Missy Kalbrener

"Little Lady"
Prior to entering grade school my father explained to me that although I was expected to become an educated young woman, the real skills that I would ever need in life were the ones passed down to me by my mother: cooking, cleaning and ironing. Skills that my father never showed much appreciation for, but his good mood made a better day for us all when he climbed into a made bed and all his shirts were dryer warm and starch stiff. My father and I had been sitting on the futon in our family room, he watching Seinfeld and I doodling in my My Little Pony coloring book, and upon filling in Melody’s tail magenta I learned that the first five years of my life had been spent learning not only my abc’s and 123’s but the difference between cold and warm water wash and how to properly remove the dust from the tops of the ceiling fans. I was an only child that was taught to be seen and not heard, I did what I was told. I went about these acts for years without resistance and I was taught by the best, my mother, the domestic goddess. She was a woman who began her life successfully as a cosmetologist and gave it up for a child. She had shown me her feet spread wide and a size larger just from carrying me in her stomach, a protrusion hanging off of her 4’10” frame, and told me that someday I too will experience the joy of childbearing for my overfed executive husband. She was a woman, I was to become a woman, and I was being trained to become her.

My parents hated my knees. I came out of my mother’s womb pigeon toed, and eventually my feet straightened out, but my knees failed to follow and they still hit and scrape themselves on everything they can reach: doorjambs, table legs, trees. I used to look forward to the weekends where I could play with my cousins, squish my bare toes in the mud with them, take turns between the seven of us riding the one scooter we had up and down the sidewalks. I could fall down on the gravel and not worry about getting yelled at by mom and dad when I came home with blood dripping from my knees down my calves. My mother clothed me in dresses to hide them and would pinch my ears when I sat down cross-legged and pressed my skirts between my legs exposing the scars and bruises from jumping off swings and too many cartwheels in the dirt. From then on it became her goal to teach me what it is to be “lady like”.

At least once a month my parents would hold dinner parties that would fill our house with twenty to fifty of my father’s middle aged employees who usually left dizzy and in cabs. I would be shoved into the purple velvet dress my great grandmother gave me, that lint covered sack made of fabric for cheap royalty, and a wide black headband would keep my hair out of my eyes so that I could converse properly with my father’s guests like any good seven-year-old daughter should. My mother loved to paint my nails the night before, usually soft pink, and put my hair up in curlers so that it would fall soft on my shoulders instead of their usual stringy locks. This is what a young lady should look like, she’d tell me as I looked at myself in the mirror, clean and tidy, then I’d have to practice my smile so that I could appropriately answer the door. And the guests came one by one hugging me and telling me how cute I was and how much of a heartbreaker I was going to be when I grew up.
I began telling boys that I was going marry them in preschool. My parents thought it would be cute to hold a faux-marriage between a young boy named Lucas and myself at their own wedding. Our parents laughed about how they were sure that we would end up together and would dream up our future occupations, our children’s names. In kindergarten I told Andy Kim that I was going to marry him while we carved pumpkins at Halloween. I told him that I had to marry him in order to keep my initials, his glasses were smeared with pumpkin strings. A boy named Clinton sat in front of me in sixth grade and while everyone else studied the civil war, I studied the mole on the back of his neck, that tiny piece of him the size of a pencil eraser. We played tennis together and he made fun of my weak serve and I cut out letters to spell out his name and pasted them in my diary. I would lay in my yard pretending to be Snow White and lift my lips into the air accepting the kiss my prince laid upon my sleeping mouth. I’d unscrew the screen off my window and throw my hair over the ledge and watch all twelve inches of it blow around in the ocean air with no male arm reaching up to climb.

My parents were always really straightforward when it came to their rules about boys. Like they always had to meet them and preferably have a meal with them. Boys couldn’t drive me anywhere or pick me up at my house, my parents always had to drop me off and walk me to every date, and no date could last more than three hours, but they sure never said anything about how to pick them. Without putting much thought into it I can easily say that I’ve dated more than four drug dealers, two auto parts thieves, a religious radical, and one mentally disabled young man. Three have cheated on me and two were gay. Oddly enough, my parents never said a thing, not even when I was running around in cropped halter tops and shorts with my ass hanging out. Maybe the occasional “Has Boy-X gotten a job yet?” but anything else awkward beyond that made me feel like I was five years old again sitting on the kitchen counter asking what sex is because that’s what my friend said she wanted to do with Michael Jackson when she grew up. It was the kind of situation that deserved one of those really uncomfortable mother-daughter talks where the mother sits and reminisces about all the boys she encountered in her high school days, but my mother isn’t the kind of person who has enough courage or even knowledge on the subject to do something like that. Both of my parents were married previously, so I guess they figured that like them I’d discover and learn from my mistakes on my own. Between classes in freshman year, I passed by two girls in the bathroom standing by the sinks eyeing me on my way into a stall. Right after I closed the door I could hear one of them mutter under her breath “slut”, and walk back out into the hall. At the time I was dating this bum that was a year out of high school and working full time bagging groceries at Times Supermarket. Now I really wish that my mother had explained to me the politics of girls and boys, and maybe more importantly, the politics of girls and girls, because in this situation I didn’t put two and two together, I just cried over being called a name.

