![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babydramatic_1950At 14, I suddenly became fatherless (my father died of a heart attack on the street). There was a large, secular funeral. We had very little family, but my parents had a large circle of friends, and as a tenured university professor, my father had a coterie of adoring adjuncts and students. Nonetheless, we had no prescribed rituals. One friend of my father’s, an atheistic secular Jew, said that “these times are hard for people like us”, meaning that no religious tradition told us what the next steps should be. In fact, on the morning we were told that my father had died, I was not even sure whether or not I was supposed to go to school.
My father’s death was traumatic, but it hardly left me feeling “orphan-like” or “Dickensian,” a prototype very much in my thoughts because by the time my father died I had read almost all of Dickens, fallen in love with his works, and been intrigued by the large number of orphans, or at least children without mothers, who seemed to have lives of freedom that I could only dream of. So our family was deprived of an upper-middle-class income and a stern patriarch, but, counterintuitively, “parenting” increased exponentially as my mother fearfully micromanaged everything I did, much more than she had previously, particularly as one of my father’s interventions had been “leave her alone!” not to mention that he wanted at least some of her attention on him, not me. And there were even more mountains of food than had been supplied by the lavish dinners my mother had served every night to welcome my father home, dinners which, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert, contained more than a day’s caloric requirement for a 14-year-old desperate to get her BMI below 25. Thanks to the endless hordes of friends and neighbors trying to be helpful and sympathetic, there was now a round-the-clock feast, and a house filled with round-the-clock guests. Fifty years later, I realized that by endlessly eating and socializing, my mother was dealing with grief, but certainly neither she nor I were “pining” which, as a euphemism for weight loss, was the prevailing stereotype of grieving.
I did not have a good relationship with my father during the last two years of his life. Only a few months before he died we had had a knock-down, screaming, physical fight over my anger that a classmate, Hannah (not her real name)—skinny, quasi-orphaned (her divorced mother had lost her job and had dispersed her four daughters to stay with various friends and relatives), bitchy, and oh, so Dickensian—had been living with us. My father told me to feel sorry for her. I called her a bitch (not to her face, but in a loud voice within her earshot, in a family argument) because not only had she taunted me for being fat, she had also cajoled and wheedled my mother into making a Laura Ashley type shift dress for her like the one she had made me, and then had preened around telling me how much better she looked in it than I did. In any event, my no-holds-barred rage at Hannah led my father to beat me (something he had only done once before, when, while on a crash diet, I had had a screaming tantrum—about nothing—fueled by low blood sugar) all the while telling me how fortunate I was compared with Hannah. In retrospect I realize that what hurt me more than the beating was the fact that he “just didn’t get it”. I did not feel more fortunate than Hannah. She was everything I wanted to be: thin (despite eating whatever she felt like), independent (even when she was living “at home” with her mother she mostly supported herself with babysitting money), self-confident, and skilled at squeezing sympathy and admiration out of other people. She might have elicited some sympathy from me if she had had any of the cultural markers of poverty that I had been taught to be aware of—poor speech, ignorance of books and of the arts, clothes of inferior make—but she did not. Really the only two things that set her apart from other girls our age whom I might have invited for a sleepover were her crooked teeth, and the fact that she did not own a pair of pajamas, but instead slept in frayed dungaree shorts and a t shirt.
It took me years to realize that the most critical sequela of my father’s death was not a reprieve from future beatings or my mother’s endless dinner parties mostly peopled by catty gay men and sexually exploratory girls in their twenties (not the best role models for a teenage daughter), but our permanent fall from the “professional middle class”. At first I did not notice it because the only things that ended were things I hated anyhow. I no longer went to a private school, and we stopped going away for extended periods during the summer. I was thrilled to be out of the private school where I was at the mercy of two girl cliques: the rich Jewish girls who showed off their clothes and social precocity, and the thin WASP-y girls who showed off their forever pre-pubescent thinness. And I couldn’t have cared less if we didn’t go away much. Who at 14 wants to take a vacation with her parents? Excursions out of town did still occur, but they were fewer and farther between. By that point, I hated them, even the summer weekends, because at the height of my obsession with my weight (whatever I weighed that particular month) I loathed and feared summer clothes and usually kept on a knee-length skirt and stayed away from the beach (and of course it was impossible to stick to any kind of diet if I was either someone’s guest or staying in a hotel). And even worse, my mother, with her misguided generosity, once or twice took Hannah on one of these trips, which for me was sheer Hell. My mother seemed to adore Hannah (this adoration took the form of a combination of pity and admiration), and the bitter irony of it all was that what my mother adored about Hannah was her feistiness, spunk, and independence, traits that my mother’s style of “helicopter parenting” made it impossible for me to develop.
Years later, a mentor of mine referred to women like Hannah as “killer waifs”, And reader, I ended up with one as a life partner, albeit one whose saving grace was that she adored me, thought I was gorgeous at any weight, made me feel like a princess, and was extremely generous with money when she had any.
Combining a casual elegance (she was of course very thin and ectomorphically built, and rarely ate anything substantial) with a chaotic lifestyle (her apartment was filled with junk and completely disorganized and she was always on the edge of financial disaster) she reminded me of the eccentric waifs all ages, genders, and persuasions who graced my mother’s dinner table after my father died. After she and I became an “item”, I felt that I was in a dream come true: in the midst of a whirlwind romance, living the sort of improvisational quasi-foodless lifestyle that I had longed for as a teenager immersed in Dickens.
