My first bra, my first period, and my first wedding dress

Me: I've started seizing up again.
She: Yes. What's happening?
Me: It was fun writing all those stories about dad and the boozy relatives, but I've got some bigger stickier stories that just won't leave me alone, and I feel like I should write them now.
She: OK. Are you ready?
Me: I think so. I've written them before, but I was angry then. I'm not so angry now. I'm just really trying to make sense of things. I feel like I just need to get them out one more time, and walk away from them. They happened. They have haunted me. And I'm totally sick of carrying them around. I kind of feel the same as quitting drinking. "I've had enough of this shit already!"
She: So write them down and leave them behind. What are they about?
Me: My first bra, my first period, and my first wedding dress.
She: OK, go!

I didn't know much about puberty when it started happening. I knew it was important, special. But I also knew it was dangerous. One day when I was about 13 I was drying myself after a shower, it must have been early evening because the sun was streaming through the upstairs bathroom window, and it highlighted a very faint a goldy fuzz of pubic hair starting to grow "down there". I was breathless for a moment. Reverent. It really was true. I was Growing Up. I remember being very excited. And very careful. Nobody else can know.

I wanted a bra for the longest time, but a bra was something I couldn't ask for, and couldn't have until mum got me one. At least that's what I thought. I didn't have any money to buy one. I didn't have any older sisters to give me their hand-downs. I had to wait until she was ready to acknowledge that I was growing up. That would be very difficult for her. She loved babies who were totally dependent on her. Kids with their own personalities, ideas, thoughts, not so much. There was no intimacy between us, no trust. I did not talk to her about anything private. She could not help herself mocking and ridiculing, exploiting any crack of vulnerability, any want or need, any individuality, anything intimate or private. Nothing was sacred. Anything she knew about us was very likely to be the butt of jokes, told to great dramatic effect at social gatherings, and laughed about. We were expected to be good sports, to take a joke.

So while I desperatety wanted a bra, I had no control over that, or anything else in my life, so I had to wait till she was ready.

Me: I'm getting all choked up.
She: Why?
Me: Because she bought me a bra, and gave it to me in front of the whole family. I unwrapped my "present" not knowing what it was, in front of her, my four little sisters and my father. It was one of those utterly overwhelming moments when I was delighted to get a bra, but mortified to be exposed like that about something so private, something that could have been special, but wasn't. I felt so confused about that.

I was grateful -- it was a beautiful bra and it was something I desperately wanted. She told me to go and try it on, and come back downstairs. I did. Then she made me lift up my school shirt to show her the fit. In front of everyone.

I hated her for this. But I couldn't do anything. If I didn't do what she said, be a good sport and get in the spirit of things, she'd just as likely take the bra back. I just needed to be a good sport, even about this.

I have read recently that some mothers cannot comprehend that their daughters are actually separate people from them. They treat them as if they were not individuals, but merely extensions of themselves. They get very angry if the daughter asserts any individuality at all, expresses opinions or desires that aren't exactly the mother's. They (the mother) drums into the daughter that she is not special, does not have any value of her own, has no control over what she eats, wears, says... and thinks, but of course that last one is ridiculous. A girl treated like this develops a very rich mental life -- it's the only place she has that's hers.

I think this was going on in our family. I felt powerless and silenced, confused. An totally alone. There was nobody to talk to about any of this.

I must say it was a beautiful bra. Pink with peachy-cream coloured flowers. The nicest bra I'd ever seen. And it fitted perfectly.

__________________

I got my period in my own good time. I was 16 when that finally happened. I don't remember telling mum, but I must have because I was given a pack of sanitary pads to use. I was pretty excited to get my period -- finally. I was a bit of a late developer. I'd heard that said about me, and understood it to be an embarassing thing. But oh well. I got my period, and the first order of business was to work out what to do with the sanitary pads.

They came with a very detailed instruction sheet. This was in the bad old days when they were attached to a sanitary belt -- they hadn't invented anything more convenient. They were like thick wads of newspaper between your legs. It was impossible to walk properly while wearing one. But I digress.Once you've worn a sanitary pad for a while, you need to dispose of it. The instructions said under no circumstances should you ever flush them down the toilet. Sanitary pads should be incinerated. I looked that up in the dictionary, to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. I need to burn the pads. OK. Good to know.

I got up, got dressed for school, put on a new pad, folded up the used one, found some matches, and headed out the the garden burner -- a rusty old 44 gallon drum that dad used for burning rubbish.

Have you ever tried to light a sanitary pad on fire?

How about a used one? Half a box of matches later, I was in tears, the pad would catch fire on the edge, the the flame would just die out and leave pathetic smoking singe marks. They would not incinerate. I was late for school. I was too embarassed to throw the pad in the burner -- what if someone saw it, what if it got flies on it? I'll just have to try again later.

What's even harder to burn than a sanitary pad? Two sanitary pads.

