Fashion: The Huh? and the Predators and the Reality TV

My mother more than once said that it was a bad idea to enjoy food too much. Because we won't get to eat after we die. Because she read that someone who communicated with the dead through automatic writing was told (by the dead) that one of the reasons that Heaven was so great was because they (the dead) didn't have to cook.

Blink.

What the...

...What?

Now, there are a lot of "Huh?" levels in that, so many that it's hard to pick one. There are plenty of people who won't stumble over the belief in Heaven, though I have my agnostic doubts. I suspect that a lot of those people would, however, have trouble with the automatic writing. And then there's the idea that a God that can create Heaven and Earth can't create food without having to employ cooks. That, of course, ignores the whole side issue of people who take joy in not just the eating but the cooking, and for whom a Heaven without butter and garlic and saucepans and a good nimble gas burner would be Hell...

I'm ignoring all that.

The part that I'm addressing is the idea that we should refrain from experiencing joy because we might lose it. That, I fear, is an area where my mother's genes sometimes show themselves in my thoughts. When I make fun plans, there's always a part of my mind telling me to wait. Wait until it's safe. Wait until that "Hmm...probably nothing, but go in for this test just in case," from my doctor has been resolved. Wait until I don't blow that work deadline. Wait until I've survived the layoffs. Wait until I have a guarantee of safety and stability. Wait wait wait.

Ignoring the foolishness of panicking at every tiny threat, and the fact that there's never such a guarantee, isn't the fact of an unsafe world a good reason to snatch at good times and enjoy them right this minute? But that's not the logic that my brain instinctively goes with. My brain, of all things, seems to fear that if I have fun today, and then the world falls apart tomorrow, I'll feel...stupid.

What the what?

All that leads into the fact that I've been watching What Not To Wear.

Yeah, you didn't see that coming, did you? See, for the first time I've been seeing clothes and their companions (like vintage rhinestone jewelry, say) as a possible source of joy. And even as I buy a silk blouse here and an above-the-knee denim skirt there, I still find myself feeling the threat of...feeling stupid.

What Not To Wear--the American version, not the British one that, by the way, got a lovely brief little parody on Dr. Who, with Captain Jack's clothed state being threatened (Have you seen Captain Jack? Even clothed?)...

...Where was I? Did I mention Captain Jack?

Ah, yes--What Not To Wear, despite its sometimes-over-the-top mockery of the participant's original wardrobe, despite my doubts about reality television, seems to be doing a fine job of unpacking and sifting my own thoughts about clothes and fashion and self-presentation. And touching on that whole fear of joy. When the sociology graduate talked about clothing as being misleading and false, my head said, "It's communication. Aren't you supposed to care about communication?" When the rounder people talked about losing those last ten or twenty or fifty pounds before they started thinking about their clothes, my head says, "Is there a law that you can't be happy in your clothes right now?" And the women who are afraid to look like they're trying--that, yes, I really understand.

In junior high and high school I saw fashion as a competition to find out who could most slavishly and expensively copy the style of the instant. It was what the mean girls did in those lazy sunlit moments stretching on the savannah as they picked their teeth and bonded after eating the unpopular.

But now, well... I begin to see that style doesn't have to be a predatory act. Some of that realization comes from the beauty bloggers. A lot of you don't just write about perfume, and when you're talking about the more visual elements of beauty you're not resting up after the kill or trying to make yourselves into a clone of the leader of the pack. You're expressing yourselves. Enjoying yourselves. Finding something to say about yourselves and your society and your identity as women and your sense of whimsey and...well, stuff.

That all feels like an introduction, but I don't seem to have more to say just now. Perhaps there will be fashion posts in this blog, as time goes on; perhaps that's what I'm introducing. Wouldn't that be... well, really weird?

Table image: Wikimedia Commons
Chef image: Wikimedia Commons
Captain Jack image: Wikimedia Commons
Hat image: Wikimedia Commons
Lion image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: More Graverobbing

I almost bought an above-the-knee skirt the other day.

OK, let's back up.

I've mentioned that writing "belonged" to Mom, in the context of our family. To an even greater degree, so did femininity and feminine attractiveness.