Now almost 70, as a legally single woman in a studio apartment (I still have the same life partner but we do not live together) living on a very modest income, without any family, I suppose I am a kind of waif and orphan myself (when my partner dies I will have no one with whom to spend Thanksgiving, for example). But sadly, I am now much too old to be anyone’s Hannah.
My father’s death was traumatic, but it hardly left me feeling “orphan-like” or “Dickensian,” a prototype very much in my thoughts because by the time my father died I had read almost all of Dickens, fallen in love with his works, and been intrigued by the large number of orphans, or at least children without mothers, who seemed to have lives of freedom that I could only dream of. So our family was deprived of an upper-middle-class income and a stern patriarch, but, counterintuitively, “parenting” increased exponentially as my mother fearfully micromanaged everything I did, much more than she had previously, particularly as one of my father’s interventions had been “leave her alone!” not to mention that he wanted at least some of her attention on him, not me. And there were even more mountains of food than had been supplied by the lavish dinners my mother had served every night to welcome my father home, dinners which, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert, contained more than a day’s caloric requirement for a 14-year-old desperate to get her BMI below 25. Thanks to the endless hordes of friends and neighbors trying to be helpful and sympathetic, there was now a round-the-clock feast, and a house filled with round-the-clock guests. Fifty years later, I realized that by endlessly eating and socializing, my mother was dealing with grief, but certainly neither she nor I were “pining” which, as a euphemism for weight loss, was the prevailing stereotype of grieving.
I did not have a good relationship with my father during the last two years of his life. Only a few months before he died we had had a knock-down, screaming, physical fight over my anger that a classmate, Hannah (not her real name)—skinny, quasi-orphaned (her divorced mother had lost her job and had dispersed her four daughters to stay with various friends and relatives), bitchy, and oh, so Dickensian—had been living with us. My father told me to feel sorry for her. I called her a bitch (not to her face, but in a loud voice within her earshot, in a family argument) because not only had she taunted me for being fat, she had also cajoled and wheedled my mother into making a Laura Ashley type shift dress for her like the one she had made me, and then had preened around telling me how much better she looked in it than I did. In any event, my no-holds-barred rage at Hannah led my father to beat me (something he had only done once before, when, while on a crash diet, I had had a screaming tantrum—about nothing—fueled by low blood sugar) all the while telling me how fortunate I was compared with Hannah. In retrospect I realize that what hurt me more than the beating was the fact that he “just didn’t get it”. I did not feel more fortunate than Hannah. She was everything I wanted to be: thin (despite eating whatever she felt like), independent (even when she was living “at home” with her mother she mostly supported herself with babysitting money), self-confident, and skilled at squeezing sympathy and admiration out of other people. She might have elicited some sympathy from me if she had had any of the cultural markers of poverty that I had been taught to be aware of—poor speech, ignorance of books and of the arts, clothes of inferior make—but she did not. Really the only two things that set her apart from other girls our age whom I might have invited for a sleepover were her crooked teeth, and the fact that she did not own a pair of pajamas, but instead slept in frayed dungaree shorts and a t shirt.
It took me years to realize that the most critical sequela of my father’s death was not a reprieve from future beatings or my mother’s endless dinner parties mostly peopled by catty gay men and sexually exploratory girls in their twenties (not the best role models for a teenage daughter), but our permanent fall from the “professional middle class”. At first I did not notice it because the only things that ended were things I hated anyhow. I no longer went to a private school, and we stopped going away for extended periods during the summer. I was thrilled to be out of the private school where I was at the mercy of two girl cliques: the rich Jewish girls who showed off their clothes and social precocity, and the thin WASP-y girls who showed off their forever pre-pubescent thinness. And I couldn’t have cared less if we didn’t go away much. Who at 14 wants to take a vacation with her parents? Excursions out of town did still occur, but they were fewer and farther between. By that point, I hated them, even the summer weekends, because at the height of my obsession with my weight (whatever I weighed that particular month) I loathed and feared summer clothes and usually kept on a knee-length skirt and stayed away from the beach (and of course it was impossible to stick to any kind of diet if I was either someone’s guest or staying in a hotel). And even worse, my mother, with her misguided generosity, once or twice took Hannah on one of these trips, which for me was sheer Hell. My mother seemed to adore Hannah (this adoration took the form of a combination of pity and admiration), and the bitter irony of it all was that what my mother adored about Hannah was her feistiness, spunk, and independence, traits that my mother’s style of “helicopter parenting” made it impossible for me to develop.
Years later, a mentor of mine referred to women like Hannah as “killer waifs”, And reader, I ended up with one as a life partner, albeit one whose saving grace was that she adored me, thought I was gorgeous at any weight, made me feel like a princess, and was extremely generous with money when she had any.
Combining a casual elegance (she was of course very thin and ectomorphically built, and rarely ate anything substantial) with a chaotic lifestyle (her apartment was filled with junk and completely disorganized and she was always on the edge of financial disaster) she reminded me of the eccentric waifs all ages, genders, and persuasions who graced my mother’s dinner table after my father died. After she and I became an “item”, I felt that I was in a dream come true: in the midst of a whirlwind romance, living the sort of improvisational quasi-foodless lifestyle that I had longed for as a teenager immersed in Dickens.
Now almost 70, as a legally single woman in a studio apartment (I still have the same life partner but we do not live together) living on a very modest income, without any family, I suppose I am a kind of waif and orphan myself (when my partner dies I will have no one with whom to spend Thanksgiving, for example). But sadly, I am now much too old to be anyone’s Hannah.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-21 11:33 pm (UTC)