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Presenting
There Must Be Cake
While I'm At It...
Family Viewing
Bookish
Like the Proverbial Hole in the Head
But First
Creepy Jewelry
Musical Chairs
Even Movie Stars Aren't Immune
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I Know What You're Saying
It had been about fifteen months since the last time I dared go near my haircutter. She's extremely nice and interesting, but it has been one thing after another. When I was most extremely pregnant, nothing was going to make me look better. Then I had no time. Then I had no hair, well, substantially less than usual.
So I finally got up the nerve to face the scissors and hear how long it would be before this odd tufty look that comes upon me in humid weather would subside.
I'll probably have to wait until the summer for my head to be back to normal, but during my time in the chair I got to look at the January issues of Glamour and Elle magazines, where the push is on to promote a book called: You're Wearing That: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation. I was susceptible to these articles. While I can go for years between haircuts (not that I would recommend it), but one of my most memorable "You're Wearing That" moments with my mother came when I bounded into LaGuardia airport after being in Berkeley for a few months and becoming a little too lively with a bottle of Sun In. As she ran up to hug me, my mother couldn't help herself: "What have you done to your hair?" And the next day we went to the first place we could find that would make my head less... I think the word was "brassy."
Te memory of my blonde chagrin was sort of interesting in light of these articles because as the title of the book suggests, this conversational gambit really is universal with mothers and daughters. It is hard to immunize oneself against the leading question:
You're wearing that?
Do you really like your hair that way?
Are you sure you haven't been eating too much candy corn?
And then there are the more insidious conversation starters that are harder to understand or parry, about the success or stability or marriage or babies of friends. It is hard to know what to do when your mother talks about these things. Are you supposed to be purely happy for the person's success or marriage or baby or are you supposed to feel guilty about the ways in which you don't measure up?
Are these things as identifiable in the dialogue between mothers and sons? I refuse to let my tongue turn so passive aggressive.
The Elle piece really is about mother/daughter relationships and it highlights a creepy and fascinating legacy. The writer Paula Fox had a hideous couple of parents and ended up putting her own child up for adoption. She wrote about her family in 2001's Borrowed Finery. That child, a daughter named Linda Carroll went on to become a writer herself (she just published her memoir called Her Mother's Daughter), in which she discusses her extraordinarily problematic relationship with her daughter Courtney Love. Of course they're not speaking. Love has claimed in the past that Marlon Brando is her father. This is almost certainly erroneous, but if she is looking for a personal mythology, she doesn't have to look any further than her own very real backyard.
posted by Elise at 8:38 PM
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