Easter
Easter: “Good Friday. Yesterday was the last day of the school term and the music teacher was busy. She conducted a band playing for the Easter Hat Parade at one of her elementary schools. What an odd cultural event that is? Hundreds of small children parading in paper hats made in class to the adoring acclaim of their doting parents. The Easter Bunny comes and distributes chocolate eggs – pure indulgence and vanity, not a Christian value in evidence anywhere.
It took her back to 1966 when she was seven years old. Back in those days easter hats were made at home and were very elaborate indeed as mothers strove to make their little girls the prettiest in the parade.
The music teacher’s mother, Gwen was not of that ilk. She’d grown up a tomboy, had married and had children, two girls, when in fact she was a lesbian, something she spent her life coming to terms with. She despised femininity and didn’t encourage its expression in her daughters because she saw it as insipid and vain.
She told the music teacher she would be different to all the other little girls because she would have a full costume, something unique and far more interesting than a mere bonnet. She would be dressed as Dollar Bill. 1966 was the year Australia changed to decimal currency and Dollar Bill was a cartoon character created to educate the general public. The next morning the music teacher was sent to school with her costume a head to knee roll of bright yellow cardboard with holes for her arms and eyes cut into a dollar sign face. She had white gloves and her knee length socks and school shoes.
The time came for the parade and her friends put on their lovely bonnets, dressed in pretty frocks and mary jane shoes. The music teacher put on her cardboard costume. They paraded around for the parents singing ‘In Your Easter Bonnet’. The little girls smiled and primped as everyone made a fuss of their pretty hats. Dollar Bill was laughed at, in a kindly way, it was such an unusual costume.
She was proud to be different in one way but disappointed she couldn’t be pretty like the other little girls. Her face couldn’t be seen so nobody could see her smile or even knew who she was. It wasn’t a huge deal but she remembers it as a time when her femininity was denied as it was throughout her childhood.
When her own daughter was seven she remembers how feminine she was, how much she loved pretty dresses, fairy wings, and the colours pink and purple. She indulged and took delight in her daughter’s femininity because she was never allowed those things, which she remembers with some pain and regret.
Her mother took young female lovers just a few years older than the music teacher when she was in her teens. They were very feminine, which was another source of distress because she felt she couldn’t compete and would never be beautiful enough for her mother or anyone else. It was a time of great confusion because her mother seemed incapable of seeing her as a separate person and the boundaries between them were unclear.
For many years she dressed like her mother, a bit butch – trousers, matching button up shirts, in shades of beige with occasional excursions into bright colours for contrast, and short hair. She would wear track suits to go shopping and never bought nice shoes, believing her feet were too wide and ugly. She also believed like her mother that her large, pear-shaped body was a barrier between her and sexual and sensual experience.
Now, in this new phase in her life, the expression of her femininity is important. She wears skirts, fashionable shoes, buys lingerie, dresses up to go shopping. She has pedicures and spends time and money on herself. It has been a slow process to become a whole and sensual woman. She has had a few teachers with her along the way. A number of strong, ballsy, gutsy but gorgeously feminine women she can relate to have shown her that she doesn’t have to deny her strength to be a sexy and desirable woman. She is indebted to them and to me, that part of herself who is her friend and guide.
“
Malcolm said,
April 11, 2009 at 11:37 am
I am so pleased that Amria accept herself and her body, and has thrown off dire influences from her childhood. The person without obvious attractiveness has to work harder to earn love, and also values every aspect of it so much more that the Adonis or the female equivalent does.
Malcolm