Mom once mentioned that when I was a baby, she dressed me in all the fanciest clothes, but that after I was old enough to have input into what I wore for the day, she lost interest. That must have been early, because I don't remember a time when she was interested in what I looked like or how I related to my femininity. Clothes, hair, jewelry, glittery hair toys, princess wands, all of the girly stuff--nope. Was Mom even involved in finding my first bra? I can't remember.

For the events associated with Mom's death, I wore clothes that were more carefully chosen than usual, clothes that, uncharacteristically for me, more or less fit. I chose them for decent appropriateness, for respect for the occasion. But I remember getting dressed for the visitation, looking at myself in the mirror, and thinking that I looked good.

It's hard to express how unprecedented that thought was, and how wrong it felt. It felt as if I were looking with new eyes. And it felt like robbing the dead. And it still does. The bubble of interest in girly things that I've mentioned now and again in my blog, has been bubbling rather more since Mom died. But those bubbles feel like betrayals. Do you remember the bit in Twister?

He didn't keep his part of the bargain.
Which part?
To spend his life pining for you and die miserable and alone.
That so much to ask?

OK, it's just a mood thing, but that bit of dialogue reflects the absurd-but-I-feel-it-all-the-same mood of the thought that if I were a decent daughter, I would continue to shun femininity after Mom's death, just as I did it in her life, because femininity belongs to her.

But there was that moment, that "Huh. I look good," moment. As if a part of my brain was waiting to seize on my feminine identity, and wasn't prepared even to wait a decent interval, not even until the funeral was over, before doing so. The woman is dead, long live the woman. Treason.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Fiction(ish): Wire and cloth and poultry, oh, my.

"Mommy or Mama?"

"What?"

"What did we call her? I loved her. You call her Mom, but back when I was in charge, what did we call her?"

"You were never in charge. I was always in charge."

"Yes, I was. Remember when we were really little, back before she lost all that weight? She was fat and warm and we used to hug her. You remember how good it felt, right?"

"Shut up."

"I'm making you cry. That means you remember."

"I'll give you that gallon of milk if you shut up."

"Nope. Mommy or Mama?"

"I'll give you ice cream."

"Not gonna happen. Mommy or Mama?"

"I'm not talking about this."

"But we'll dream about her again. We'll tell her we love her again. You're not in charge there. The Id Owns The Dreams! Bwahahaha!"

"Lay off the power trip. You're not the id. You're just stupid stray thoughts."

"Remember the Buffy episode? Which of us would have stolen the sandwich?"

"That just makes you obnoxious, it doesn't make you a...a...some stupid textbook thing."

"Where tiny people?"

"Shut up."

"FOAMy."

"Shut. Up."

"Giles, don't make cave-id unhappy."

"SHUT UP!"

"Mommy or Mama?"

"I don't care. She didn't love us."

"But we thought she did. That's what matters."

"The hell it is."

"You and your objective truth, blah blah. What good does it do us?"

"It's real. She didn't love us. That's real."

"We thought she did. Those monkeys with the cloth mother think it loves them. Why do you want to take her away from me?"

"I didn't do it, she did. She didn't love us."

"Pretend with me."

"No."

"It feels good."

"No."

"If you don't, I'll make you cry some more."

"No."

"Mommy or Mama?"

"Shut up. If you shut up I'll make you some fried chicken."

"But..."

"Slow-fried, Mom style."

"Wait..."

"With crunchies."

"Okay."

Rambling: Frying the slow way

I just fried chicken "Mom style" for the first time since Mom died. I've fried plenty of chicken since then, but I always fried it the faster, less greasy, Alton-Brown-inspired way. Tonight I realized around nine o'clock that I had a whole chicken that wanted to be cooked before it expired. The crust of Mom-style chicken is better the next day, and the method works better for bone-in chicken breasts, so I did it that way. I'm eating some, wiping my greasy fingers and typing between bites. And of course, the taste makes me think of Mom.

When I say that Mom didn't love me, I don't mean that she hated me. I mean that she didn't know how. I believe that for her to understand on an emotional level that another person had a mind, and thoughts, and feelings, for her to try to bond with that separate mind and to succeed to any extent, stretched her emotional understanding to its limit. She did that with one person in the world--my brother. I'm proud of her for achieving that. I've accepted--well, sometimes--that to expect her to generalize that, to love even one more person, would be expecting something beyond her ability.

