Underwear

I went to the Freud conference yesterday and my professional life clashed yet again with the personal.

Several times I talked to people, most of whom seemed pleased to see me, but I felt myself gush. Now I grow hot with shame.  I should have kept myself to myself.  I fear I become one of those crazy women whom people tolerate but behind the windows of their eyes they judge. 

We wear our underwear on the inside, I hear them thinking.  We keep our failures to ourselves. We put our best foot forward and we do not tell others about our criticisms of colleagues nor of our colleague’s criticisms of us. 

I wear my underwear on the outside.  I make sure it is clean and there are no holes, but the very fact of having underwear is another one of those things that is best kept secret.  

We wear our underwear in order to keep the outer layer clean given what comes out of our bodies, the sweat and other messes. 

Men have less of a problem down below, I imagine, unless of course they’ve reached that dreadful late aged stage of incontinence, but at conferences like the one I attended yesterday, most people have not yet reached this. 

Yesterday, the speakers talked about the difficulties of working with Gender Identity Dysphoria, (GID) in children and adolescents.  Dysphoria means distress, the distress of  some of us who decide they are not their assigned gender, but its opposite.  It’s a tricky one and apparently it’s on the rise. 

I’ve always felt reasonably confident about my gender.  A girl from the start, and still a girl, which is not to say there have not been many times when I wished I were a boy, not for the bodily show of it but for the social power.  For the sense, as my fantasy has it, that the world is masculine. 

As women we are always on the edge of the divide, though not as sharply on the edge as those who do not accept the gender their body assigns them at birth.

I sit in conferences like this and can feel the weight of all those other bodies behind me.  I sit in the front, to see and to hear better.  Goodie goodies and the elderly tend to sit in the front.  I marvel at those who hide up the back or those who do not care where they sit. 

To me it matters.  So much matters to me.  I sometimes wonder whether my internal world is not a mess of self consciousness.  

My daughter tells me that she too suffers, not so much at conferences, or at lectures at her university, but on FaceBook, the younger person’s arena for self presentation. 

On FaceBook some folks wear their underwear in multiple layers, to give the illusion it’s not there. Their underwear itself is part of the performance and their bodies underneath must be polished and primped in perfect proportion to the image they want to create.

It puts my daughter off.  It makes her feel inadequate.  She can never measure up to those pouting, beauties, both men and women, who peer out from their FaceBook pages.

 

I am relieved that I was not born into the FaceBook generation; that I might use FaceBook as a place to stream my political views or to share the occasional item of interest, but I do not use it as my personal platform. 

My blog can be my place to open out and explore these things but every time I write I shudder inside at the thought, what will people make of it? 

Among a small group of people to whom I spoke at the conference yesterday during afternoon tea , I noticed the face of a woman who had joined our group late and whose eyes suggested deep disapproval of me. 

Whenever I imagine someone dislikes or disapproves of me I examine my conscience.  Now wait a minute I say to myself, Isn’t it you who dislikes her? 

But then I reconsider, and in this instance I know the feeling is mutual.  And I cannot put my finger on the why?  Perhaps it has something to do with our underwear.  

Sins of impure thought

My grandsons stayed overnight during the past couple of days.  At bath time – a bath time of sorts, a puddle of water in the base of the bath on which the two paddled mechanized ducks – I noticed how reluctant the older boy was to take off his clothes.  This compared to his younger brother of two years, who has no shame or modesty.

 

I put those words together effortlessly, shame and modesty.

 

Why be ashamed of your body?  What drives my grandson as a six-year-old, and not even into the hormonal stirrings of pre-adolescence, to want to hide his penis from others?

I remember the sensation as a thirteen-year-old; my mortification when my older sister insisted I should not try to change my clothes in private.  My desperation when all the cubicles at the swimming pool change rooms were occupied and I was forced to change out of my bathers in public.

Others did not mind.  Others were okay with standing there naked to towel themselves dry.  Others bent over to pick up clothes, unabashed by their nakedness, but I had decided early on that it was shameful, my body was shameful and needed to be kept hidden.

