the cult of girlhood

 When I was a kid, I spent significant parts of summer camping up at the RV my paternal grandmother owned near Lake Wisconsin, which was next to an RV owned my my eldest uncle.  Since my dad had waited until well into his 30's to have children, long after most of his siblings, my cousins were all older, mostly female, and prone to doing the things all teenage girls circa the late 70'/early 80's did--ie spend hours getting ready to go nowhere in particular. Since I was the sole child mostly in those years (my sister still a baby) I tagged along with them incessantly. To the drive-in, to get iced cream, to the little playground in the campground where they sat on a huge tree segment polished for climbing and carved with the markings of every teenager who vacationed there, where they talked about teenage things and flirted with boys from other campsites. The most acute memory was the getting ready though--even if it was just to go to the beach--long hours showering in the public coin operated bathrooms.  They would take me, huge totebags in tow--full of potions and hair tools--eyeshadows and creams--and then spend over an hour in front of the huge sink mirrors in the concrete building. Sometimes they did strange things like wash their hair with eggs or beer.  Shave their legs. Pluck their eyebrows and curl their lashes.  They'd curl and blowdry and tease, then spray each other with endless colorful cans of Aquanet. It was all this strange world I did not inhabit, so mostly I would play with the shampoo bottles and the coin operated machine and wait for them to finish once I was, myself, bathed and dressed while listening to them talk about things I neither knew about nor understood. 

A cousin on my mother's side was the sort of girl who almost a cliche, A good hearted cheerleader dating the football star (who she foolishly married at 19 and who turned out to be an abuser.)  Homecoming queen.  County Fair Queen. I would stay overnight in her yellow farmhouse bedroom, filled with ribbons and tiaras and aspire to that kind of girlhood.  To the sort of things I saw as I flipped through her highchool yearbook.  My grandmother on that side would let me play for hours with her jewelry box full of costume jewelry, mostly clip on earrings and clunky bejeweled bracelets. The makeup on her vanity, nail polishes and pots of rouge.Tiny white sample lipsticks. Besides the set of encyclopedias in her living room, they were my favorite things in the house.   

My mother, when she was working, was particular about getting ready. Each morning, you'd find her up earlier than us having showered the night before, curling her short hair with a curl brush, dousing herself in hair spray, and teasing out with a comb.She was less ornate with the beauty implements, but just as precise.  She'd slather her face in foundation and powder, dust on eye shadow, some blush and mascara.  Then hit her hair with another round of hairspray as a final touch, then turn the bathroom, which was one of two, but the most functional one, over to me and my sister to shower and get ready. I was the last in, since I liked to sleep to the last possible minute and then throw myself together (some things never change.) When I was a teenager, I normally quicky blowdried my hair, messed with my bangs with some product (the early 90's--oy!), put on some cover up to hide oily skin, added some lip gloss and that was about it.  I never took to makeup as much as my mother.  Or perhaps because of her, which she sometimes tried to foist upon me.  As I got older and my skin cleared, I forwent it entirely, maybe at most carrying some powder and lipstick in my bag. When I wore eye makeup or blush after that, it seemed painted and unnatural in the mirrror and not a particularly useful use of my time. 

Over the years, I have (pre-masking) loved wearing tined lip balms and matte liquid lipsticks.  My favorite is lip pencil and balm, which has great staying power even through several cups of coffee. Unless I have a blemish (or you know the cats decide to jump on my face overnight) I usually forgo even concealer (though I have noticed on days when my dark circles are more prominent, I can make myself look a little less like a haunted victorian child.  I'm sensitive to many things around the eyes--even using certain hair products--so I avoid anything there. Ditto with my hair, which is usually wet when I leave the house all four seasons at least a little. For all my love of clothes, makeup is not something that accompanies that love. 

Still that cult of teen girlhood was sort of magical when i was a kid--my cousins, my mother, even my sister who wears some makeup sometimes.  The potions and lotions.  While I do not wear much makeup, I am a hoarder of various bath gels, shampoos, body scrubs, bath oils, face masks. Esp.  things that also come in pretty packaging. Also nail polish, though since the things I do are hard on my nails, I usually only paint my toes. I was thinking about how much those hours watching my cousins in that bathroom getting ready formed my idea of what teenage girls did with their time. My own teen years of course, more solitary.  More cousins would not be born into the family until those girls started having kids a decade later. By then I was already coming into adulthood. 

So much of those years is memory--riding around with them listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles.  Washing our hair in the river at another campground where there were no showers. When I was working on dark country--esp, the beautiful, sinister and exquisite damage portions, these were the experiences I had in mind. The settings I was writing within. When I was a teenager, we camped less as a group and more often just as a family unit--so those years were mostly me reading on the top bunk of the pickup camper and fighting with my mother incessantly, But still, with my sister in tow, I would carry my tote bag to the shower building and spend some time washing off the grime of the campsite, getting ready for nothing much.