But to the extent that I perceived love from her in childhood, I perceived it most in her fried chicken. And I realize just as I type that last sentence that in a way, this whole bleeping blog is dedicated to fried chicken, and so...

Sigh. There's always one more tether to childhood and your parents, isn't there?

Mom fried chicken for me. She made her spaghetti sauce for my brother. Both appeared with equal frequency on the dinner menu. She always floured and fried the stray little bits of chicken and skin that appeared when she cut up the chicken, and fished them out of the pan along with clumps of fried flour, and let me steal these "crunchies". I ate some of that fried flour before I sat down to chicken on a proper plate. Shatteringly crisp. The taste of greedy childhood.

Chicken skin as love?

So be it.

Image: Mine.

New Year's One of Two: Heavy and Bitter

So it was a weird year. Mom died, and that changed more things than I would have expected.

I mourn the chunk of life that Mom was cheated of, the ten or twenty more years that she had every reason to expect. I wish that she'd had the chance to live those years and to take from them whatever joy she was capable of.

But from a purely selfish point of view, I've learned that mourning what's lost is easier than mourning what can't be attained. A mother that didn't love me is a less upsetting fact than a mother that doesn't love me today and won't love me tomorrow. I suspect that I've done a good deal less crying over Mom since she died than I did in any of the last several years of her life.

Sometimes it feels as if I've spent all my life explaining things to Mom, explanations that she was determined not to hear but that she never stopped demanding. Trying to explain, trying to help, trying to connect, trying to communicate. Mom never discouraged me from trying--it seemed that she wanted me to try, and try, and try, to keep pouring myself into a bottomless vessel. But she was never going to give back, not even to the extent of understanding the explanation or accepting the help. It's as if she not only needed me to try, but also to fail, utterly, in every effort.

I wish that Mom could have those years. But there's a relief in no longer failing. Now that I know that that path is closed forever, I can walk another way.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Courage and Lipstick

In my last ramble, I said that "...it's somehow appropriate that it's Birdie, who was able to find joy no matter what, who has the courage to act." Since Mom's death, there's been some vibe in my thoughts about her that I haven't quite been able to get my hands around, and I realized just today, "Duh."

See, I don't grieve the loss of Mom's life as much as the loss of opportunity in that life, and the fact that that opportunity can never be recaptured. Mom, at least as long as I'd known her, never had the courage to act or to feel joy.

She was smart, but she actively concealed that intelligence, going out of her way to seem empty-headed, a Gracie Allan personality without a George to love her. The simplest of everyday competencies--balancing her checkbook, learning how to lock a newer model car, even writing a check to pay a bill--were opportunities for a show of what she surely saw as attractively feminine confusion. She cared greatly about religion, philosophy, art, politics, but she again never allowed herself to think seriously about those things, to express considered opinions, to understand or even be aware of gray areas. Her opinions rarely went beyond, "Well, I just don't think that's very nice," or "Aww, I think that's cute."

But I don't think that she was content behind that facade--I think that she always longed for someone to bring her out, to recognize the sharp mind behind the powder and lipstick. Maybe--and this is no doubt just a thought that I manufacture to make myself feel better--maybe to some extent I gave her that, because I was never willing to just accept Gracie: I was always arguing with the mind that I knew was there. Maybe she liked that. But I doubt it.

She was beautiful, and she valued her appearance immensely, but in my memory she never allowed herself to tend to it the way that it deserved. She insisted on wearing lipstick, but she never once bought a lipstick that cost more than a drugstore brand, and she never changed the color from the 1950's bright red that she'd always worn. She fussed incessantly over her hair, but she never treated herself to an expensive, or I suspect even mid-priced, salon. When she abandoned her straight short-cut hair for permed curls, she waited months between perms, so that often she had several inches of straight hair adorned with little bobs of curls at the very end.

She bought the cheapest of clothes, sometimes buying two of a garment because she knew that one wouldn't last. I remember her pleasure, early in my childhood, at a purchase of three pairs of very nice pumps at a deep store-closing-everything-must-go discount, but I rarely remember her wearing them. Her underpinnings were held together with safety pins and sometimes she wore two, one on top of the other, to do the job of one. Some of her blouses were so thin that she had to carefully plan layers so that you couldn't see through to skin.