There are those who might suggest my shame comes out of some sort of desire frustrated, to use a technical term, out of ‘repressed libido’.  The excitement of looking at naked bodies,  as I did so often in those days when I was a child .

 

I scanned the pages of my father’s art books under cover, hidden beneath layers of blankets so that no one else, none of my siblings, might see what I was up to.

 

What was I up to?  Looking at naked men and women in old fashioned settings with bits of material draped over strategic bits, the occasional fig leaf, but enough nakedness revealed to send shivers of excitement through me. 

I did not understand my excited pleasure but I recognised it as wrong. 

By the time I was my older grandson’s age I had begun preparations for my first confession and first communion.  The nuns took us to the priest who taught us about the nature of sin.  Sins like stealing and telling lies.

 

Such tame and obvious sins did not trouble me, but the priest gave a name to my excitement under the blankets with my father’s borrowed art books.  

He called mine the sin of impure thoughts.  And impure thoughts were worse even than stealing ten pounds.  They were worse even than even the biggest of lies.

 

Whether it is true or not, in terms of Catholic doctrine, in my mind it became true: impure thoughts constituted mortal sins, and mortal sins were dangerous indeed.  

Die with a mortal sin on your soul and you will be banished to hell forever.  Die with a mortal sin and you can never enter the kingdom of heaven. 

By the time I was eight years old I agonized over these incessant sins to the point where I imagined God’s pointed finger burning red at the tip in my direction, but I could not bring myself to tell the priest about my impure thoughts in the confessional. 

I could not bear to tell the priest things that I feared might not only cause him to despise me, but might also stir him up. 

Somehow, I knew about that strange contagion of desire; the way looking and being seen, listening and telling could evoke powerful responses in the others. 

What could I do?  My sins of impure thought weighed me down as if I were carrying lead, like the silver grey lump that rested on a bench in my father’s workshop; a lump of lead, poisonous my brothers told me, and too heavy for us to carry.

 

How could I be rid of this sin? 

Then I heard about novenas, and relief from sin, of all kinds and degrees of severity, when a person goes to mass on the first Friday of every month for nine months. 

How I managed to get to the first Friday of every month Mass as a ten year old, I cannot fathom, but in my memory I managed it.  I most likely went along with my sister. She was busy getting up early most mornings by then to avoid our father’s visits in the night. 

She and I went to early Mass together. In those days daily seven o’clock Mass was commonplace.  She and I walked together to mass to cleanse our souls; she for what was done to her, and me, for what I might do to others.  

Have you no shame?

Yesterday afternoon one of my daughters dragged inside a potted olive tree from the back yard. We brushed it down to release the spiders and their cobwebs, and then rested the tree on a tray in the living room. This way we can keep watering it during the tree's enforced imprisonment inside over the next few weeks.

My daughter has since decorated it with a few Christmas baubles, not too many or the tree begins to look ugly, at least in my daughter’s view.

A minimalist olive tree to represent the flavour of Christmas.

Is it a feature of aging that I become more and more jaded each year by the demands of Christmas, the demands to celebrate, the demands to buy, the demands to close up the year with good will, when my emotional bucket is almost full?

I could see the same exhaustion in my mother’s eyes when I was young, whenever Christmas came around, that same sense of 'how will I ever keep up with the demands?' And yet my mother relished Christmas more than me, I suspect. She still does.

I must be stressed. The rash has come back, not as vehemently as last time during my holiday in the Grampians in September this year but I can see the raised bumps under the surface of my skin and I am beginning to itch again.

At least this time I have a solution in the form of a quick hit with cortisone and then slowly wean myself off the stuff, but if this rash should come back a third time then I suspect a visit to another doctor might be in order.

The trouble with writing autobiographically, one of the troubles at least, is that it can evoke shame. I start with a thought, but all too soon the inner voices say: Now hold on, wait a bit, what will so and so think about that? How will your daughters read this? And what about those others in your life who might reflect differently on what you write here.

Have you no shame?

I wrote a few words for an online colloquium on psychotherapy recently. ‘I hate to be abandoned,' the words popped into my head and down onto the page. I qualified them with more thoughtful and erudite comments about the nature of our universal fears of abandonment from infancy onwards and then sent them off.

