Ep.42: A uniform to conform

I’m nervous about getting the bus on my own, I never have before, there’s lots to trip me up, single me out.  Standing on the pavement outside our house I’m exposed, vulnerable.  My mouth tastes metallic and I can’t swallow it away.  Kicking at the weeds pushing through cracks in the tarmac I pray the bus appears soon, I stare down the hill to where the road opens out into the fens, both willing it to lurch round the bend and a little bit hoping it won’t.

I’m still too young to realise that not having exactly the right change for the bus isn’t a crime, I don’t know that if I have to sit next to a strange smelling old man or woman, or worse still a slightly older kid from my school, the world won’t actually end.  No one does die of embarrassment. But I don’t know this yet, so I might.   

It must have been spring or early summer of 1982, I picture it as late May.  The field beside the bus stop will be shot through with green, the weather mild and the days long. I’m now allowed to cycle the 2.5 miles across the fields to school on my own so I will have rushed back in time to get this bus, pedalling furiously down Gatehouse Road no handers.  It must be shortly after my 12th birthday or I wouldn’t have money to spend. Far enough away from the start of my first year at secondary school the previous September for me to be able to argue that my clothes should be changed, augmented, for me to take greater ownership of what I wear. Far enough into secondary school for me to have formed friendships, found a tribe and now be desperate to conform, to look like everyone else.  Important enough for me to want to spend birthday money on new school clothes in order to fit in.  That was where happiness lay, in fitting-in. 

This memory surfaces as I try, yet again, to understand the world from B’s point of view. We’re in town trying to find her a winter jacket.  She’s been resisting this trip for weeks, even now she drags her heals and refuses to put any energy into the exercise.  She seems embarrassed to be with me, pulling her hoodie over her head, ducking if she sees another kid roughly her age, I struggle not to take it personally.  After pointing to endless jackets and receiving endless eye-rolls my patience is thin enough to spit through.  ‘What exactly do you want then, given we’re not leaving without a jacket’ I say through gritted teeth, ‘something black and plain and boring, exactly the same as everyone else, something which will go unnoticed’ she pushes back. 

This desire of B’s to disappear unsettles me. I don’t like that she wants to be so anonymous, blended. I don’t let this go.  I feel a need to persuade, educate, so although I’m intensely irritating when I do this, I slide the subject up under my skin and over the coming days keep returning to scratch at it.

‘It doesn’t matter what other people think’ I say as we’re driving to her piano lesson the following week and she’s telling me about the endless dramas of the school day, girls back-stabbing and bitching, ‘if they treat you like that then they’re opinion is worth shit, don’t give them the power to upset you’.  ‘You don’t understand’ B comes back at me, her frustration leaching out of every syllable, (it’s a phrase I hear so often I’m starting to consider whether it should be chiseled into my grave stone), ‘I need them to like me, its all I care about’.

No, no, no, I’m adamant she should understand that conformity, the opinion of others, how you look, all belong in the big bin bag of life, be different, individual, be yourself, but the harder I try the more she digs in. We’re passionately at odds here, B and me.  Even when we’re not together I can’t help giving it another itch, to see if it will yield more insight into why it pisses me off so much that she cares about things I think shouldn’t be cared about.  I think this goes deeper than just an adult’s perspective on a pre-teen’s woes but I can’t figure it out.  I wake at 5 in the morning and it’s the first thing I turn to, a shadow by the bed, but when I look, it vanishes.  Its permanently on the tip of my tongue, I keep reaching for a resolution, but it always remains vague and out of touch. 

Perhaps the changes that hitting 50 and surviving cancer has wrought in me, work exactly in equal weight and opposition to the changes that happen when you edge across that crevasse between childhood and teenagehood?  Is that it?  Is that what’s eating me?

There is just one bus an hour and I’ve worked out if I time it right, I can make the twenty-minute trip into Cambridge, run to the shop before it shuts, buy what I’m after and still manage to make the last bus home in time for tea.  Its tight and a gamble and, for my 12 year old self, it feels huge and risky.  But it’s a calculated risk, and the reward – conformity - matters this much.

I must have been almost exactly the same age as B is now. Strange I can remember so clearly what seems now like such an unimportant act, the act of getting a bus into town on a school night to buy new clothes. I can only think it lodged in my memory because at the time it meant so very much.  It’s the emotionally charged stuff that lingers and now my brain has pulled it to the front of my mind because there’s a lesson in it for me, a reminder of how, when you’re 12, things matter.  A lot.  At 12 you sweat the small stuff.

At 50 I’d like to think I’ve got pretty good at sorting the wheat from the chaff, the things that matter from the things that don’t.  I’ve become an overnight expert in plucking out certain aspects of my life to fling casually into the ‘don’t give a shit’ pile, which is good because I think the BC me (before cancer if you didn’t start way back at the beginning of the blog) probably clung to the inconsequential like a hoarder.  But B’s desire to conform has quite suddenly found me wrong footed.  

I play a game of personal devil’s advocate, go straight in for the killer question.  Ok Pen, if you are so good at not caring what other people think, not conforming, why did you get a breast reconstruction?  I remember distinctly my surgeon saying I needed to ask myself why I wanted to go that route so here I am again, asking it again.  Casting my mind back is difficult because all my decisions are distorted by the consequences of that choice.  Surely, I got a reconstruction because I wanted to blend, be like everyone else, disguise my difference.  And that mattered enough for me to risk having a piece of my back pulled through to the front of my body in order to form a new breast.  Then, in the face of my reconstruction not being terribly successful – small and odd shaped -  I go and get fitted for a prosthesis. Presumably so I can look ‘normal’, so I can ‘fit-in’, secure a uniform so I can conform.  Fashion my own version of a black, boring, winter jacket.

Ouch. This realization is massive.  I’m shocked by it.  I thought I was somebody different, thought I didn’t mind being re-arranged and changed, but clearly, I do.

Flush with the success of navigating the bus and bus fayre and other passengers I ran, arriving a scant 15 minutes before it closed for the day.  I can’t remember the name of the shop, something beginning with A maybe, something faintly exotic, but I can picture it, 3 doors up from Tammy Girl and the Wimpy, next to the fabric shop.   I forage among the cheap nylon overly-bright shirts and elastic waisted skirts, cloaked in the smell of spicy, musky, foreign imported clothes.  Cambridge University sweatshirts rub shoulders with tie-dye bags, metal bangles that turn your wrist black, burgundy woven scarfs shot through with silver thread. I haven’t considered that what I’m looking for might not be in stock, I’ve come all this way, I’m childish enough to believe the importance of that act is enough to ensure success. It will be there, it has to be. And it was. A navy blue single tier ra-ra skirt and a cheap never-seen-a-sheep-in-its-life navy v-necked knitted tank top. The next day I wore my new clothes and happily merged into the crowd of other first year girls, all wearing the same skirt and jumper, mission accomplished.

The next time I lean towards lecturing B on the worthlessness of conformity and have the nerve to vociferously argue that other people’s opinion don’t matter, I hope I remember that young girl in her ra-ra skirt and tank top and this much older woman busy stuffing a fake boob down her bra to make herself more ‘normal’, even though I know to the core of my being that the people I love and care about and who care about me couldn’t give a toss how many boobs I have and of what size or shape.

It turns out the only real difference between B and me is that she openly admits that fitting in and being liked matters, I have the distinct suspicion I’ve been dressing my own conformity up as something else.