And she was always, always worried--Does this blouse look OK? Do you think this needs earrings? Do you think the earrings are wrong? Should I tuck this in? Does this need a belt? She paused at every reflective surface to check her lipstick. For most of my life, I saw this as self-absorption, as vanity, but vanity would have been healthier. A vain woman would enjoy all this fuss and planning, and would obtain the toys needed to make it enjoyable, even if they had to be the cheaper toys. Mom, she worked and worried incessantly to follow what she saw as society's expectations of her, while ensuring that she took absolutely no joy in the process. And I still don't know why.

Was she always this way? Was there ever a time when she felt courage and took joy in life? In her youth, she was beautiful, and judging from the saved finery from that time, she took pleasure in that beauty and tended to it. And there's evidence that she was ambitious, that she did things that surely required her to express a considered opinion, perhaps sometimes even against opposition. Am I misreading the evidence?

What happened?

3 A.M. Thoughts: Transgressions

Mom's gone. As previously discussed.

Writing was Mom's territory. It was a huge part of her identity.

I haven't been writing much.

These are not unrelated facts. I think.

If I had had any success in writing while Mom was alive, she would have tried to be happy for me. She might have been able to act out being happy for me. But she would have been furious. Writing was hers. It was a big part of what made her feel special. And Mom wasn't good at sharing specialness.

When Mom was alive, that fact didn't bother me much. When she made little remarks here and there, I rolled my eyes and ignored her. At least, I think I ignored her. I never did work much on my writing, but that's true of so many wannabe writers that it's not a big mystery that needs unravelling.

But now that she's gone and she can't defend her territory, I find myself shying away from writing. I'm still typing out long strings of paragraphs, but I'm typing them for forums, and emails, and other places that I don't think of as mine. I'm not writing any fiction at all. I'm not writing on the blog. I'm not reading books about writing.

It's OK for me to program, or garden, or sew. Mom had no particular regard for those things, and therefore she would have let success pass unchallenged. I find myself focusing on those things, because I don't have that feeling that I'm transgressing. But writing has now become a sin against my ancestors.

I need to work on this.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Talking Faster

Remember When Harry Met Sally? Of course you do. Marie, Carrie Fisher's character, was dating a married man and waiting for him to leave his wife. People kept telling Marie that that would never happen, and Marie kept groaning, "You're right, you're right, I know you're right."

I keep wanting to write about Mom. And I keep telling myself not to. Because I don't have the impulse to write about all the good things that they talked about at the funeral. What keeps coming back to me is the Mom who wasn't interested in me.

I want to write about the failed struggles to have even two minutes of conversation with Mom that was about me, instead of her. And the times that I talked about myself as fast as I possibly could, because if I let her get a word in edgewise, she'd change the subject to herself, and I just didn't want that to happen yet.

And the resolution that I wasn't going to try again. Just pick up the phone, let her talk about herself for five minutes, make an excuse, and hang up. What's so hard? She will never be interested in you. Got that? Never. Ever. Not gonna happen, no way no how. Are you listening?

"You're right, you're right, I know you're right."

But I could never do it. I complained. I argued. Somebody doesn't complain and argue unless they have hope for change. And when I complained about Mom's behavior with regard to me, that conversation was about Mom, so Mom participated in it. But it was also about me, just a little bit, and I guess that's why I couldn't stop starting those conversations. Mom would participate, and promise to take an interest in me, and I'd test the waters by talking about something about me that wasn't also tightly linked with her... and in thirty seconds we were talking about her.

She always insisted that we weren't. Stories about her childhood? "But he's your cousin, too! That's about you!" The latest thing that someone at church said to her? "But you used to go to that church! That's about you!" I'd try to shift to a movie I went to; that's really about the movie, not me, right? "Did I ever tell you about when I used to work as an usher at a movie theater?"

Yeah.

I don't mean that it was wrong for her to talk about herself. I mean that once in a while, even once in a long while, couldn't we talk about me? Y'know, for maybe three or four conversational exchanges? Two minutes? Ninety seconds? Couldn't we?

No. We couldn't.

