Missy Kalbrenner 2

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 was taught by the best, my mother, the domestic goddess. She was a woman who began her life successfully as a cosmetologist and gave up her salon for a child. She has 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 has told me that someday I too will experience the joy of childbearing for my overfed executive husband. I was to become a woman, 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 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.
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 getting out clean, 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 the 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, not because I really cared about him but because it was what I felt meant to do, it was what Cosmo told me to do, it was what Jane did for Tarzan, tamed something wild, make it civilized by my standards. I had an image of men, as many of the girls around me did, similar to the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast,” and an impossible and pointless quest to better each of them. But things don’t work like this in girl-world. 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 walked 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. I had entered, as every woman has before me, without warning, the cult of women.

So, some in my own cult thought of me as promiscuous, and I beg to disagree; it may not be this simple, but, I was, and still am, trying to learn about my position in this world through understanding the opposite sex. Naomi Wolf captures this sentiment perfectly in her book “Promiscuities”: “The progression through the “bases” was not only a physical exploration, it was also a social one: it told us about who we might be in the social hierarchy. And it was about trying on personas. Who we could be was determined by who we were allowed to touch.” The cult of American women has changed dramatically over the last hundred or so years. Society’s feminine themes and the media’s ideas of womanhood have gone from, as Marjorie Ferguson cites, “The Working Wife is a Bad Wife” and “Getting and Keeping Your Man” to “The Working Wife is a Good Wife” and “Getting and Keeping Your Man”. We, women, have gone from thinking that perfection is the ultimate goal, specifically perfection as a wife, to loving our woman selves and convincing ourselves that we will find love just by being the who we are. Every woman I have ever known has said that, “Be yourself”, and it’s always been in the context of finding “the one”. My family gathers often at my house to barbeque on the weekends and as they enter they kiss, they hug, then they divide: men in the backyard with the grill and the game, women in the kitchen with the gossip. While my father, my uncles and my female cousins’ significant others discuss the number of touchdowns Green Bay made the week before and how my uncle is doing at his new job, my mother, her sisters and my female cousins discuss the men. How so and so is unable to pay the rent on time, how so and so still hasn’t gotten around to cleaning out the garage, how so and so might be having an affair. And all of this was discussed while they made spinach dip, laid crackers out on trays and loaded coolers with ice and beer for the men. I was, and still am, the one to deliver these items and I always hang around the men until my mother calls me for another duty, often to relieve myself of all the talk I endured back inside the house. Things are always simpler outside with them—discussion of impersonal things, world issues, television—its masculinity at it’s finest. As E.M. Forster says in A Room with a View, “Men…move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive.” Using that as a definition of masculinity, my father is masculine. Using society’s macho man, look at how many hot dogs I can scarf down, how many baskets I can make and how many bears I can take down with my bare hands definition, my father is not masculine. Although he supported us easily with his six figure income, it was my mother who took out the garbage, mowed the lawn and installed our ceiling fans. She’s the one we buy worktables and jigsaws for at Christmas; we buy my father books and Bose headphones. When they go walking in the morning my father prefers the sidewalk near the beach or the air-conditioned mall, my mother goes on muddy hikes and still attends kickboxing afterwards.

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, how much I was to be exposed to. They shied my eyes away from all the “negative” attributes of the world, they’d cover my eyes when anyone kissed on television, changed the channel after someone cursed 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.

My family and I have always considered ourselves to be Filipino-Hawaiians rather than Filipino-Americans. Hawaiian culture has dominated our beliefs, our customs, our hobbies, so to be able to fully understand my family and the women in it, I had to take a step back in time to Hawaii in the early 1800’s. The first Westerner to explore Hawaii was Captain James Cook in 1778. Along with disease and foreign creatures, he introduced the Hawaiian people to military technology and western trade as well as western customs and systems. The establishment of private property was what still haunts the Hawaiian people today, but what haunted them then was the treatment of their women. Death rates were high due to what is thought to be cholera and bubonic plague, so women made it their duty to bear ten or more children in hopes that one would make it to adulthood. Up to this point, Hawaiian women were equal amongst men, but with businesses and port towns rising they felt the need to find work as nurses, washerwomen, prostitutes, all of which they received about half of men’s wages. Prior to 1845, women could vote, own property and divorce. Beginning in 1845 their rights were stripped, property had to be forked over to their husbands, by 1860 women were required by law to take their husband’s name. Status, usually dictated by blood, was what kept women in power and they seemed ahead of their time from a western point of view, they spoke up and created protest groups when their Queen and the Hawaiian Monarchy was overthrown. Hawaii became America’s 50th state in 1959 and by that time Native Hawaiian women had married all kinds of men, Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino. In a span of 100 years the Hawaiian people had gone from being completely unexposed to having their culture and language banned, their monarchy taken and replaced with a foreign system, then back to reviving their culture and adapting to a legislation and new inhabitants. My family enters in the early 1910’s when my great-grandmother came over on a boat with many other Filipinos, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese, to work in the sugar cane and coffee fields, and the pineapple canneries. They were separated by ethnicity, then within their ethnicity they were separated by gender and class. Some of the only men those women were exposed to that were outside of their ethnicity and class were white men, military men who slept with them and were never seen again. This is where the cycle begins.

