My mother had always loved glitter, so naturally I’d always hated it.
Once I’d outgrown the sparkly princess dresses and plastic jewelry, I swore off the stuff. It didn’t take long before I felt the same disdain for the colour pink, opting instead for the ever-so-more-neutral purple. Apparently, the addition of blue took the femininity out of pink.
Soon, I exchanged my pointe-shoes for sneakers and, after ten years of keeping my hair long for the purpose of smothering it in hairspray and needling it with pins, I cut my hair short. I remember the place I took that “scary first step into growing my own identity”. It was the summer before 9th grade and my mom had taken my sister and I to a sketchy shopping mall close to my aunt’s apartment. With little to no Hungarian knowledge (that was before the spiritual awakening that prompted my hot n’ cold love affair with the Duolingo owl), I’d managed to communicate my wish to the nice lady with the big and intimidating scissors. This “life changing hair cut” seemingly transcended language-barriers – at least that’s the story I would like to go with. In reality, the credit goes to my mother’s intervention: ‘She can’t speak Hungarian’ evidently did the trick. As if I’d fooled anyone.
That same year, in my attempt to evade my Swan Lake past, I’d accidentally stumbled into the male-dominated arena of volleyball. Now, before you call in the firing squad, I’m not saying that volleyball is inherently masculine – that is bullshit – but living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, ‘diversity’ isn’t exactly the buzz word. As a result, my team consisted solely of 18-year-old high school boys and middle-aged men who apparently had nothing better to do on a Monday evening. I’d played volleyball on my school team, but my 15-year-old ass could in no way compete with the likes of the 7-foot-teenage-hulks that surrounded me – and it seemed that they didn’t really care whether I did. To nobody’s surprise, it didn’t take long before I stopped showing up. Every time my mom would drop me off in front of the community sports hall, I’d drag out entering as much as I possibly could. At first I masked my dread with simulating a deep interest in whatever disagreement she’d had with my dad. She’d drone on unhindered until the opening car door cued her to halt, and each week the cue would come later and later until at some point it ceased completely. I missed the flowy, pink lightness of the ballet dressing room, where I wasn’t the only girl and where I actually knew what I was doing. What was the point of going if I couldn’t even get my serves over the net.
With my confidence at an all time low and my dreams of becoming a volley-icon crushed, I entered high school. By that time my hair had reached a little over shoulder-length and I was deep in the trenches of my art-hoe phase. If I couldn’t be a sports icon, I thought, I might as well embrace my little side-hustle of watercolour painting and covering my entire room in patterned scotch tape. Therefore, it filled me with contempt when my mother handed me a beige, woolen trench coat, stating that I should ‘dress like a pretty lady’. At that point I just scoffed and returned to the safety of my button-ups, mom jeans, and colour-block sweaters.
Later, by what must have been some sort of divine intervention, I picked up that jacket and threw away my horrible primary coloured sweaters from H&M. With no ulterior motive whatsoever (cough, cough), I embraced my mom’s innocent prayers of ‘dressing like a woman’, and developed an obsession with a Danish brand ironically named BOII. By the end of 11th grade, I was wearing low-cut, floral dresses and lolita blouses to school. I’d gotten the most horrific bangs of my life, but besides that unfortunate hair-cut, I’d let my hair grow out further.
Let’s return to the ulterior motive for a second. Of course, nobody will escape the throes of an unrequited crush, and sadly, against my most dire resistance, I couldn’t either. As I inched closer to graduation, I found myself in the unfortunate situation of having a big, fat crush on a guy in my class. If there was any hope of me passing the Bechdel test at all in this essay, you can wave goodbye to it now. It seems, however much I strive to tear down the oppressing walls of the patriarchy, you cannot write an essay about womanhood without touching on the male gaze.
The man in question could not have been any more of a typecast if I’d made him up for fiction: a white man with blonde hair and blue eyes. He was the standard Scandinavian zyn-head and had a way of emitting such rage-inducing nonchalance that it would send the Dalai Lama into a coma. It was a combination of this nonchalance, his annoyingly good looks, and the fact that he seemed completely unattainable that caused what I can only compare to a psychotic breakdown. When I think back on this time in my life, I realise that it had much less to do with him than my own obsession with his perception of me. Looking at yourself through the eyes of someone you want to impress always leaves you worse off, and months of trying to alter myself into what I thought he expected (or to be perfectly candid, trying to mimic the girls he was actually interested in) left me a shell of myself.
A month after he’d told me I looked pretty at a graduation party, I cut off all my hair. I donated or gave away most of my wardrobe, and instead began stealing more and more clothes from my mom. I found that I much preferred the clothes she used to wear to the things she would pick out for me. I disliked the sterile brightness of the new clothes she’d present me with – especially those of a more ostentatious nature, such as those involving way too much glitter and rhinestones. But the pieces neatly stored in the bottom of her dresser felt much more honest. They were worn, but somehow perfectly preserved, and they still carried her scent even though it had been years since she wore it. To my surprise, many of her clothes fit me and I liked that feeling. She had always been much thinner than me and I found a sense of pride in her affirming looks when she realised I could fit into her clothes.
I am a carbon copy of my mom. If you were to look at a picture of her from when she was twenty and me now, you would be staring at two almost identical women. I’ve always enjoyed looking like her because she is pretty, and nice, and everything I think a person ought to be. She is kind, gracious, and cares too much about everyone – sometimes to her own detriment. She is brave, but I also think she doesn’t realise that. She values her family, but moved 1000 km away to start her own, and now only sees her sisters once or twice a year. Her parents are long since gone; my grandma when she was 30, her dad, my grandad, just before I went away for college. She was always thin, too thin, and that thinness came at a cost. She can never eat without thinking about it and she always worries about her weight. She works in a kitchen now, and I’ve always wondered how tough that must be for her – to be surrounded by food all the time. Then again, she always did feed everyone beside herself; as a young woman supporting her family, as a wife, a mother. That was never really the problem.
My mother had always loved glitter, so naturally I’d always hated it. I think I hated it because it reminded me of everything I didn’t want to be. I wanted to set myself apart from her to escape all of her struggles; to evade what she’d put onto my sister and I – as subconscious as that may have been on her part. I blamed her for being a pushover, for letting our dad take up so much space, and never teaching my sister and I Hungarian. I hated that she commented on our bodies and always made us feel like we had to look a certain way to be good enough – I hated that she was content with living up to, and perpetuating, ideals that had done nothing but harm us.
But in blaming her, I turned her into a token of femininity and the toxic, unattainable expectations that the world puts on women. In my own way, I robbed her of the agency I’d always accused her of not having.
It is hard to look at someone who looks exactly like you and recognise everything they went through marked on their body and in their face. I see in her the struggle that comes with being a woman who sits between the world, themselves, and the women who came before them. I see in myself how the cycles keep repeating themselves; how years of questioning yourself, your body, and your place in the world leads to nothing. And I know it is not our fault.
There is a picture of my mom hanging on the wall of my grey college dorm-room; She is standing by some canal in Venice. I believe the picture was taken when she was in her early to mid twenties, close to the same age as me. The water is blue; such a deep, bright, glittering blue – it almost matches her jeans. She is smiling at the floor, and the sky is all white because the picture is so old. The grey t-shirt she’s wearing hangs in my closet, and her hair is almost as long as mine is now.
