Two more pages.
Do not attempt to go back and revise your problem, but try to complete it by writing forward in the essay.
If you use the Didion essay as a guide, you will note that she states the first part of the problem in the beginning of paragraph two and the second half in paragraph four. This works within the construction of her essay, it may not eventually working yours, but the idea is to write towards a finished work that will prove a solution to your inquiry.
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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 my hair 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 even 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.
I entered high school with an older public school boyfriend that my parents did not approve of. They did not like his shifty eyes that would not look into theirs or his convict father and drugstore clerk mother. But I liked him, and he liked to buy me things with the money he made off of small time drug dealing. He’d buy me necklaces of the finest cubic zirconia, pleather skirts, and skimpy tops made of nothing but translucent sequins and I became a sparkling lure for him to cast, told to lead various military men and tourists from the front of clubs to the back parking lots where he would wait selling his finest. This relationship soon became meaningless and waking up in the backseat of his car no longer a shiver of bliss but disgust and just when I was thinking of slipping out of the relationship, his best friend tied a rope around his own neck. He didn’t speak for two whole weeks after it happened and it was my duty to sit with him on his curb rocking the dead weight of his body in my arms. He had me trained, as my parents had, to be a dutiful young lady aiming to please. I knew he cheated on me more than once and had also treated those girls the exact same way he treated me, dressing them up to his advantage, pressing their faces in between his legs, but they were smart and got out early. I didn’t want to leave yet, I wanted to be that one girl that could change him, and once again not because I really cared about him but because it was what I felt obliged to do, it was what Cosmo told me to do, it was what Jane did for Tarzan, tamed the wild beast. If I had had just a few more drops of feminism in my blood I might have stood up for myself, asked to be respected or maybe just held, but in the end he left me, my project incomplete.
Every woman on my mother’s side of the family has gotten pregnant in their senior year of high school or shortly thereafter and most of them now have multiple children from various fathers. 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. 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.
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