Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Netball skirts and tracksuit pants. A match made in heaven. To my eight year old self they symbolised community, domesticity, vitality and motherhood.
It was the uniform of suburban mums back in the 1980s. Active mothers moving from drop offs to shopping centres to netball matches to pick-ups to after school sports. To me it was a uniform for the majority, a majority that I so desperately wanted my mother to be a member of.
Much to my dismay my mother never donned a pair of track suit pants. Or a netball skirt. Let alone together. My mother has a serious aversion to trainers, sneakers or flat soled shoes of any kind. On the one (short lived) occasion she wore a pair of shiny white, cushioned Reeboks (it was the 80s), she declared that the shoes were the most uncomfortable things she had ever worn and quickly retreated back into the apparent comfort of her pointy ended, high heels, never to return to a shoe with a mild incline again.
My mother rarely picked me up from school because she ran a jewellery shop in a quiet suburban shopping centre. It was small but glittered with its sparkling jewels and affordable time pieces, in sharp contrast to its fluorescent lit neighbours. But when she did I’d anticipate her arrival with nervousness and a degree of dread. Amongst a sea of netball skirt and track suit wearing mothers, she would arrive like some sort of Chinese Joan Collins – bold matte red lips, black sweeping eye liner, a freshly coiffed perm, patent pointy high heels, a replica Chanel suit and then layers upon layers of sparkling, eye catching merchandise from her shop.
As one of the few Asian children at my predominantly white suburban primary school, standing out wasn’t something I prized. I wanted to move with the crowd unnoticed, be one of them, to conform, to fit in, to be less Chinese. But her arrival was akin to watching a peacock amongst a sea of pigeons and her conspicuous arrival drew unnecessary attention to me.
For years I tried to sell the virtues of pairing a netball skirt with tracksuit pants to my mother. I’d preach its versatility, how its unique combination of elasticised waist with gentle pleats was the height of sophistication and comfort. But she never budged, never to be familiar with leisurewear let alone active wear.
30 years on and facing the prospect of my first school run next year, I can finally appreciate the stubborn determination of my mother to maintain her red lipstick, weighty jewels and Dynasty-style outfits. It was her way of maintaining a sense of self, of identify, of carving out an image of motherhood that reflected her pre-child self in the face of routine and predictability.
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