Because I Said So!

Living with the embodiment of Scarlett O’Hara can be tough for a messy and clumsy fat girl. Beyond all human understanding is the fact that my mother does not sweat. I have seen her standing over the stove, canning green beans while the heat and steam were wafting up from a big boiling pot of water and there wouldn’t be a single bead of sweat on her brow. I have watched her plant flowers, iron clothes, paint walls, and even whip the fire out of my fanny with a wooden spoon and still she never broke a sweat. I just have to breathe heavy and I’m soaked. It wasn’t fair. How could I possibly present myself in a lady like fashion to emulate my pristine mother if I was going to sweat like a gorilla? There was no hope for me.

My mother’s hair and make-up was always perfect. She spent quite a bit of time drawing it on every morning. What I never understood was why she spent time each night taking it all off and then putting an abbreviated version of it back on before going to bed. She would say, “Because I want to look pretty for your Daddy.” And I would think to myself ‘but he can’t see her in the dark can he?’. She also spent much time working on her hair. It had to curl and fluff and wave just right. I would watch her in the mirror as she twirled it with curlers and curling irons and applied all kinds of sprays and gels to it. It always looked perfect. The wind never blew it out of place. In comparison, my hair always looked like a rat made a nest in it.

To further maintain her sad and unrealistic dream of having a girly-girl, she kept my hair long. It was below my shoulders for several years. I hated it. It was hot. It was thick. And it was a magnet for dirt, leaves, and the occasional lady bug. My grandmother was, among other things, a cosmetologist at some point in her life. We made dutiful visits to her house each weekend. These visits were comprised of the two of them having me sit on a stool in the middle of my grandmother’s kitchen and then my mother and grandmother spending what felt like hours fiddling around with my hair while they talked and discussed and generally solved all the world’s problems. I was too young to follow their conversations so I was bored out of my mind. Sitting on the stool for so long made my butt hurt and I would wiggle a lot. Having them brush, curl, perm, twist, pin, and continuously style my hair for hours on end was torture. But I sat there and I tried to be still and I tried to be polite and I tried not to interrupt so my mother would be happy and, at the end of the torture session I could, for one small five minutes, look like the girly-girl she was hoping I could be. And then five minutes later, after finally being released to play in the back yard, my hair would again look like a rat made a nest in it.

One day when I was much older I said to my Aunt, “I’ve given up trying to be as lady-like and perfect as Momma. Her hair is always perfect. Her makeup is never streaked. Her clothes don’t even wrinkle. I don’t understand it. There is no way I will ever achieve that state of perfection!” My aunt replied with a snort, “Try being her sister and growing up next to it!” I felt a warm bond with my aunt in that moment. She understood my dilemma! She understood the impossibility of being so perfect all the time. Thank God it wasn’t just me and I was not alone!

The last and final attempt my mother made to save her dream of having a girly-girl was to enroll me in dancing lessons. She was so excited to announce that she had signed me up for Tap, Ballet, Jazz, and Gymnastic lessons. She had this beautiful and encouraging smile on her face. Her enthusiasm was electric. I, however, burst into tears. “Oh my GOD! OH MY GOD, MOMMA! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? Oh NOOOOOO!!!”

This was not the response she was hoping for. I begged and I pleaded and I cried and I begged some more but there was no getting out of it. “I’ve already paid for a whole YEAR of lessons! You just turn your mind around, young lady, because you’re going to dancing lessons and that’s all there is to it!” And I cried some more, “But whhhyyyyyy meeeeee?????” And she said, “Because I said so! That’s why! Now hush up before I give you something to cry about, young lady!”

And that was the end of that. So twice a week I went to dance class. I can not even begin to describe to you the embarrassment, humiliation, and pain of it. These days my mother is now fond of telling me, “You can’t expect a frog to fly, Jacque.” I wish she would have learned that particular piece of wisdom in time to have saved me from the degredation of stuffing my fat self into that damn black leotard and dragging those uncomfortable and saggy pink tights up my flabby thighs. Here’s the complete version of that particular piece of wisdom: You can’t expect a frog to fly and you can’t make a messy, clumsy fat girl a ballerina, either. No matter how much you might “say so!”.

It was a long and dreadful year. She drug me to class every week. I cried every time on the way there and on the way home. There was nothing fun about it for me. Well, I take that back. I did like learning how to twirl the baton. I wasn’t so good at walking around while I was doing it. But I could twirl fairly well. And I enjoyed smacking my brother around with my baton any chance I got. It was an opportunity to take out my anger on someone else since I couldn’t very well slam my mother upside the head with my baton and it would not have occurred to me, at that age, to have shoved it up her perfectly dressed ass. So I endured. If this experience taught me anything it did teach me that nothing lasts forever. Nine grueling months later, it was time for Dance Recital. Oh God, the horror of it all ... cameras, costumes, pictures, people looking at me on stage ... oh GOD it was enough to make me want to explode into a million pieces.

Backstage, as she helped me don my white gloves decorated with green four leaf clovers and my green glittered straw hat, I begged her to please just let me go home and not make me go through with this. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t remember any of the steps. I was having an anxiety attack and didn’t know it. And she said, “Now young lady, you’ve worked hard these past 9 months to get ready for your show and I expect to see you go through with it. So you can just turn your mind around, dry those tears, and paste a smile on your face. Ladies do not cry on stage. And you are my little lady. So get up there and get through it!”

I turned towards the stairs that led up to the stage, dragging my fat, clumsy self towards my ultimate public humiliation and looked back over my shoulder at Momma with big tears welling in my eyes. My only saving grace was that my dance teacher had wisely placed me at the very end of the very back row so I wasn’t going to be seen by many people anyway. As the curtain started going up, I sniffed really big and swallowed and I heard this loud whisper coming from backstage, “Jacque? Jacque! When this is all over, we’ll go to Dairy Queen and get ice cream, ok??!!” Was there no end to this nightmare? Now everyone who heard what my mother said as her voice echoed it’s way across the auditorium would think that the fat girl in the back line only performs for ice cream. Thanks Mom. Thanks a lot. No one will be looking at me now, I’m sure.

The dancing experience was, thankfully, the end of my mother’s attempt to re-live her Shirley Temple childhood through me. As I entered the awkwardness of my teenage years, she came to realize that damage control was going to be her most viable option at this point.