Representing a mother

Wanting To Be Liked. . . | Clarissa's Blog


I’m not somebody who cares at all whether anybody likes me. But I got embroiled in the whole project of getting liked because my father said to me, the moment we arrived as new migrants in Australia: “it is vital to get people here to like you, even if you have to say you really like things that you don’t like”.

So, I got the message from that that I ought not to say what I thought, but to find other things to say instead. Indeed, he was right in a way, since whenever I spoke without thinking, that is without censoring myself, I walked into trouble. Moralists took deep offence at my identity, in rather the same way they would if I were to profess to be a Zionist right now without fully understanding what the term meant and believing it to be morally neutral.

So, trying to figure out what I could or couldn’t say and how much I was allowed to be myself, became a real puzzle for me.

Postmodernism was a severe blight on my thinking processes, too, as it asserts, idealistically, that can be anything one sets one’s mind to be.

Well, that’s not true. I have a character structure that is suited to being on the peripheries, but not in the mainstream of social life — and certainly not representing norms or conventions, particularly conventions of gender.

I’m not sure if American schools have more leeway in terms of how gender is allowed to be expressed, but in Australian schools, the female teachers are not allowed to be harsh, tough, or aggressive. They have to represent motherhood.