Hair, by Gillian

Looking back on it, I had rather nice hair when I was young, in a typically English way; golden-brown with a few coppery highlights. But I didn't appreciate it one whit at the time. My mother created two braids for me every morning until she began school teaching again, at which time she announced it had become my responsibility. I was somewhere in the early grades at Elementary School so I guess I was six, maybe seven. Braids were the only thing I knew, so I continued them. Unfortunately, my pudgy little arms were not sufficiently flexible, not were my young fingers skilled enough, to create the braids at the back of my head. Instead, I pulled half of the loose hair forward over each shoulder and braided it from the front, resulting in braids which refused to hang down my back. No matter how often I shoved them back, they persistently sprang forward to flop down my chest. They were almost waist-length and seemed constantly to inhibit the important things in life such as lessons or games. The morning one of them dunked itself in my toast and honey was the last straw.

So I cut them off.
Inexpertly.
Unevenly.
With old, blunt, rusty, scissors.
The second I had done it, I panicked.
What had I done?
Why oh why had I done it?

I looked about me as I scooped my severed braids up from where they languished on the kitchen floor. Even as I gazed hopefully about for somewhere to hide them, as young as I was, an inescapable logic told me that there was absolutely no possibility that no-one would notice my lack of them.

My mother came into the kitchen. She stared at me, then at the lifeless braids hanging from my little fists. She remained silent, uttering not even a grunt or a sigh. She propelled me into the living room, gently took the braids from me and tossed them casually onto the open fire. I stared, in equal silence, as the hair, my hair, curled and crackled and sparked, turned rapidly black, and gave off a sickening odor. And it was gone.

I risked a sideways peak at my mother, who resumed her place in the old armchair: picked up her book, sipped her tea. I squinted at Dad, in the other armchair, reading a car magazine and sipping his tea. He was on an afternoon tea-break from chopping wood. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the grandfather clock standing on duty in its corner and the contented purr of the cat re-settling herself on Mum's knee. I stood on the hearth, shuffling my feet, waiting for whatever was going to happen, to happen.

Dad put his magazine and tea cup down on the little table beside his chair, looked up at me and gave a solemn wink.

'Get your coat on,' was all he said.

We walked, my hand in his, across the fields through a cold drizzle, to the neighboring farm where we immediately saw and heard the farmer, in his barn, attempting some work on the tractor engine. He was addressing it with a string of very bad words, which he swallowed back down his throat the moment he saw me.

' 'Ow do' he greeted us genially, adding to my dad, as he jerked his head towards the engine, 'Bloody lucky you're 'ere.'

I never heard either of my parents even say bloody, but it was inoffensive enough to Mr. Llewellyn that he let it slip right through his filtering system.

'Ay,' my dad replied, 'Lucky you're 'ere an' all.'

By way of explanation he pirouetted me around.

'Bloody 'ell!' was the response as Mr. Llewellyn grinned at me, a very rare event, displaying many gaps in his jagged brown teeth. He shoved his greasy flat cap to the back of his head.

'Dog been chewing at yer 'air?'

He waved me to a filthy old bench outside the barn and reached for an equally filthy leather bag up on a shelf.

For the first time since I'd picked up those scissors, I relaxed. This was familiar territory. I knew what to expect. More or less on a monthly basis my dad came to the farm to have what little hair he had left cut by Mr. Llewellyn with his sheep shears. Money never changed hands. Dad was terrific with engines, so he worked on the tractor engine in return. I sometimes went along and communed with various animals while the shears took a swift swipe just above my father's scalp. So I felt no trepidation as the shears approached. I knew they were kept viciously sharp, but I had never seen my dad's head receive as much as a tiny nick. In no time we were done. No mirror to be held up so that I could offer my approval, simply a nod and a grin from Dad. I sat and waited for a few minutes while the two men grunted at each other and pointed to things like wires and spark plugs, and soon we were greeted by the welcome, if not too promising for the longterm, cough and splutter of the ancient tractor.

My mother reasserted control over my hair, cutting it herself with my dad's cut-throat razor, still his preferred shaving implement but he apparently had no objection to sharing. The erstwhile braids were not mentioned again. Many years later, I asked Mom why she had reacted so strangely; so silently.

