I... am a girl. I... love clothing.
Shocked?
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
I mean, you probably (hopefully) knew full well I was a girl, but the "loving clothing" part probably caught you off guard. It's understandable. When I was a kid, I literally would feel sick if I had to do any shopping at all, especially clothes shopping. But that was at a point where my mom had to fight me to wear pants that didn't have holes in both knees, shirts that fit, and overalls that stayed secure on both shoulders.
I used to HATE dressing up... I mean, HATE it. Sure, if it was just me and my sister and we were trying on enormous, billowy bridesmaid dresses with poofy sleeves, I was in. But even on Easter, I'd only wear my pretty dresses after giving my mom a good long stink-eye, and for performances? Pants and a nice shirt.
I'm still not entirely sure why I hated to dress well so much. When I was really little, when grown-ups would ask me what I wanted to do when I was an adult, I would reply "Own a spin-around dress store", meaning a shop that would sell only pretty dresses with skirts that billowed out when I twirled. And today, years later, I'm still fascinated with long skirts, and I still twirl, though I don't want to own a "spin-around dress store" anymore. So why the long interval of determined tomboy-hood in between?
My guess is that I was determined not to be a priss. I'd seen too many movies that starred annoying, whiny-voiced girly-girls who said "like" too much and spent hours in front of the mirror as antagonists. I made what my dad and his friend Bob Hamp call an "inner vow". I would NOT be a girly-girl, because no one likes them. I will NOT care about how I look, because if I did, people would say I was a "typical girl" and cared too much. I made an inner vow at about six. Scary, right? I built up a mental block against anything pretty, girly, or feminine -- anything that showed I was a girl. Well into middle school, I still refused to style my hair in anything other than a ponytail, and my clothing choices consisted of enormous, baggy t-shirts and ripped up jeans. I looked like a homeless person. I had proven that I didn't care how I looked... but I'd also proven that I had no standards, no values, and no appreciation for how I represented my family.
Now, I'm not saying that my tomboy years were all bad. When I was about seven or eight, my family lived in an apartment complex in Dallas. Most of that time was spent outside, riding bikes, climbing trees, hanging out with the neighborhood boys (who kindly accepted me and allowed me to join in their games), and spending HUGE amounts of time reading anything I could get my hands on, unless the book had super-long words, like "ubiquitous". There were tons of kids in the complex, and we would all play together, playing "knights and dragons", "house", and "who can ride down the stairs fastest on their bike", and on Fridays we'd all commune to one of the families' apartment and have a movie night. It was tons of fun, and would have been much harder to experience wearing cute-sey dresses and hairstyles.
But in fifth grade, I went back to public school. I'd been living the past three years in a gated-off complex, separated from the rest of the world with a few other kids who were just as sheltered as me. The amount of rejection I experienced in fifth grade stunned me. I'd never had so many people just... not like me for no reason before.
Up till that point, I'd had no insecurities, about my looks or my personality. But after I met the world, I collapsed. They'd made fun of my looks (especially my emerging acne and not-quite-grown-into long neck) and they had certainly never liked my personality; I came to the conclusion that I was an irreversibly unlikable person, and my family were the only ones who could really like me unless I was like everybody else. When I switched schools, everybody else dressed like I'd always done, and acted like... well, delinquents. Luckily, I never progressed to sex or drugs, but that was not a good year for me.
Somewhere along the way, I grew up. In seventh grade, when i again switched schools, I found myself wearing pretty shirts and nice pants, though still never skirts. I cut my hair in a very flattering bob, and I felt really pretty and grown-up for the first time in years. By the time I went back to homeschooling in the eighth grade, I felt like a different person. I'd discovered I was a girl, and that I was okay with showing it.
In fact, I loved showing it. Long, full skirts became a part of my daily wardrobe. I started playing around with make-up, and I did my hair into fancy styles that as a kid, I would have mimed barfing at. And as I fished around for a style that suited me, I finally landed on one just a few months ago: Forties clothing.
I LOVED them. I loved Donna Reed's dresses and Katherine Hepburn's pants. The modest femininity I found gorgeous. The only problem was... I didn't have any.
Next 1940's Blog: Movies!!!!
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