Author: Elisabeth

Amputated nipples

‘Speak for yourself.’
Do you ever have the urge to say these
words when someone makes a universal pronouncement with which you disagree? 
I wanted to say it the other night
to a man whom I met via friends, who had insisted that people in England were concerned
that the face of England, its population, will be completely unrecognisable in
twenty years time.  Completely taken over
by foreigners, he wanted to say but did not, and not foreigners of Greek or European
extraction, but mostly from the Middle East.  
You can guess the rest. 
I wanted to say, look at your self.  When your parents arrived in Australia some fifty years ago they
would have suffered the same derision for being different, for coming from the
Mediterranean.
Why’s it so terrible to be
different? Why the pressure to be the same?
I feel the impulse run through me, too.
Take for instance, my latest
preoccupation with the female body and why we women do things to ourselves to
conform to some perfect ideal, even if it kills us.
In my tenth year of school I spent time as a boarder, which meant for months on end my body barely saw the light of day. 
We boarders dressed in almost
darkness with a pitcher of water on our side table and a face cloth with which we swabbed down
our more sensitive parts before covering ourselves from top to toe.
In those circumstances it mattered not to me
that I could not shave my legs or my underarms, though I had started the practice
a year earlier when, at fifteen, I decided to follow in my older sister’s footsteps
and turn my legs into the supple, shining silk-like radiant things I had seen in the new
advertisements directed at women in ‘need of ‘ shavers for the fairer
sex. 
At boarding school no one worried about shaving legs
or underarms, until it came time for the school dance.  
My older sister who had left home
by then and was studying at teacher’s training college picked me up after
school one day and we travelled into the city to Adele Formal Hire where we
were able to select a gown for me to wear. 
It was in polka dot black chiffon over a satin lining.  The dress covered my legs to the ankles, but was sleeveless
in a respectable manner.  The nuns would
not tolerate anything less.  No visible
cleavage, no plunging back lines, nothing suggestive of the female body
underneath, only arms, legs and head visible. 
You could not see my legs,
but after five months in boarding school, my underarms had sprouted a fine black layer of growth.  I  took to them with fingernail scissors during the
three days each week when it was my turn to take a bath.   Boarders were rostered for separate bath times three times a week, and once a week hair washing on Saturday mornings, lined up at the basins.  
In the bathroom there was daylight
or in the early evening an overhead light that enabled me to see my body, at least in bits.  There were no mirrors.  Mirrors were not allowed in the bathrooms, too
likely to tempt the bodies that travelled through. 
One of the older nuns had told us that in
her day, girls had to bathe in mid ankle length petticoats so that they could not see
their naked bodies while bathing so as to resist temptation.  
The things women must do/did to resist,
not only their own desires, but the desires of others. 
So my preoccupation at the moment with
the nature of women’s bodies – how we preen them, how we attack them, how we strip
them of excess, how we try to whittle them into an acceptable and universal
shape, how we try to hide them, how we cover them to make them look the way we
imagine others might want, the way we want ourselves  – hit me hard when I saw a YouTubeclip of women who had undergone mastectomies, nipplectomies or other forms of surgery that have left massive scars on their otherwise ordinary bodies. 
To see these images is confronting and most
of all for me the thought that some of these women may have elected to have their nipples removed.  
Why would they do this?  For health
reasons, in the case of cancer I can understand, but the other reasons, I’m at a
loss to understand.  

Disappearing sunflowers

My mother has been dead for six
weeks now.  I think of her often.  How is she and has she found
out for sure what she once believed and I long doubted, that there is a place
out there somewhere where she can finally be at rest? 
It’s a curious confusion because
although I operate on the belief that my mother is now no more, she lives on in
my imagination and memory and in some strange way she grows bigger on
re-remembering. 
One of my daughters intends to
write a short biography of my mother as part of a university assignment.  She tells me she plans to write from the
perspective of contested truths about my mother.  The differences between the ways my mother
represented herself and the perspectives of others who knew her. 
My mother the saint, as distinct
from my mother the manipulative scheming – I went to say ‘bitch’ but that seems
too harsh by far.  Not my view, never my
view.  Manipulative yes, but always as a function
of my mother’s impotence.  Her inability to ask
directly out of a belief that she should somehow do without. 
I put up a picture of sunflowers on
my Facebook page three weeks ago. 
Glorious, upright, full faced sunflowers.  
They are now ready for the compost bin, sad and dishevelled, an
embarrassment in a vase.
  
They put me in
mind of my mother’s body before she died and the direction in which my own body now heads. 
I check my hands from time to time
for signs of ageing, the tell tale liver spots, big brown freckles alongside the
bulging veins on my otherwise pink fingers. 
The rings on my fingers remain the
same.  They scarcely age, though the
wedding ring I first wore nearly 37 years ago is beginning to thin out on one
side. 
A friend, now in company with my
mother out there somewhere, made this ring for me.  He cast it in gold and shaped the image of a
man on one side reaching out one hand to a woman on the other.  The man is bigger than the woman.  His shoulders stand upright, the highest
point of the ring’s texture, while the woman, who tends to sit on the inside of
my hand, is much flatter. 
I wear my ring this way, with the
man visible, the woman underneath, not consciously out of any symbolic view, but out of aesthetics and comfort.  If I try to
put both figures on top and in full view they look indistinguishable and the
bulky man rubs against the sides on my eternity ring on my middle finger, or if
I push it against my little finger with the man it feels lumpy. 

I completed one of those inane
tests you find on Facebook the other day, one which tells you after you have answered a
series of multiple choice questions around your preferences, the type of person you should avoid. 
Turns out the person I should most avoid
is a comedian.  The person who spends his
time cracking jokes.  The person with whom
I can never be serious. 
Like all these quizzes there’s a
grain of truth here perhaps, though in such an absolute way as to render it almost
meaningless.  
Still it set me
thinking. 

I had thought the person I might most
seek to avoid is a person like me, a person who talks a lot, who might tend
to dominate a conversation, a person who wants to be seen and heard, unlike the
woman on my wedding ring, who hides underneath and brushes up against the soft padding
of my hand.
Sometimes she rubs against hard objects out there in the world, this woman who wears away into a thin
semblance of herself.  This woman who
disappears.