There’s a strange push and pull that comes from having two parents that are so different from each other. I still can’t figure out what they have in common, but in terms of raising me they had the same mixed feelings of how much I was allowed to think on my own. They shied my eyes away from all the “negative” attributes of the world, they’d cover my eyes when anyone kissed on television and I would sneak into my mother’s sewing room after dinner and watch the Simpsons or Beavis and Butthead, follow my cousin into his bathroom and watch him shoot up heroin with his best friend. I also never got a sex talk from mom and dad, instead a book was slipped under my door, “A Doctor Talks to 8-12 Year Olds”. Boys were always a serious matter to them, but sex is still something we do not discuss. My father is a conservative white man from a small town in Minnesota. He did what any respectable Midwestern male was supposed to do, go to college, play football, marry your college girlfriend and get a comfortable job. My mother is a Filipina from Hawaii who went into cosmetology and ended her career for a family. Long distance phone servicing was what brought my parents together. My father was at the time running Sprint’s Asia-Pacific region, and my mother was a sales representative who walked in his office one day and began their unlikely flirtation by noticing that his socks didn’t match. I still can’t see where the spark came from. Opposites attract is the only kind answer I can think of, but from what I can see, my father just looked like a good provider and my mother a good wife, plus they both realized that time wasn’t on their side anymore.

Every woman on my mother’s side of the family has gotten pregnant in high school or shortly after graduation and most of them now have multiple children from various fathers. At our regular weekend gatherings or Christmas dinners each of my female cousins would show up with a new man, if a man at all. We don’t talk about this, we just treat him like he’s one of the family and even though we know he won’t be back again, we make him feel like he’s invited and welcome anyway. My mother was the exception. She was told that she was virtually unable to have children after trying for years, so when I showed up they thought me to be some kind of miracle. But my cousins who were pregnant at sixteen weren’t punished in the same manner as I would have been if I had been pregnant at such an age. They were supported, their mistake was overlooked and the problem was not seen as such, it was seen as something that just plain happens because it had happened to her mother and her mother before that. My mother’s half of the family is Filipino, yet another culture in which women marry and bear children as teens. My great-grandmother had her first child at fourteen on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii, the father was a white military man twice her age. And here my cousins and I stand as the fourth generation in Hawaii continuing something that is not socially acceptable in the U.S. I came into the world just as they began to have kids, but by the time they were on their second or third I was aware of what was happening. I also began to understand that I wasn’t at all like them. I attended a private school, it was almost certain that I would graduate and go on to college, I didn’t go job searching the minute I turned fifteen. A certain alienation happened and I maintained a distance from them, which not only stemmed from my privileged life but also from our age difference; my closest cousin is five years older, the next is twelve.

It wasn’t until I left home at sixteen that I noticed it, the judgement, the way they looked at me and the way I looked at them. We are all judgmental whether or not we like to admit it. It’s how we make choices and decisions and form opinions; it’s imperative for us to judge and evaluate the world around us. I’ve judged my family, my mother, and found that babies, GEDs and welfare weren’t for me, instead I’ve chosen to surround myself with friends, higher education and maybe in the future I’ll be knocking on welfares door. If only they knew how alike we really are. We’ve all felt out this world through men and the same kind of men, the difference is they left their men (or rather their men left them) as soon as a child was conceived, I leave mine when I get curious, not bored, just curious. I try on the outfit until the clothes have holes and then I change. I’ve ended up with a diverse wardrobe, each reminds me of a different era of my life and a time where I’ve resurrected and rebuilt myself to fit the next outfit. Now I’m picking out my own clothes, but I will never throw out the rest.

I carry the women of my family with me whether they like it or not, I continue to judge them and extract those things that make them beautiful, they’ve sent themselves back to school, loved their children and teach them lessons through their own lives, the mistakes they’ve made, and those children have got some big dreams now. I like to think that I could have done what they did, but I got dealt an easy hand and a part of me wanted to experience what they had and I did that through men. I will never be a housewife, I might not even be a wife or a mother for that matter, but I will continue to learn this world through men until I find one who will come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner and will return for Christmas.

At three years old I would sit in my car seat, Sophia Loren sunglasses covering half my face, belting out “Shower Me with Your Love”, and that’s exactly what my parents did. They showered me with the kind of love that restricted me from playing with the two boys next door that let chickens loose in our yard, closing my door for any reason, and from being able to stay out until midnight even at my best friend’s house a block away. And I know that everyday I become more like my mother sweeping and vacuuming daily, dusting the shelves before I stack my books, but in the end its not because I’m female and that’s the role I’ve been raised into, it’s just because I like clean floors.