For many years - sporadically from age 5 but solidly from age 7 onwards - my mother didn't buy me any new clothes at all, apart from my school uniforms. I know I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but I think I've just figured out the reason why she neglected me in that way.
Mum used to buy my brothers new clothes on a fairly regular basis considering the tight constraints of her budget. My elder brother was even treated to t-shirts with his favourite bands on them as a teenager (these were very expensive as they had to be imported from overseas) and my younger brother owned everything that had anything to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But she was loathe to buy anything for me.
I've just realised that she probably didn't like to buy me clothes because she didn't like my taste in clothing: specifically, my preference for wearing male clothing.
I've recently been looking through some old family photos from the 1970s and one thing struck me: every single photo of me before the age of 5 has me in a pretty, frilly dress, looking like a stereotypical pretty little girl. When my parents had sole control over what I would wear, my mother would choose to dress me solely in pretty girly things. So she made sure she chose hairstyles & clothing that showed off her 'pretty little girl'.
But after the age of 5, the photos tell a very different story: I'm wearing t-shirts & shorts or my favourite corduroy trousers (hey, it was the '70s!) in every one. That's because I'd started to notice gender differences and I insisted on being treated like a boy. And there are far fewer photos of me after the age of 5 than before.
Many of the clothes I'm wearing in those later shots were my elder brother's old things that he'd outgrown. This is because my mother would refuse to buy me boys' (or androgynous) clothes and would pressurise me to choose dresses when we'd go out clothes shopping. I'd invariably kick up a stink & refuse the dresses, so the end result was that I would wind up getting nothing at all. For years.
This went on for my entire childhood, from age 5 until I started working and could afford to purchase my own clothes at age 17. I have wondered over the years why my mother would buy clothes for my brothers but not for me (did she love them more?): but now I think the answer is simply that she wasn't comfortable that her pretty little girl wanted to look like a boy so she couldn't bring herself to buy me anything. She wanted me to be her pretty little daughter, dammit - not the masculine tomboy I insisted on being.
She did have one way of trying to force me to wear dresses: if I was invited to a friend's birthday party, my mother would insist that the only way I would be allowed to attend would be if I wore a dress. This would lead to a lot of frustrated crying and begging on my part because I really wanted to go the the party but I really didn't want to wear a dress. She wouldn't budge, so if the party was important enough I would eventually give in & wear the damn dress. She would curl my hair and try to 'prettify' me as much as she could - but if you were to see the photos from that period you'd see a pissed-off kid looking very uncomfortable. I guess she wanted her daughter back any way she could, and she thought that if only I could see how pretty I am, I would start acting like a girl. She was very wrong about that, though.
I remember having nothing but my brother's old rags to wear for years and around age 15 I was invited to perform in a school play, and my mother's pride would not allow her to let me perform on-stage in my brother's tatty old clothes. So she gave me R20 to spend on clothing and sent me into town on my own to pick out some clothes. I came back with a pair of trousers, a t-shirt and a pair of boots. All in white, for some random reason. No, actually the reason wasn't that random - it was because I hadn't been allowed to buy clothes for the past 10 years so I didn't really know what to get. I was hugely uncomfortable and anxious on that trip; almost as uncomfortable as I had been a couple of years previously when she took me out to buy my first bra (what a heartbreaking experience that was!). That was the one & only time she gave me money to buy clothes; after that I couldn't buy anything until I started working part-time at 17 and could pay for my own things.
So, yeah. My stubborn mother was so uncomfortable with me wearing even androgynous clothing that she preferred to buy me nothing whatsoever to wear. :-(
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