Our points of conflict changed over the years. During junior high, I went through a period of trying desperately to fit in. Because the other kids made fun of my clothes and hair all the time, I assumed (erroneously) that if I had "proper" clothes and hair that they would no longer make fun of me. So I tried to identify the clothes that the popular-seeming kids wore, and tried to get my mother to buy me those. At that point, our fights were about cost. Not overall money spent -- cost of particular items. So, if I picked out a pair of jeans that my mother thought were too expensive, she just refused to buy them. I wheedled. I cajoled. I begged. I made what seemed to me an entirely reasonable proposal: that she should give me whatever money she had alotted for new school clothes and let me pick out my own clothes, and if I only got two pairs of jeans instead of four that year, I would just have to live with the consequences.

No dice.

The funny thing is, we are both still like that. My mother is more likely to have an entirely new wardrobe every year, but she will balk at any individual items that seem to her to be too expensive. I'm more likely to pay top dollar for something that I think is really terrific, and then keep wearing it for the next ten years. (I also offset that with paying almost nothing for used clothes -- something my mother would never do.)

Of course, now I know why my mother wouldn't let me spend the money myself. First, because she didn't actually have a budget. Second, because we were really fighting about control. It's the struggle between teenagers and parents -- the struggle for adulthood, for autonomy.

We were fighting about who got to define me, to choose the way I was presented to the world. Me, or my mother.

Obviously, eventually, my mother would lose that fight. And I suppose she knew it. But we didn't talk about that. We talked about pink.

By the time I was Terra's age, about to start my senior year, my mother and I were no longer fighting about cost. I had given up thinking that the right clothes would protect me from ridicule. The thing that protected me from ridicule was... well, ridicule. It would have been tacky to make fun of cheerleaders to their faces -- some of them were reasonably nice people, anyway. But the institution of cheerleading, that was rich for mocking. The "popular" kids no longer seemed powerful to me -- they seemed like pathetic, deluded fools who actually thought high school was important.

So, I no longer wanted to dress like I imagined the popular kids dressing. I wanted to dress like a hippie -- for a while. (I still have my flower-embroidered shirt purchased at Pike Place Market from this era. It has come in handy for plays and Halloween costumes.) Then I wanted to dress like a beatnik, because even though I still liked 60s music and idealistic social concerns and surrealism, most of the time I would really rather wear a black turtleneck than a bunch of paisley. Then I wanted to dress like a punk/waver. (I still have my shirt from the X concert I went to in 1982. It looked like the cover of their Under the Big Black Sun record and it was my favorite shirt for years. I stopped wearing it regularly at a certain point only because I didn't want it to fall apart entirely.)

My mother didn't want me to dress like any of those things. I'm not sure what she did want me to dress like, really. Like I did when I was five? Or like she did when she was sixteen? Like the teenagers she saw on television? Like some magazine told her I should dress? There was one year where my mother threatened to make me wear a skirt to school one day a week, which confused me because I didn't mind wearing skirts, I just didn't own many, and anyway, by the time school started she had forgotten about it entirely. I still don't know where she got ideas like that. Church bulletins, maybe.

The one thing I did know, was that she seemed absolutely obsessed with getting me into the color pink.

And I don't like pink.

I like black.

And she absolutely, positively, did not want to see me in black.

So, by the time I was Terra's age, that's what we fought about.

Some of the things that came about because of this seem pretty funny to me now. I got a pair of black pants by demonstrating how great they looked next to a particular pink top with tiny black stripes. (See? It's an outfit!) My graduation dress was pink, and now I can't remember what concession I was trying to get out of my mother by picking out a dress I knew she'd love, but I know it was something. I remember vividly when Mom had her "colors done", was pronounced a "summer," or possibly a "spring," and came home convinced that I must be one too, even though our skin and hair color are entirely different, and this meant that I absolutely had to wear pink. The color people said so!

(Even though the color people also recommended that my mother "stain her hair beige," a notion that she rejected out of hand.)

(Also... and I realize this is just my opinion... I think that everyone in the Color Me Beautiful books looks awful, both before and after, which you can see by visiting the "colors done" link. Yes, they look somewhat worse in the "before" pictures, but really! That kind of 1980s clown blush is flattering to no-one!)

(Furthermore, I tend to think any system that attempts to neatly divide people into four, or six, or twelve set categories is fundamentally flawed. I think this when I see horoscopes (western or Chinese), I thought this when I read Color Me Beautiful, and I thought this when my parents borrowed The Spirit-Controlled Temperament from church and I read it. Of course, now that I know it was written by Tim LaHaye, co-author of The Worst Books in the World, I understand why it was nonsense.)

I imagine, sometimes, that my mother probably thought the whole black thing was a phase.

Oh, and if you miss the significance of the alligator, check out this personal reminiscence, and also, this nearly forgotten remnant of 80s pop culture.