'I think I was in shock,' she replied. "It wasn't that it was such a terrible thing. Just such a surprise. I had no idea. Why had you never told me you hated your braids?'

Because, I wanted to say, because .... because, Mum, we weren't that kind of family. We never talked about anything deeper than the weather or the next meal.

But I said nothing. What was the point? A relationship is not too likely to change much after decades of entrenchment.

If I had been asked, while my parents were still alive, who I was closer to, I would unhesitatingly have said my mother. As an only child with few other kids nearby to play with, I spent a lot of time with Mom. I have written often enough before about our strangely flawed relationship, but nevertheless we got on well. She was a fun person to be with. She loved to play games and she loved to laugh.

My dad was quiet, never using more than the minimum amount of words necessary, and it took looking back from a considerable distance for me to see how his actions spoke for him, loud and clear.

Now they are both gone, I feel myself growing ever closer to my father. If asked, now, to whom I feel closest, I would definitely say my dad. It surprises me, this change of heart, but perhaps it's simply a clearer understanding I've gained over the years of both Mum and Dad, and my relationship with them.

Ah well! Death, just like life, is full of surprises.


© January 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

Pets by Gillian

My mother was a great one for pets. She had pet peeves, pet grievances, pet projects, pet phrases, and, being a school teacher, even teacher's pets! She herself used these expressions.

"Oh, you know that's one of my pet peeves," she'd say as a hand projected from a passing car to deposit unsightly fish-and-chip wrapping in the flowering hedgerow. Split infinitives was another. Star Trek was after her time, but I cannot hear that phrase, to boldly go, without imagining how she would have given a sharp intake of breath, shaken her head sadly, and told the TV, admonishingly, "It's either boldly to go, or to go boldly, NOT to boldly go!"  Split infinitives, she always stated, set her teeth on edge. Fortunately for her, being a teacher, fingernails on the blackboard did not!

I, also, have pet peeves; people who, chatting on their cellphones, crash their grocery carts into my ankles. Or almost crash their car into my car. Or shout into their cellphones at the table next to mine in a restaurant, or in line at the supermarket. Or those who, speaking of the supermarket line, react in astonishment when the clerk implies that they need actually to pay (see, no split infinitive!) for their groceries, and begin an endless hunt, in a bottomless purse, for their checkbook.

Mom's pet grievances, and they were many, were all sub-titles. They related, mostly directly, occasionally indirectly, to the the Grand Category of Grievances: my father. What he had ever done to deserve this, I never could ascertain; but I have written about this before so will not repeat myself. Suffice it to say that I loved my dad, and never truly understood Mom's animosity.

When I say I loved him, I don't mean that he was my dad so of course I loved him in spite of all his faults and wrong-doings. I mean that I loved him because of who he was, not despite it.

I have my own grievances, but most of mine, or so I like to think, are general rather than personal.  "A feeling of resentment over something believed to be wrong or unfair," says the online dictionary.  Given that definition, yes, I grieve every war and every youth sacrificed to it. I grieve every starving person with no food to eat, and every thirsty person with no water to drink. I grieve man's inhumanity to man, but then you've heard all that before, too. In the last couple of years or so I find myself forced to grieve for young black people killed, no, let's use the right word here, murdered, for no reason other than the color of their skin, by angry bigoted white men.

My mother's pet projects, in the sense of those which go on, year after year, were writing, both poetry and prose, and pressing flowers. I do my best with writing, and truly love doing it, but the pressed flowers somehow passed me by. I do love to photograph them, though, so perhaps that's some kind of higher-tech equivalent. My latest pet project is organizing my photos into a series of theme books.

And so to pet phrases!

Do as you would be done by. If the whole world lives by those few words, what a wonderful world it would be!

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. We, as a society, definitely have abandoned that one!

Oh dear! What will people think? Mom, a product of an age when appearances greatly mattered, said that quite frequently to both me and my dad, neither of us great respecters of neighbors' judgments.  

This one was somewhat at odds with another pet phrase of Mom's.

"Just be comfortable," she'd respond, in any discussion of what to wear, but then proceed to "what will people think?" when I arrived in slacks or my dad without a tie. Mom was not without her inconsistencies, but we learned easily enough how to deal with them and my mother was, on the whole, considerate, sweet, and kind. As with my dad, I loved her very much, simply for who she was.

