The Bewildered

"Senior citizens find that Ulm, Minnesota is a good place to retire..." From the U.S. National Archives.

In the past year or so, my grey hair has gone from novelty to reality, from the odd rogue strand to a topic even new friends now feel it is appropriate to comment on: “Wow, you’re really young to have so much grey hair!” or the more considerate, “I really like that you have some grey in your hair!” In other words, “grey” is quickly becoming a definitive adjective in describing my hair colour.

None of this is particularly surprising in and of itself. My mother was leaning towards more grey than brown by her late 30s, like her sisters, and, as late-night slumber party whisperings declare, you inherit your hair woes or blessings from your mom. What’s more shocking, really, is the fact that I’m now beginning to look like a version of my mother that I actually remember.

I’ve had a pretty fraught relationship with my hair. My grandfather was a barber, so for years he cut my hair. Given that his barbering repertoire was developed in the 1950s and limited to men’s styles, this meant my hair was cut into a slightly longer version of the popular men’s bowl cut. In an era and neighbourhood in which young femininity was defined around bobbles and banana clips, the bowl cut did nothing for my sense of self. I was forced into a vague tomboy-dom that I didn’t have the moxie or athletic chops to really own. When I hit puberty, I finally convinced my father to let me get it cut at a real salon, but my hair betrayed me. Along with acne and growing pains, I developed an irregular curl-pattern that I battled valiantly (though according to remnant snapshots largely unsuccessfully) with a round brush and blowdryer. By my mid-teens, exasperated and inspired by Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, I hacked it all off, doused it in too much gel and began a spate of hair dyeing that would last into my 20s: orange, red (more fire engine than handsome shade of auburn), dark brown almost black, a regretful period of badly-striped highlights, finally followed by an acceptance of the mousey brown that so many tow-headed kids grow into. After eking out some sort of truce in this decades-long battle (though I’ve yet to make peace with my hair’s odd curliness), I can’t quite fathom the fact that it is changing on me again and I don’t know how to respond. » Read the rest of this entry «

Disclaimers: First, I am a feminist. I do not in any way condone patriarchal structures that give women little voice, lesser pay and judge them on the quality of their derrières, rather than the content of their characters. As a woman, frankly, I don’t think it’s much of a question. I owe the fact that I’m in graduate school, unmarried, relatively financially stable (ahem, personal disclosures) to generations of women who fought hard for these realities. The least I can do is identify myself with them by declaring my own feminism, even if my struggles have shifted (and in many ways, they haven’t shifted that far, but that’s the stuff of another post.) Second disclaimer, another disclosure perhaps, I’ve recently started watching Mad Men, finally, slowly and without tremendous enthusiasm, but nonetheless with curiosity. I’m sure that something of Betty Draper’s confounding existence has seeped into these ramblings.

So, with that said, when faced with the kinds of impossible decisions adulthood brings, I sometimes find myself wondering what it would be like to live in a world in which someone else made decisions on my behalf.

Housewife cleaning a TV set with a feather-brush. From: Collectie Spaarnestad

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Only one characteristic of personality and orientation to life and work is absolutely, across the board, present in all creative people: motivation. – Albert Rothenberg, MD, from 35 years of research as the principal investigator for the project, “Studies on the Creative Process.”

Dr. Rothberg’s notion that creative people’s most universally shared trait is motivation is one of those findings that just seems common sense—umm… of course creative people are motivated, why else would we choose to work in very-much-less-than-financially-rewarding careers? Or spend our weekends tweaking semicolons and adjusting colour-balances? Or be okay with appearing in public as pasty, too-long-inside folk of the sort who do their grocery shopping midday, without a child in the grocery cart?

“Motivation” is one of those things we think of as unquestionably good—it’s meant and perceived as a compliment, an ideal, a standard toward which we should all strive. Of course no one really wants to be unmotivated. And yet, I wonder what it is we’re talking about when we talk about someone’s motivation. In terms of creativity, the pretentious have been on the subject of motivation for years—critics and academics want to discern an artist’s motivation, their reason for doing what they do, that inner trauma they’re trying to express in material form. But, as we perhaps move away from the era if the bereted art critic, I can’t help but think that the question of creative motivation has slipped into the realm of motivatedness where we judge creative types on the basis of their production, rather than their motivation. In other words, we move from questions of why or how into wondering to what end or how much. The motivated artist is a different figure than the motivationally-driven artist. I’m not trying to say that the former is not also the latter, but the idea of motivation now seems to mark a person capable of almost unbelievable output, physical and mental endurance and a nearly constant flow from a seemingly unending supply of originality. We conflate the two: the esoteric inner drive that compels an artist to create is harnessed now in the service of prolific production. And, since their work is motivational, fuelled by some deep-seated inner desire, of course the creator will find it personally rewarding, even as the effort it demands is sometimes superhuman. A creative person must love what they do because that love is part, if not most, of the payoff for a career spent in the expression of motivation.