I think back, remembering when I was a teenager and Mom and I used to sit at the kitchen table and eat Sunday pastries and margarine. I remember those conversations rather fondly. I remember Mom talking about her love for daffodils, and how her father used to have her deadhead his roses when he was out of town, and her fondness for marzipan, and her religious philosophy, and her opinions about mass transit.

I don't remember talking about my schoolwork. Or the latest book I was reading. Or the Doctor Who episode from last week. Or my friends. Well, I didn't have friends, but I don't think Mom knew that. It's not the kind of thing that she would have noticed.

You see why I shouldn't write about this? But apparently I am anyway.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Back home

So, I'm back from the funeral.

I'm tired. I'm stupid. I'm having occasional inexplicable moments of murderous rage at trivial things. (OK, not that I'd actually murder anyone. Or even yell at them. But, you know.) I ate chicken and ice cream that Himself got for me while I was gone. Himself is not the target of the murderous rage. I like Himself.

OK, that's not much of a post. But I was getting all writers-blocky. So here it is.

Image: By Sfeol. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Road Trip

So, this isn't a story. I mean, it isn't fiction.

There's a picture of my late father, taken probably early in my parents' marriage. To me, he looks young and glamorous and amused and, most of all, angry. I call it the "ya wanna make something of it?" picture. At some point, I learned that it was taken by his mother-in-law. While I was very fond of my grandmother, I remember my father's feelings about his inlaws, and therefore I understand the expression on his face.

There's a picture of my mother, too, the engagement glamor shot that was in the newspaper. She's beautiful, but when I look at that picture I don't feel that I know her. It doesn't have the burst of life that I get from my father's picture. I find myself wanting older pictures, from when she was in high school, or grade school. I find myself wondering if perhaps only a picture of my mother as a toddler would show her as a person that I feel that I could know. There's always been a distance about Mom, a facade that kept me from seeing her and, I think, kept her from seeing me. She went behind that wall long, long ago, and she never came out again.

Last night I dreamed about my father. He had dark hair and wore a fine Gatsbyish summer suit, and he had the youth and confidence of that old photo. Except he wasn't angry in the dream; he was amused and exuberant in a way that I never remember seeing him in life. He was performing some task, some duty that he was happy to do. And he was driving; the duty involved a car journey.

Mom's been sick, very sick, and I remember waking up and thinking, "If she died last night, a sentimental person would think that he was coming to pick her up." Not, no, in the sense of a reunion of true love; they never got along, at least not in my memory. But she never could take big steps without somebody's help, and he was always driving her places. If there's somewhere to go after you die, I can certainly imagine him giving her a ride there.

And then I learned that, yes, Mom died last night. I'm writing this on the plane. It's sentimental, and I hate it when I'm sentimental, but I'm imagining the two of them on their way somewhere. He'll drop her off and get her settled, and someone will take care of her and comfort her like the frightened child that she's always been. She'll have her chance to fix whatever it was that kept her from fully inhabiting her life or knowing the people in it, to wash out the anger and to ease the relentless emotional hunger that never seemed to leave her any peace.

Well, I claimed that this wasn't fiction. Does that mean that I believe that ending to this story? I don't know. But I like it.

Photos: Mom and Dad

Rambling: Sundays and Grudges

My goal this weekend was to keep tidying and decluttering. My success was limited, but there are five boxes of books, one of magazines, and one of clothes, bundled up and ready to go. These don't count as DCOTD material, because they haven't gone yet, but it's still good.

And there are substantial pockets of tidy. I'm particularly pleased with the hall shelves, all nice and neat and organized for use. There's a section for library and borrowed and new books. And another for books waiting to be shelved. And the subset of cooking magazines that we're keeping is organized in month groups--after all, in November you don't care about the recipes from Thanksgiving of 2007; you just want all the Thanksgiving issues. And the popcorn bowl for wallet cards that are rarely used, like the cupcake punch card or the discount card for the bookstore in another state that we may get to a few times a year.

Details, details; what's my point? My point, I think, is that it delights me to have a home that has systems.

