Please Don’t Tell My Mother I Have Cellulite..
(And Other Monday Horror Stories We Keep To Ourselves When There Is No More Rhyme or Rhythm to Our Days.)
This is why i diary (verb). Or keep one (noun). And just keep a pen on the side, in case the train ride to the café i need to be at five minutes ago to meet a friend, who didn’t have wifi, and i need to scribble or work out a problem on some form of paper. (Yes paper.)
I would like to clarify why anxiety is riddled into our psyche, even post-education - from Kindergarten onwards. Think this occurs more into the North American persuasions, rather than the very sensible British women. They are not insane, because we worry too much about everything.
I am glad to report my two sensible girls are british-educated, and american-born son will now need to deal with their stable manners - and hopefully fall in love with someone who is not me - worried about every single thing.
Let’s start with mothers.
Months before Mother’s Day, where we send automatic flowers to mothers while we are miles and miles away - and scribble sentiments safely from away, and not deal with the grudges of being an only child. (Whether that was with viable regret, or imminent thankfulness - i can’t really tell).
I will not deplete her of the drama. Or repeat the anorexia that plagued all girls aged 12-19 in the eighties, trying to follow in not Cyndi Pauper’s footsteps, but the Supermodels hailed by all living boys - Cindy had her work cut our for her. It’s a social ill - i will not expound on here - because, there is a borderline to being happily eighteen, to eighteen pounds overweight when you are 16 and wanting to be accepted as you are. Even if you’re not a jock, artist, stage performer, science geek, chemistry genius, or head of mathematics, or language and socials scient. You are achieved, and your status of being is cognisant - whether you have been born in a test tube, socially dismantled for your being half-asian, you can still dribble that soccer ball and attend all the meets, and become who you want to be - despite all the odds.
Anxiety is sometimes caused in achieving our social need - and this has been the focus of most kindergartens, from day one. How to commence a human being to become “human compliant”, or something that made people get along with other people. And sometimes, we discuss this as amiability. Or as “nice”, the opposite of a social construct to delineate from the undesirables - being “mean”, which in some new-found societies is acceptably frowned upon, but in traditional ones, used as a means to assert the delineation of the ages: status, depictions of superiority, and assertions of choice within the amalgamation of diversity: a norm, in achieving the regional, timely order with racial disharmony (it happens within the playground, among peers: because, if you let them, they work it out amongst themselves). But in some societies, “mean” can mean fierce, responsive, tough, street-smart, not a pushover, being strong, where showing your might is a social currency and a sign of “girl power respectability”.
My weighing in: every girl to woman, should be able to respect others, and earn her “respectability” via means of Coming into her own. This simply means, having the time to become someone she (in her centredness) achieve this in her own time (or as God has permitted her), until she comes into clear view of herself. This can happen, from age 12 to age 50. I think it happened to me in my 30s. That feeling, when you finally accept yourself in your whole being, for who you are, and congratulate yourself for who you’ve become. And that pride, will recognise that You are all you needed.
My mother, plagued by a similar cultural estate had know this all along, said: “You shouldn’t give a shit what anybody says. (But tell no one.)” And it had me thinking for a long time that it was just something that “ran in our family” that bobbing self-affirmation - and confirming, that it had permeated all branches of it. The only thing was to come of it, very expressedly of something that would actually pan the environs quite enough to even qualify to nurture it with recognition -and then, a socially significant relevance (in that order)- and be able to expand it, easing its catalyst state with a progressive community with the static fix of it being naturally correlated in the environment.
It was like a definite stamp of definite genetic authority on each of the females - distantly emanated, or not - that laid esteemed claim in its name, or permanent affiliation to our genetic code.
It was a female compliant code.
And as with cellulite, anorexic aesthetic tendencies, in all in its variant culpabilities of plaguing our adult - it is in full rapacious capacity. And despite its spongeing, strengthened my resolve to remain.