“May I have another naartjie,” I ask Ricky. “No,” he says, and looks at me. A foot-stomping runs through me and I’m about to react when I see his face. Ah, I’ve done it again. I’ve asked him permission. I began to notice this happening a few years ago. Though I am almost 40 years old, I ask my husband for permission, especially around food, as though he were my father. Please, daddy, may I have some more? I feel the ridiculousness of this as I do it, and he does too, but I seem powerless to stop it. It is baked in, this need for approval and consent from some perceived authority figure or the nearest thing to it around me.
Do I want some more? I can’t actually tell. If he says yes I am pleased and vindicated in my desire for another. If he says no I am displeased and feel a compulsion to rebel but hesitate too. Have I had enough? The pulse that prompted me to ask for more, was it genuine need or greed? I have no idea. None. It is all based on something outside myself. I cannot feel myself. What does full feel like? What is it to be satiated? Food is all somehow muddled into goodness and heaven: eating is inherently a filthy thing, especially eating more than your fair share, or more than is seemly for a girl or a woman. The body, that great ape, must be tamed, and the tamer is God, a stern sky man, watching, watching.
I remember my aunt giving me a lecture on personal hygiene when I came home one day from roller skating with my cousins. I was quite young, seven or eight, but still I “stank”. She told me to wash my armpits. She said, Girls shouldn’t smell. But I smelled, and farted, and ate. And later I sprouted hair everywhere, on my stomach and upper lip, between and beside my eyebrows, so I plucked and waxed and dyed and epiladied. I wanted to be smooth as a baby. I wanted to be pure and thin and clean and fresh smelling. I wanted to be white as the brides of Christ who wafted through my prepubescence, swearing under their breath in their native German.
I developed weird hungers: I craved uncooked pasta and ate soup powder straight from the packet mixed with sugar. I wanted cocoa powder from my mom’s baking cupboard and crystalised honey by the spoonful. Later I consumed very strong instant coffee with three spoons of sugar and little else. I did a project in primary school on anorexia nervosa and read with fascination about girls taking laxatives and dropping their pants behind tool sheds, or vomiting out of windows, or imagining hunger as a bug they flicked from their otherwise clean, white plates. I felt a mix of pity and scorn for them. We whispered about it, the girls in late primary school and high school: the pain and power of vomiting or shitting on command, the purity of going without, of bringing the body under the whip. Out loud we spoke of matric dresses and pinched our stomachs, dissatisfied.
All the while I tamped down any urges too grotesque for the light: sex with men and, oh God, women!? Dance, food, chewing with my mouth open and mixing cutlery type, speaking up, touching myself, vaginal discharge and periods and feeling pleasure, any sort of real pleasure. These were to be avoided, not spoken about or stopped altogether if possible. After trying in my girlhood to be very good, very pleasing to God and man, I wore heavy make-up and wrote poems with the curtains closed. Then I left home and drank and drove the wrong way up highways and let a cutting comment come out in a jet of cigarette smoke. Finally I settled, calmed, bought a house and made pickled onions from scratch while furiously pursuing a career in academia.
But between myself and myself there was a wedge, so I didn’t know – and still don’t know – my own rhythms. I am perpetually a girl in bobby socks and a straw boater, clutching my school books and getting her pigtails pulled. Or a 1950s housewife with a just-baked cake mashed into a 1980s career woman in a power suit and impressively large hair. And who will I be soon? A mother Mary, stone-eyed and beautiful, placid, enrobed, my heart cut through with light on full display in my chest? Though I am able to survey the fallout from this holocaust, I am unable to undo it in myself except in the most minute increments.
So how will I raise a girl? How will I not show her, through my mostly unconscious actions and through the life of my body as it encounters food and skin and bark, that her body is to be despised and that table manners are paramount? And while I don’t want to raise a girl who sits sidesaddle, I equally will feel a pressure to show her the shape of society, to allow her to fit in. There are expectations for a girl, as there are for boys (I’d be as worried if I were about to raise a boy). But for girls it is a pressure to be demure, to eat lightly and quietly, to slip serenely into rooms and hearts, to blush pleasantly at the mention of unmentionables, to ask permission, to seek validation. Don’t scratch your crotch, close your legs, be nice, don’t – don’t – be ugly. And she will imbibe all this at my breast, so the work, I know, is first with me.
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