My mother had, quite literally, generations of teacher's pets. She began teaching in the local two-room school in 1928 and retired in the early 1970's, so, except for few years out in the 40's, she taught in the same room for about forty years. At the end she was teaching some whose grandparents she had taught.  

"Oh that little Johnny Batchett!" she'd exclaim. She never denied having favorites but she would never have treated them as the classic teachers’ pets. She would have taken great care never to show any hint of favoritism.

"He's got that same little cheeky smile as his granddad! He's got his mother's dimples though. The girls are going to be round him like bees around the honey! Of course, his dad was just the same. All 'love them and leave them' young Tom was, till those dimples hooked him fair and square ..... " and off she'd go.

" ...... but that Yvonne Atkins! What a little madam! Still, what can you expect? Her mum and dad, both such discipline problems at that age. I'll never forget the time ......."  My dad would give me his covert wink, and we'd settle down to listen, or at least pretend we were.

Recalling Mom's pet thises and thats reminds me, once again, how the world has changed over the course of my life. Not too many people these days are taught by the same person who taught their grandparents, or even their parents. Or even, come to that, an older sibling.

Most of us care little what anyone thinks of the way we look, or often even the way we act.  Those old admonitions such as the Golden Rule, once painstakingly embroidered and hung on the wall, have more or less disappeared; I'm quite sure they aren't about to go viral any time soon. I'm not suggesting we abided by such things in our day, but at least we were aware of the concept; perhaps we tried.

Yes, I am being an old curmudgeon. My own pet peeves and grievances grow apace.  Well why not? There is much of this Brave New World I do not like.  But there would, I suspect, be more to dislike, knowing what I now know, if I returned to that rose-colored past, than there is in the reality of the present. Why would I want to return to a world where homosexuality was illegal? A woman having a baby was forced to quit her job, and for this reason could not get a loan to buy a house or car in her own name, no matter how well paid she was. And even after the birth control pill gave women much better control over their own reproductive rights, it was illegal to provide [or] prescribe them for an unmarried woman.  No. I really want np part of it.

As for the future, who knows?

As Jay Asher says, in his novel Thirteen Reasons Why -

"You can't stop the future

You can't rewind the past

The only way to learn the secret

... is to press play."

So as I'm not yet quite ready to press the stop button, and certainly not the eject, I guess I'd better do just that!

© 18 August 2014 

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

From God to Santa Claus by Gillian

If you grew up when most of us here did, in the nineteen-thirties or 'forties, practically every figure of influence and power, from God to Santa Claus, was male. Oh sure there was Mom, and maybe some other female family members; even possibly a teacher, nurse, or some kind of social worker in the traditionally female nurturing/caring roles. But the police, firemen, ministers, lawyers, doctors, drivers, sports figures, business owners, politicians, bankers, musicians and artists, etc etc, were almost exclusively male, with one or two rare exceptions.

When today's topic of The Women in My Life came up, I expected to bore you all some more with ravings about My Beautiful Betsy - and not that she is not deserving of it - but a couple of weeks ago the topic Sports brought me to a different approach. Many women talked about the bond they had developed with their fathers over sports. Or maybe it was the bond they had developed with sports through their fathers! And not to denigrate father-daughter relationships, but I was struck by the lack of mothers or even grandmothers. They simply did not figure. They were not there. So I am going to talk about the leitmotif which seems to have followed me - Women (not) in My Life.

I have written before about my mother, but in case anyone has been woefully remiss and not memorized every word I've ever written, I'll repeat it briefly as she was the first woman who was not in my life; not in the way I wanted and needed her to be, at least. There was some unidentifiable something that came between us. It left a gap; a space. She wasn't with me. Children intuit things but cannot possibly explain them, even to themselves. Much later in my life, a psychiatrist interpreted this all for me and I think she had got it right. It feels right to me.

In my teens my aunt told me my parents had had two children who died before I was born. At ages I think two and three, they died of meningitis in 1940. My mother, the therapist postulated, could not bare the prospect of a repeat of such pain, so she didn't allow herself to be as close to me as she doubtless would have been otherwise. That explained so much. I loved my mother and she loved me. I was never in doubt of that, but nevertheless she was, in some sense, not in my life.

