girlfriend in the thigh, nicking her femoral artery. The younger old girlfriend, left a trail of stark blood on the mall floor all the way to the bathrooms, and she might have bled to death if not for the convenient appearance of an EMT and a surgeon who happened to be around, browsing American Eagle and Radio Shack and gnawing on Auntie’s Pretzels (Okay, either an EMT and a surgeon or highly trained mall staff). The older girlfriend and the boy disappeared, presumably to the Centennial Trail as it is across the road from the mall; the trail follows the river and dips under one badass railroad bridge (If I was a teenager of the valley I would so hang out there every full moon). I heard (via high school kid gossip on Bus Route 97) that older girlfriend threw the knife in the river and the two of them tried to skip town. Of course, it had to be a boy, I said to myself. He probably asked older girlfriend to marry him afterward as they were running with dry blood on their shoes, and the girl saw cloud castles and rainbows through her tears. Stupid, stupid girls. It’s just a stupid, stupid boy. But then if I was dumb enough to stab some chic and run, I sleep easy at night knowing I'm lucky enough to have a a lover/partner/husband who would be right there with me, running alongside, ready to truck it to Mexico, telling me when we get there, he'll find us a couple of Strawberry Daiquiris, and he has no qualms with changing his name. And what better lover could one ask for? 

. . .  on buses?   

5.       I’ve been on the bus a lot lately, since my Looney Tunes edition Venture minivan died and since I realized how idiotic it was to keep driving (even after the Venture was replaced) back and forth to work, wasting gas and spewing emissions, when a bus route could get me there for free and with little worry. Last week, I rolled my eyes at a set of loud girls who stood in the aisles of the crowded bus, pushing each other around, laughing like second graders on sugar highs. They flipped around their flat-ironed, dyed hair; they wore tight skinny jeans and thick make-up – extra curly-Q mascara, and their eyebrows were plucked near to oblivion. They took turns punching each other in their respective limbs and giggling and snorting. They stood between impending conversations (as they were occurring across aisles between myself and a colleague) without even noticing. Or maybe they noticed and kept themselves in the same spot regardless. Surely they were having fun. Surely they wanted all eyes on them. And that’s where mine were, although I was far from impressed; rather, I was steaming and my nostrils were flaring.  Because I didn’t want to scare my colleague as I had scared my husband when I let the neighbor girls have it in the stairwell, I said nothing. But then, had I caught myself thinking "Girls should know better" again?

6.       In the fall, I was on a Greyhound in the middle of Kansas on a four-day trip from Spokane to Indiana for a family funeral. My presence back in Indiana was absolutely necessary, but a bus trip cross-country was all I could afford. I came to learn I wasn’t the only one on the bus taking the cross-country route. I was sharing the same space with several of the same faces I’d met up with, even joined coming from Seattle, at the Greyhound Terminal in Spokane. Conversations were sporadic but always with purpose. Some of us had grown to know each other quite well. Some of us had gone far to illustrate our distinctive personalities. All of us were smelling bad and ready to be out of Kansas. The bus driver told us the air conditioning had stopped working not far outside of Salina, but we wouldn’t be able to change buses until Kansas City. At some point – a stop post-Denver? – the bus had picked up an older obnoxious woman in a tank top with lots of tattoos, who wouldn’t stop fidgeting – standing up, sitting down – and also chatting with thin air. The man beside me told me she was likely “missin’ her crystal.” When a few passengers started telling her to sit down and shut the hell up, she became pissed and started flipping us all off. She threatened us all with an ass-whoopin’, told us she didn’t have to put up with our shit, started yelling at the bus driver to do something because everyone was ganging up on her. A twenty-something girl who seemed quite comfy in the bus setting had been among the first few who had spoken out to her. The girl stood up where her seat was (as the bus trucked on down the wide and super-flat interstate) and told the older woman to come a little closer if she was going to be such a whiney ass bitch and the girl would see to it that she shut her mouth. Sweat glistened on both of their foreheads. The older women flinched as though she might pull up a fist, and it was enough to send the twenty-something girl near-to crawling over the head of the passenger seated between them in some fit of mad rage. A man jumped to his feet to hold them apart while I sat shaking my head like I beheld greater self-control and wisdom. The bus stopped and the older tattooed woman was handed a lecture (for us all to see) from the bus driver who was indeed a firm woman who had been quick to spout her rules when we first met (“If you are off smoking or eatin’ Subway and you aren’t back when I say I’m leavin’, I’ll leave your ass in TheMiddleofNowhere, Kansas – Don’t test me.”). I confess: I had expected the men at the back of the bus to start arguing about the pot smell coming out of the bathroom first. I must have truly been delirious or an idiot. I came to learn that days on a Greyhound levels the playing field in gender, class, and reasoning skills.

. . . for pretend or real?

7.       I didn’t watch the Grammys because I don’t have cable. I did find a list of winners the next day – Go Adele and Foo Fighters!  But what was with all the Chris Brown shit? And then there were the tweets. The small-minded über-goofs of far too many naive girls calling out (as Brown’s Grammy performance was rolling) hash-tagged comments to the online social networking world like, “I’d let Chris Brown punch me in the eye any day.” Wink. Wink. I confess: I hope they may never get a punch in the eye from a man who they think loves them, but then a part of me thinks it might take something just like that before they kick themselves for having ever made such an idiotic public claim. Meanwhile, Brown will continue to get his shoes kissed like some R&B hero who couldn’t help his manly rage (as sexy and encouraged as manly rage is). We’ve been TAUGHT to raise a higher eyebrow at Rihanna.

8.       The only time I was ever homeless was when I was hiding in a domestic violence shelter, seeking a divorce and doing all that was in my power (which wasn’t much at all) to keep from losing custody of my three kids. At the shelter, I had to keep my apartment up to par for daily inspections. There was a curfew of 9PM and a locked gate. There were group therapy sessions in the basement alongside the washer and dryer, and we cried to each other while our children rolled around with a set of blocks on the cold concrete floor. I stayed there in a tiny little apartment on the toughest side of Indianapolis for almost six months while I endured court hearings and tried to keep my kids (and myself) in the same school. Within that six month period, I drove down once to my hometown (five hours south) and picked up my big sister just before her husband was thrown in prison for running a meth lab (a business she had long suspected but had tried to ignore). She showed me photos of herself she had taken months ago when she had a black and blue face, swollen and broken to the point of missing several days of work. She told me she took those pictures to remind herself of how hideous things had gotten between the two of them. I drove her up to Indianapolis with me – so she too could hide in the shelter with me, even though her husband was going to be behind bars. We needed the therapy. We needed the daily inspections. We needed the curfew, and we needed the gate. If we knew nothing else, we knew that we needed those things, and that we needed each other. When her husband got out of prison, she took him back and not much changed. She didn’t see other options. She wanted to make him better. I blamed myself for being the world’s worst sister, for preoccupying myself with my schooling rather than giving her the friendship she needed. It reminds me now of how I know there is a part of me who still blames my mother for her crooked nose, having had it broken by my drunk father twice, early in their 7-year marriage. And although divorced from him today, I can become angry at her in a flash when she implies she may be regretful, being in love with him still – if only a little.  

finis. (Finally!)  ;)
Anybody else got any conflicting expectations or confessions? Or did the world drop a make-believe egg on my head again?