It was a disaster.  Every day I had more pads to deal with. I tried again and again to burn them with matches. I ended up with a bag of singed, used pads in my room, and no idea what to do with them. I actually don't know what I did with them in the end. Eventually I realised that there were incinerators for them at school (I think), so I disposed of them there. Eventually I just used face-cloths, which I washed, dried secretly in my room, and reused. Eventually I figured out how to use tampons (but that's another story!)

I was so alone in all of this. Standing out at that burner, failing to do anything but singe the edges of those pads, hot and angry, desperate, late for school. Mum must have known this was going on. Did she? Didn't she see me out there, struggling, ashamed, hopeless? Didn't she know that a girl needs some information and advice and support?

I guess not. I have been angry about this for years. I don't think mum was deliberate about this neglect. This whole situation was the result of her denial about her children being separate humans with separate lives, growing up, and my deep distrust of her with any intimate details of my life. The absolute last thing I would have done was ask my mother "what should I do with my used pads?" 

Once a friend told me a story of a girl getting her period. Her parents gave her a ruby ring to mark the occasion and took her out for a special meal to celebrate. I cried when I heard that story. What a wonderful idea.

She: Well done.
Me: I feel awful writing that.
She: In what way?
Me: I feel like I'm whining and betraying mum. There's a voice saying "Your mother was busy with five kids and a husband, and a household to run. She didn't have time to look after herself, let alone anyone else."
She: Tell it to shut up. Tell us the one about the wedding dress.
Me: Can I wait till tomorrow? If feel shattered.
She: OK.

After-thought: Why didn't I just put them in the rubbish? We didn't have rubbish then. Household waste was dealt with like this: vege and garden scraps went in the compost. Bones, and other things were burnt in the burner at the bottom of the garden. Every home had one. The only rubbish that was picked up was the ash-can. Can that is exactly what it was; a can of ashes from the fireplaces that heated the houses. The ash can sometimes contained hot embers, and if you put other rubbish in there it was likely to burst into flames and burn down your shed, so not advisable. Any waste that couldn't be dealt with those ways was taken to the tip. A trip to the tip was quite an event, and didn't happen that often. Just to give you some perspective, hardly any food came in plastic then (this is the late 1970s). Milk was still delivered in re-usable bottles. There was no such thing as tetra-packs (the juice, milk and liquid containers so common now. Meat, fish, bread, cheese were wrapped in grease-proof paper which could burn. There was not such thing as individual servings of anything. So we didn't have a rubbish bin that I could shove sanitary pads in. They were a category all of their own!
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I was having a silk wedding dress, that was for sure. I bought the material myself, from Ballantynes in Christchurch. It was a beautiful colour -- milky tinged with coffee. I was not having a white wedding dress.

Originally, it was going to be a cotton and muslin dress, elegant hippy style, flat sandals, with a huge armful of lupins from the side of the road out to the beach. That of course, wouldn't do, and while I was trying desperately to avoid being bullied into anything about this wedding, I had to agree that a hippy outfit would look ridiculous at the town hall Victoria Chambers, where my parents decided the wedding would take place.

So I dropped the muslin for lush silk. It was gorgeous. Mum was against a silk dress. Silk crushes, wilts, has flaws in it. Totally unsuitable. I, on the other hand, was committed to a natural fabric, cotton and muslin were out, then it would be silk. End of that story. I'm 23 at this point. I paid for the material myself. Oh, and I'm the one getting married.

Balantines shipped the bolt of silk to the dressmaker, and she got busy with the dress. Mum and my future mother-in-law wanted to come to the first dress fitting. I thought this was a bit odd, but then thought it was sweet that they were interested and wanted to be involved. So off we went to Pat Pope's place in Mataura.

When we walked in her sewing room, there was a dress hanging on the wall, disturbingly similar to my pattern. It wasn't my dress though. It was the wrong colour, the wrong fabric--I could see that from across the room. "Who's dress is that?" I asked.  "It's yours!" said Pat. "But it's the wrong material. It looks kind of yellow. It's not my silk..." And I started wondering what had gone wrong. Did Ballantynes send the wrong fabric? What had happened? I was so confused.

And then they all started talking at once. The silk material had a flaw in it, we had to return it to the shop, we got something very close, nobody would know the difference. It's polyester (polyester!!) so it won't crush or wilt. It's going to look great. You'll be thankful on the day.

"But why didn't you tell me this happened?" "We didn't want to upset you."

This was a total lie. The whole thing was a farce. Mum didn't want me to have a silk dress, so they changed the material, made the dress in nasty cream polyester, and expected me to wear it. Which of course I did, because... well that's just what I did. I was a good sport.

Was there a flaw  in that silk? Who knows. Who cares? That's the beauty of silk. The pattern was full and gathered, a flaw in any material would not have shown. I knew that. I knew this was a lie. I was not the kind of person who would be "upset" by revisiting a flawed fabric. I was very upset about being tricked and bullied out of the wedding dress I really wanted.