As far back as I can remember, decades before I came out even to myself, I have always been in love with some female figure in my life. Only one at a time. Even in my fantasy world I was seriously, if serially, monogamous. They were wonderful friends but were never in my life the way I wished they were; needed them to be. Of course I only recognized this at some deeply buried subliminal level, so I didn't even give them the chance to be what I only dreamed of. Those with whom I am still in contact were, when I told them of my long-ago love, flattered rather than horrified. I seem to have chosen wisely, these women who were not in my life!

I don't think I have ever met a lesbian who was not at some stage in love with her gym teacher. I am no exception. But I was a pudgy un-athletic child who did not impress her at all.

I played on the high school field hockey and tennis teams only because it was a very small school requiring all hands to the wheel. I enjoyed both, probably mostly due to my infatuation, lapping up her gentle criticism as I would have praise from my other teachers. When she married the geography teacher I was broken hearted, but then she never was really in my life.

Growing up in England, I had certain female role models absent in the U.S. When I was nine, the king died and Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne. She's been there ever since and seems, as I'm sure it must to Prince Charles, destined to live forever. Previous queens, Elizabeth the First and Victoria, lived long and reigned well. Women in power were nothing new. But they had been born to it. That's the only way you get there! You don't think, as a "commoner" in Britain, maybe I should work towards being queen when I grow up!

Maggie Thatcher, of  course, did spring from common stock. I could admire the position she had; the power she had taken. But her politics were not mine. The family I had still remaining in Britain despised her. She was a role model in some sense, perhaps, but she was not in my life: nor would I want her to be.

Even the musicians and artists of the day were overwhelmingly male. Come on, I know you can rattle off half a dozen world-famous male landscape or portrait painters. How many women can you name?

Ah, but the times they are a-changing!

In 1970 only 10% of doctors in the U.S. were women. Now the number is over 30%, with women making up half of the students in Medical School. The percentage of women in the legal profession these days is much the same. After the recent mid-term election, there will be more women in Congress than ever before. (One of the few good things to come from that election, sadly) There is no longer any shortage of women athletes. When I grew up, we would have considered it a joke if anyone had prophesied that within our lifetimes we would watch women's teams competing in soccer, and all the way up to the Olympics. Coaching is rather a different story. Many women, in teams or in individual sports, employ male rather than female coaches, something I find hard to understand. Many in individual sports are coached by their fathers, but only occasionally by mothers. And as for women coaching men, well....... But there are a few examples even of that, one very notable. Brit. tennis champion Andy Murray, winner of Wimbledon and an Olympic gold medal, was originally coached by his mother and is currently coached by Amelie Mauresmo, an openly lesbian French tennis champion. Some changes are slow in coming. Women currently hold only 5% of Fortune 500 companies' CEO positions. But it will come. Hard as the Republicans might try to push women's rights back into the Dark Ages, I cannot believe they will succeed. We have come too far and fought too long to go back now.

I feel the loss of the many women (not) in my life, but they are in fact still with me, if in some cases only in memory, and the relationship I have with them now is genuine, real, in a way it never could be before. One of the women I was madly in love with for years, remains my closest friend as she has been for almost fifty years. We love each other like sisters and there are no longer all those confused emotions on my part to complicate our love. My mother is still with me. She always will be. I hear her chuckle at some silliness - she had a great sense of humor. And now at least I have a little understanding of the flaw in our relationship, and the reason for it, I accept that it was not about me, so I am free of the many negative, confused, emotions it once visited upon me.

My latest loss of a female is that of Brunhilda! She, as most of you know, was our VW camper van which we drove over 100,000 miles around this country. She, Betsy, and I, had a little menage a trois for 15 years. Sadly the old girl got battered and worn out and way too expensive to maintain so it was time to say goodbye. But the story ends happily. She went to live with a man who restores these beasts. So after a while, with new hips and knees and a heart transplant, she'll be in better shape than any of us. And perhaps, as she remains with us only in memory, we will learn in fact to love her more. Because in real time there were more than a few occasions when I came close to wishing she was one of those women (not) join my life. It was something of a stormy relationship, to say the least! Now we can just gaze fondly at our photographs and see her through those rose-colored glasses we all tend to favor as the years go by. And all those women once (not) in my life slide quietly into their correct, comfortable, and comforting, places, whether in my life or only in my memory.

© 27 November 2014

About the Author

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.