| Nail polish and money
In this edition of the Wayback journal, I take note of my experimentations in femininity. To be honest, I really don't remember caring at all about fingernail polish or perfume or clothing to the extent recorded here.
Somewhere along the line, evidently later, I decided subconsciously that femininity was a trap ~ maybe even actively a danger to my sense of self. And I was resolutely unprimped from then on until fairly recently, when I've rediscovered the pleasures of adornment (still in a style distinctly my own, I hasten to add!).
The other thing that sticks out for me in this entry is the harping on money. My family was a mess on the subject of money. My father is a New York Jew, a true son of the Depression, and had grown up genuinely poor and deprived. He spent 10 years, from the age of 7 to 17, in an orphanage. (His father died when he was 7, and his mother couldn't support him, even after she remarried. His sisters were farmed out to relatives.)
My mother, on the other hand, came from Midwestern Quaker/Methodist stock, born in Illinois and raised mostly in California. Her family had money. Not oodles and oodles, but enough to get through the Depression in relative comfort, and to provide her with a stipend which (I later learned) made our middle-class lifestyle possible.
That two people from such utterly different backgrounds managed to have a successful marriage is amazing. That they did it against a set of pretty impressive money phobias and taboos is even more amazing. Unfortunately, there was plenty of dysfunction around the topic to go around. I was taught never to talk about money with anybody. My Dad was all about saving and scrimping. My mother was clearly afraid of ever being too generous.
I mean, what was the deal with the watch? Get me a cheap Timex for god's sake and call it a day! There was a lot of this irrational stuff, and you can see me soaking it in.
12:33:40 AM  |
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