See, I grew up in a hoarded home. Oh, it was a mildly hoarded home--it would never never make it through the audition process for either of the Hoarders shows. But an important thing to know about a hoarded home is that it's organized for the convenience of the hoard, not for its occupants, not even for the hoarder. A hoarded home is owned by the stuff. And systems are for people, not stuff. Therefore, we didn't have systems. Most of the closet and bureau and cabinet space in the house was filled with rarely-used junk, and the things that we actually used either had to be shoehorned in and out, or had to find some surface to perch on. Even the refrigerator crisper generally contained more decayed than usable food.

The situation wasn't entirely out of control. When it was no longer possible to put a fresh item in the crisper, it would finally get cleaned out. The junk usually only filled the closets and bureaus, and maybe a thin layer stacked on top or nearby; the piles were low, and there wasn't much overflow onto the floor. But that strikes me as all the stranger. Clearly the situation wasn't one of uncontrollable accumulation. But if it was possible to stop accumulating when all of the storage, plus a bit more, was full of stale unused items, why wasn't it possible to clear some space for items in actual use?

It was as if a home that was arranged in any way for daily life was a little bit distasteful. We crept around the edges of the house, using elements of it rather like a peasant farmer, tasked to maintain an ornamental garden, might surreptitiously grow a few vegetables in a corner somewhere. Concern for our own convenience and comfort would be like eating an ice cream cone in church, except it's not a deity being worshipped, but junk. I find it interesting that my metaphors are about food. Our home didn't feed us. We fed it; we fed it junk, and then we left it in peace and tried not to disturb it as it digested.

The house did let people live there, but grudgingly. Drawers stuck and weren't fixed, handles fell out and weren't replaced, one of the stove burners failed and was never repaired, the bottom of the sink cabinet rotted out and was never renewed. One of the base supports for my dresser fell out of the front right leg regularly, several times a year, and several times a year I took the bottom drawer out and shoved the support back in the leg. It never occurred to me that it could ever actually be fixed. It wouldn't hold any more stuff if it were repaired, it would only be more convenient for the humans, and what did that matter? I remember my puzzlement when a neighbor friend talked me into painting my battered old bedside table; the idea of making a household item prettier and cleaner was a revelation to me.

The rice pot--I've mentioned that rice pot--had no handle on either pot or lid. We used the pot a few times a week, but why should a handle matter? Handles are for people. Closets exist to hold as many hangers and garments as possible; the people who might want to use a tiny subset of those garments are just there on tolerance. I maintained a running battle against my room, organizing the junk into the drawers and closet and making the room look civilized for a brief moment, only to have it revert to chaos again in days. It never occurred to me to keep less junk; that would, again, just make the room more convenient for me.

I'm casting all of the issues with my childhood home as being about hoarding; I know that there were other issues, there were relationship issues, there were two adults who were too unhappy with their lives to do anything about the stage on which those lives were acted out. I sometimes wonder if I'm just nursing petty grievances.

I do feel grievances. I couldn't dream of having a school friend over to the house. My parents never, ever had people over; I reached a pretty advanced age before I realized that adults had friends. We were so isolated that I was well into my school years before I was able to speak to a stranger to order my food at a restaurant; for years, my parents had to order for me. That fact apparently didn't worry them. Neither did the fact that, aside from a neighbor or two, no friends visited my home or invited me to visit theirs. I often wonder; should it have worried them?

But I had heat, functioning plumbing, clean clothes, and safe food. It was possible to find a flat surface to do homework on. By the standards of the average life of a child of a hoarder, I was in heaven. Sometimes I think I should be grateful; sometimes I think I should be furious.

Image: By Christina. Wikimedia Commons.

Smell Series: New Barbie Doll

After analyzing all of the possible reasons why this blog has gone into a coma, I'm going with the obvious: It's the perfume-buying moratorium. The one where I forbid myself to buy any perfume until August. That one. Apparently my brain refuses to blog about perfume when it knows that it can't buy any.

OK, fine, be that way, brain. See if I care. But can I have a blog about smells? Non perfume smells? I'm declaring a series. And I'm starting with one of my favorite smells, the scent of New Barbie Doll.

It seems faintly odd to write about dolls, especially a fashion maven like Barbie, because I was never a fashion-focused girly girl. Once I got past toddlerhood, big enough to be opinionated and no longer a passive doll to dress up, Mom lost interest in those things for me. So the whole feminine-frippery-sharing thing didn't really happen.