All night long I cursed myself. I tossed and turned. I could not sleep for shame, for fear that certain of my colleagues, most of whom I do not know and will never know – it’s an international colloquium, rather like the blogosphere but seemingly with more at stake, professional reputations and the like – for fear of what others might think of this clearly dysfunctional human being.

Even as I believe others feel this way too.

Why do you do it? I asked myself and then answered my question. To stir things up. All those stuffy voices spouting theory.

Why can’t we write as human beings? Why can’t we write life as we experience it? Why must we always cover up our insecurities in abstract words that protect us and others from the rawness of it all?

‘You can’t say that,’ someone will say. ‘You can’t write that.' Recently I read a review in which Andrew Reimer talked about Joan Didion’s book, Blue Nights , a memoir on the death of her daughter.

I’ve yet to read Didion’s book but it’s next on my agenda. I look forward to it, especially after reading her gut wrenching The Year of Magical Thinking.

I want my gut to be wrenched apart by such honest and breathtaking writing, but Reimer reckons that such writing should not happen. He has ethical misgivings. 'The thought of her buffing and polishing these self-conscious works of literary art for public consumption, for us the readers or perhaps voyeurs, troubles me,' Reimer writes.

I do not share the man’s reasoning. Why ever not write about our grief?
Or does it make him feel ashamed on Didion’s behalf. The way our children might feel when we embarrass them in public or vice versa, when they embarrass us.

At the same time I suspect the tension inside between the wish to write and the fear that our imagined audience will disapprove might facilitate the writing. It's rather like the way in which our optimal anxiety before giving a talk enables us to present our talk in a lively and engaging way.

Oh, but it makes me feel sick in my stomach every time I worry about my imagined audience when the fog of shame descends.

All I want to do is to run away and hide, and a Christmas olive tree is too spindly and light of leaves to offer much by way of camouflage.

Shame

I share a room with my sister. She is fourteen years old, four years older than me and her body is different from mine.

At night from under my blankets I watch her undress for bed. I watch her silhouette as she slips out of her tunic and blouse into her nightie. She wears a bra and the fine point of her breasts rise up from her chest like mountains.

I touch my own nipples, hard now, but flat against my ribcage.

One day I will grow breasts like my sister and mother. One day, I too will be big.

In the daytime when no one is looking I take an old towel from the laundry cupboard, one my mother keeps to use for dishcloths. I tear it into one long rectangular strip.

I take a piece of coloured ribbon from my sister’s ribbon basket and tie it around the centre of material to make a gathering where I can imagine my cleavage to be after I have tied the material around my chest like a bra.

At night when everyone sleeps I wear my bra under my nightie. I like to feel it in place and imagine myself to be grown up like my mother.

In the morning I scrunch up my bra into a ball and stuff it into an empty cigarette pack, which I have taken from the rubbish bin, I hide it between my bed and wall.

One day I come home from school. My mother sits in her usual chair beside the fire, my sister beside her. They look up at me when I walk in and my sister smiles. They look at one another in a meaningful way and without knowing why or what I sense that I am about to be found out.

I see the cigarette box first and the strip of toweling laid out on the table.
‘What’s this then?’ my mother says. She holds the bra up to the light. She does not wait for my answer. ‘You know you’re too little for one of these, but never mind, you’ll be big enough one day.’

My sister smiles, an inward smile, as if she has just been given top marks at school.

I do not know what to say. My hands are clammy. My Singlet feels wet under my arm pits where the skin prickles.

My mother picks up the empty cigarette box and stuffs the bra back inside.
‘Now be a good girl. Throw this out where it belongs. In the rubbish.’

‘What are you doing?’ my brother says as he sees me at the rubbish bin. He sees the cigarette pack. ‘Have you been smoking Dad’s cigarettes?’
‘No, “ I say. And now I know that my face is as red as the hair on the lady on the front of the cigarette pack.
‘You have been smoking,’ my brother says. ‘It’s written all over your face. Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I won’t tell.’