Kathleen Uno states the Western idea of Asian women as such: “‘Lotus blossom’,’ ‘submissive,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘sexy.’” When it comes to Filipino women my guy friends say they think of porn stars. My girl friends equate Filipino women in Hawaii to what MTV or BET makes black women out to be in what is modern mainland U.S.A. We’re a little darker and usually mistaken for Polynesian of a sort, we’re a little louder and edgier than the Chinese or Japanese, and in the end, the sad stereotype is that we all end up knocked up and alone. This is not specific to Hawaii. A study done in San Fransisco by the Pilipino Health Mini-Forums Committee in 1993 found that Filipino teens had the highest pregnancy rate of amongst Asians, and the highest rate of increase in number of births in coparison to African-Americans, Latinas and Asians. In the Philippines, women function much like Native Hawaiian women did, as equals, but after the Spanish colonization it was the domesticity that we still have today that prevailed. Mix this in with the Hawaiian culture, a culture that also once had women who were treated as equals, toss in a few 1950’s Midwestern ideals and you end up with my family.

After realizing my cultural and social history I began to understand that I wasn’t at all like them, my family I mean. I especially wasn’t anything like my cousins. I attended a private school, it was almost certain that I would graduate and go on to college, and 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. It’s often a song that will bring me back to these boys. I am reminded of my very first boyfriend whenever I hear that Ja Rule and Jennifer Lopez song “I’m Real”. When I met my first serious boyfriend’s parents, his father sat down at the piano and serenaded me in Italian high as a kite. His parents grew pot in their backyard and every now and then that song comes into my head, often when I smell marijuana. My next serious boyfriend was from Idaho and was a drummer in a Christian rock band, sometimes, my iTunes will play one of their songs while on shuffle and I will be instantly brought shot back into his 1987 Buick LeSabre with my hand out the window holding up the right side-view mirror. The Beatles’ often overlooked song “Honey Pie” takes me back to music camp and the Jew-fro sporting jazz pianist I will never forget. Anything off of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album sparks the blue eyes of my sole companion for the last two years of high school in my head. These were the important ones, although they were all very different from each other, they taught me the most. They have created who I am today. They sewed my sleeves and hemmed the pants of the clothes I tried on through the kinds of music they liked, the movies we saw together, their families, their bedrooms. And I’ve judged them all through exploring these things, I even judged them as marriage material, but I find myself now at a crossroad. For the first time I see no future in dating. I’ve always dated for the companionship, kept them around long enough to get to know them better than they knew themselves, now I’ve lost that urge, lost that urge for exploration. Now I want freedom, I want to travel and not have to call whoever I’m with every night, I want to sleep in my own bed, alone and I want to govern when I retire for the night. Through these men, I’ve acquired knowledge, whether it be about culture and heritage or drugs and cars. I’ve found that I almost like doing their laundry for them and bringing them meals for no reason at all. And in the end I’ve learned to respect them, and that although they’ve hurt me through their lying and their cheating, I’ve lied and cheated just the same.

I carry the women of my family with me whether they like it or not, they’re my family, they’ve raised me. I will 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. My parents, although they blindfolded me for many years, have produced a child that can cross her ankles, smile and hold airy conversation for hours as well as belch like a sailor and dance on tables. 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. I will always carry them with me, my mother especially. We will never have talks of birth control or the men in my life, but her influence is what will remain. And I know that everyday I become more like her 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.