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Mother’s Day is early this year, which, in combination with the fact that I don’t have cable (and hence can better avoid saccharine commercial appeals), seems to have translated into better-than-usual success in avoiding the build-up towards Mother’s Day. For me, it is always a build-up. My Mother’s Day comes at the apex of a crescendo, following weeks of growing tension as I am increasingly confronted with smiling visages of all that is missing in my life.

For motherless daughters, there are a lot of difficult days in the year: her birthday, your birthday, her death day, the days when you feel you have to “stand in” for her at family events, the days when you just need her advice, etc. For me, though, among the worst is Mother’s Day. Birthdays, anniversaries, these are personal, intimate. If they are shared, they are shared with those who know your loss or may even share it. Don’t get me wrong, these days are deeply felt, but at least they are publically invisible.

Mother’s Day, on the other hand, thrusts mothers into the foreground in a bald appeal to show your love through time and money, mostly the latter. Of course, we all know that the “mother” represented by Mother’s Day is a fiction: the tender, soft-spoken glue that holds the family together, the figure who packs the lunches, Swiffers the ceiling fans and tends to wounds. Sure, many of our mothers are lovely people, often caring, selfless, or hard-working, but, they are certainly not uniformly so. Most of us have an at least somewhat complicated relationship with our mother; many have mothers who aren’t necessarily figures who should be celebrated; some of us have mothers who’ve left us behind. But, on Mother’s Day, we’re meant to celebrate the fiction, the ideal, to focus on the golden moments that stick with us, however tenuously.

1920 Mother's Day Pageant, c/o Oregon State University Archives

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In their latest catalogue, J. Crew featured a spread called “Saturday with Jenna.” A photo shoot showing creative director and company president Jenna Lyons at home on a Saturday, enjoying her morning coffee, her J. Crew sweats and a round of toenail painting with her 5-year-old son Beckett. The caption reads, “Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”

Incidentally, the company doesn’t even seem to be selling this shade of polish—though it does advertise a couple of more modest shades in the “necessary luxuries” section of the women’s wear shop—and it is certainly not listed alongside the pint-sized bowties and gingham shirts in the little boys’ section. But, so what if it did?

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While we’re on the subject of my grandma, I remember going to visit her with my younger brother later on in her life, after she’d moved to the retirement home, which she inwardly hated and outwardly tolerated. My brother hadn’t seen her in perhaps a year or so and was visiting while in the area before a big walk he was going to do, either his walk across Newfoundland, or the one up the coast of California. I can’t remember which. He was explaining the philosophy of the walks (and there is a philosophy—there has to be to walk all that distance), that he liked to get out and meet people, talk to them, that part of the point was to show what’s lost when people race around in cars all the time. I’m not sure how he expected her to react to this kind of idealism, but, she was completely exasperated and asked when he was going to settle down and get a real job. He said he liked the walking and that he thought about it as a kind of work. She responded by telling him that people shouldn’t like their jobs, that liking your work really wasn’t the point. She might as well have added, “that’s why they call it work.” He countered with probably the best and worst response he could have made at that point; he told her that Jesus’ job was essentially to walk around and talk to people, and so, in a way, he was really just following in his footsteps.

That pretty much ended the conversation, but not in a way that suggested he had won. You couldn’t just compare yourself to Jesus in front of my grandma and come away unscathed in her mind. I’m sure she never forgot the conversation or the discomfort that followed it; the collision of worldviews was obvious, stark, the impasse palpable.

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Honestly, someone asked me that once. Point blank. I didn’t know her. We were standing next to each other at a set of sinks in a public bathroom and she turned to me and asked, “So, like, are you anorexic?” I can’t remember exactly how I responded. I was rendered mostly speechless by the question, and so I think I just muttered, “no,” blushed loudly and got out of there as quickly as I could. She left the bathroom right after me, and as she met up with her friends, I remember them looking at me and giggling. Looking backwards, I have no idea what she meant by her comment: did she want tips on how to be a successful anorexic? Was she trying to feel better about herself by hating on an obviously geeky but enviably slim wallflower? Was it just another example of the meaningless viciousness of teenage girls? An expression of her own insecurity about her weight? Was she spurred on by my insecurity? Could she somehow sense it? And did she simply want to reinforce it? Or did she think she was enacting an intervention, there in the dingy mall bathroom?

So, like, are you anorexic? (From The Powerhouse Museum collection.)

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