Guess My (Mother’s) Age!
If I could write poetry (I had an ill-fated foray into pretentious neo-classical poetry in high school but thankfully I have since then recovered my senses), I would compose rapturous odes to the glory that is my hair. Why did I wait 22 years before chopping all of it off? Why did no Korean hair dresser think it was a good idea? It takes a good twenty minutes of out of my morning routine (shower, vigorously towel dry, leave) and according to Bex and my mother, it makes me look older and “more sophisticated.”
JJ’s Mum: I like it! Now you look like you’re 17 instead 12.
Ah, my eternally youthful face. I suppose it will hold me in good stead when I am older. And as if my mother can talk; at 47 she looks like she’s 35. I like to play Guess My (Mother’s) Age with my friends and get vicariously smug. The general consensus is “mid-30s.” (Although my mother’s youthful appearance used to get on my nerves when I was younger because men would think she was my older sister and hit on her first.)
Reading through my old entries from high school, I have to laugh at how melodramatic I was about my relationship with my mother, especially at my hyperbolic statements about how she was ruining my life or how she didn’t think I was mature enough or how I was beating my heart out trying to please her when she wouldn’t be, would never be pleased. Perhaps I’ve gained a sense of humour since then but the fact that we are friends now in addition to being mother and daughter is wonderful and slightly disorienting.
Last night my mother took Bex and me out to dinner in Korea Way (because she is predictable that way) and the three of us gabbed about everything. It’s a pity that my mother is so morally conservative (“You know I don’t approve of alternative lifestyles,” she said) because she would make one of the best faghags ever. She’s beautiful, shallow, bitchy, witty, charming, judgmental, and loves shopping and beauty and fashion. Sir Gay would love her. It isn’t as though she doesn’t like my gay friends as individuals, but her generalisations about homosexuality, transgendered peoples, and other queers tends to make her less open-minded about meeting them.
On the train ride home, my mother picked apart the features on my face and offered beauty tips, but I think now I’ve come to realise that her remarks are not personal but stem from what Camille Paglia would call an Apollonian aesthetic or “the Western eye.” She views my appearance as though I were an objet d’arte. There is truth to what my mother said about my teenaged self: that I was overemotional and sensitive because I was with regards to her.
Doesn’t mean she isn’t still slightly insane, but it’s in a good way.