Mom and I did interact on the girly front, but "front" might be the right word. She insisted on getting my hair combable-tangle-free and with an unflattering razor-straight center part every day; I stole a piece of the red silk scarf that her mother had given her a piece of. There wasn't exactly a meeting of the minds. We came much closer to bonding over food. Or her mother; why do you think I stole the scarf? But those are different smells. (I still haven't found her mother's perfume.)

Come to think of it, this leads me to another possible reason why I'm not writing: Because I need to write about Mom, and I'm not ready to do so, except in little bits and fits and starts and passive-aggressive side remarks in my posts on other subjects. I need to reconcile my gratitude that she taught me to love things like marzipan and daffodils with my resentment that there wasn't more that we shared, that she wasn't (and isn't) sufficiently interested in me for there to be more. I need to reconcile the person that I told myself that she was, with the person that she really was and is. I need to accept that while I adored her parents, her childhood wasn't exactly ideal either. I need to figure out why I think of her in the past tense, when she's still just a phone call and a thousand or so miles away.

I need to decide whether I'm relieved or angry that I can safely write about her here, because she's not going to bother to read my blog. To steal the phrase, she's just not that into me.

One of the things that Mom did do, was Christmas. I don't know how our holidays compared to those for other kids, but I do know that when we were small my brother and I were presented with a Christmas that fulfilled our--or at least my; I shouldn't speak when I don't know his mind--shiny get-up-in-the-wee-hours-with-a-pounding-heart hopes. And I'm pretty sure that Mom was a big part of that.

I do find myself pausing and wondering: When both parents were shambling around sleepily at one o'clock Christmas morning, was Mom the one primarily producing the shiny? Am I mistaken, and was it mainly Dad? I always took it as an article of faith that Mom cared about our Christmas, that it was one of the times when she looked outside herself to do something for other people, and I think it's true. If it's not true, well, maybe Dad, now that he's gone, won't mind giving Mom the credit if it's what she needs to get and what I need to give her.

So. Christmas. The Christmas tree, and special snacks that were exotic to my childhood self, and dinner, and comfy family rituals, and of course gifts. Our Christmas gifts were mostly about new toys--clothes and educational toys were not invited. Toys weren't bought casually throughout the year; they had to wait for holidays or birthdays, making them all the more special. Christmas meant toys that I wanted, that I discovered from hours and hours with the Sears Wish Book. Not what Mom thought I should want, but what I actually wanted. On that subject, Mom was interested enough to hear me.

New toys had those smells, those modern, manufactured, no doubt horribly unhealthy smells, and I loved those smells. The dusty smell of bright-colored cardboard boxes, the barely-there and indescribable smell of clear plastic enclosures, the fabric-treatment smell of new doll clothes, and most importantly, the wonderful rubbery-plastic smell of a new Barbie doll.

I still love those dolls. Even as an adult, when I'm near the toy department of a big store I'll sometimes go to look at the doll displays, savoring the idea that I could buy whatever I please, though I never do. And I love the smell wherever I find it, even in an eraser or the rubberized handle of a new garden trowel. New Barbie Doll Note, I'm realizing, perhaps meant not just new childhood wealth, but times when Mom demonstrated that she cared and that she knew who I was.

Now, Barbie herself was not my favorite character in the BarbieVerse. I preferred Skipper, especially back when she was ungiggly and flat-chested and straight-haired and intelligent-looking and lacking in scarey eye makeup. It was Skipper that had the ever-growing handmade-by-me wardrobe (including at least one garment made from that stolen red silk scarf), selections of which were carried in stuff sacks before I knew what a stuff sack was, as she travelled on endless adventures with her dog, Fateful. Yes, I'm sure that I got the name from some TV dog named Faithful. Which meaning did I think I was getting? I wish I knew.

And then there was Dawn, a short, twenties-flapper-figured clone of Barbie, with another intelligent face, though she was laughing and not sober like Skipper. And the Sunshine Family, a cheerful trio that I wished I could meet in real life and, interestingly, the only ones that I cared to keep into adulthood. But they all smelled like New Barbie Doll when they first arrived.

So... this post was going to be about shiny toys, and seems to have instead led me in a cranky direction. But it did lead; I didn't have to get out and push.

Image: By Joe Mabel. Wikimedia Commons.