But I took it on the chin and moved on. I also allowed myself to be bullied into wearing high heels to that wedding. Did she tell Pat to make the dress a couple of inches too long, so I had to get up on heels? Who knows. I only wore the dress once for the wedding, and on numerous occasions at drunken parties when it was pulled out the dress-up box at mum's place. I always hated the scratchy feel of that fabric.


She: Are you feeling OK?
Me: I'm getting that tight throat feeling, but it's not too bad. Back then my throat constricted so much I couldn't speak. Maybe my silence was seen as consent. But not, I felt powerless. On some level I knew I needed to stand up to mum on some of these things. Say "this is not your call -- you have no right to do this." But she would cry, and say she was only doing her best to be helpful, and I had no idea, and how could I think she was being anything but... " Blah blah blah.

I just remembered the nights when I was in 7th form, 17 years old, planning my career after high school, deciding that I was going to be a journalist. We always sat at the table for dinner, and talked. When I talked about doing anything beyond high school that didn't involve staying home and getting a job in and office in town (which is what mum did), mum would cry. This was not an isolated incident. It happened often. Her family would be broken up. Why on earth would I want to leave home, leave the family? What was wrong with getting a job and staying at home?

I suppose I could have seen this as loving and charming, but it was horrible. I had talents and hope and dreams of being a writer. I needed to get away from home and invercargill. As it happened, I stayed until I was 21. I still dream regularly about being trapped in a house with my parents and sisters.  They are still back in the late 1970s. I am myself now. At some point in the dream, I wise up and say to myself, "Hang on, I don't have to live here with these people. I have my own money. I can get a car, get my own place, and get out of here!"

At 21 I was desperate. I decided to enrol at the university in Christchurch, and spend three years doing a degree and getting myself sorted out. I had saved enough money, so I didn't need any help from mum and dad. I didn't tell them I was doing this until I had received my acceptance letter. Then I told them. Then they protested mightily. But I just went. I was so tired of being under their thumbs.

I got to Christchurch and found a great flat with a lovely flatmate, and settled immediately into my classes, loving the reading, learning, freedom, wide openness. One night, mid way into the first term -- perhaps a month or six weeks after I'd left home -- there was a knock at the flat door. It was John Riack, a family friend who was a travelling salesman of some sort at the time. "Your parents asked me to bring something up for you. Will you come out to the car and get it?" Sure, great. And when I got out to the car, there was my mother in the passenger seat, come for a visit, come to stay with me in my new flat. She slept in my bed. There was nowhere else. She came to lectures with me. I was dumb, dumbfounded. She only stayed with me for a couple of days. Her older sister, Judy, lived in Christchurch, and when she heard what had happened she came over and picked mum up and took her back to her own place to stay. I was very grateful. Judy understood.

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I do want these stories to go somewhere else now. I don't want them to be "the complaints department".  I feel like I can't preface these stories with "I don't want be be judgmental about mum..."  because I know I am. I feel like I could never understand the depths of her fear and insecurity. I would never know what made her tick. The weird thing is that people who know our family remember mum completely differently, and I suspect these stories might not be believed -- or seen as gross misinterpretations of an immature adolescent.

People say these things about mum:
She was such fun! Always the life of the party.
Such a good sort. Always having a joke.
Such a good dressmaker.
She always dressed you girls so well.
She was so good with interior decorating.
She was such fun.

And I know those things were all true.
________________-
I keep getting fleeting ideas about how I didn't deal with these experiences in any kind of healthy way, and how they just stayed buried -- even though I'd talk about them, I'd never done anything with the emotions around them except stuff them down and try to be a good sport. These stories show me what a deep, dark, lonely place I was in -- I knew it was bullshit and bollocks. I totally knew. But I was always silent. Always took it on the chin. It was the only safe way. I had learned to protect myself by being silent, compliant. Accepting that what I wanted and thought didn't matter. That I was nobody.

Humans respond to that kind of situation in different ways. Some rebel and react and assert themselves. Some just don't even register it's happening and get on with their own lives. Some withdraw and go numb to deal with it. That's what I did.

We went on our honeymoon on a motorbike.
Mum didn't protest or interfere. I was mystifies. I asked her "How come you haven't said anything about our honeymoon plans." "You're married to Gerard now. You're his responsibility now, not mine." And that was the end of that.

It was interesting that later, after Gerard and I divorced, and I was not re-married, she resumed her oversight of my life, albiet from a distance. There are so many stories. They are interesting to me, but probably just sound like whining first world problems that I should have recovered from years ago. I really should just get over myself. Indeed.

But these stories, and this particular habit of withdrawing, numbing and running away from pain, has been with me for decades, and I'm only just learning about living in a different way. It's revolutionary.

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