Footnote Part V

Here's the funny thing: Having my stepfather take me shopping for my clothing was the norm in my house.
And yet- I knew it was not normal at all for a father figure to take a daughter to Montgomery Wards (whoa- I'm old) to do her school shopping. Really. I knew.
And that's the damn thing about abuse. You get used to a normal which is not normal at all and your body tells you, even if your mind can't, that it's wrong.
But in my house, it was taken as a token of how much C. "loved" me that he would do this feminine chore.
You know what? A father shouldn't give a rat's ass what his kid wears. He should be perfectly ignorant of his daughter's wardrobe unless the mother is completely out of it and someone needs to tell the child that really, that's not appropriate.
Clothing was a big issue in my life. As I went into Jr. High, the style for girls was Villager skirts and white oxford cloth blouses and Villager shirt-waist dresses. And because my stepfather was so tight with a dollar, Villager was not going to happen. There was, in those pre-Walmart days, a store called J. M. Fields. It had everything. Clothing, groceries. And we shopped there. And I got J.M. Fields faux Villager dresses and although they had the tiny flower patterned material, the buttoned-down and belted style, they were not the same.
But that's what I wore.
I wanted to look like all my friends. I wanted to be the same. And really- my friends had maybe two or three of these dresses and skirts. What would that have cost?
Too much to spend on me.
J.M. Fields. Monkey Wards. That's where I got my clothing. Until I learned to sew, which girls did back in those days. We all sewed our own dresses and since there were only so many Simplicity patterns and the local fabric store sold only so much kettle cloth (that was the material of choice), our clothing became far more democratic as we moved through Jr. High and high school.
And I, I! had control of what I wore.
And that was one more step in taking my power back over C.
Any way that I could find to take that power, I grabbed.
If it involved pinning tissue patterns over cotton and sewing up simple dresses, I did it.
And as soon as I figured out that I didn't need to wear a bra at all, I did that.
Thank-you, feminists. Thank-you, hippies.
I could take control of what I wore or did not wear over my own breasts. And if he said anything about it?
Ah. Well. He could not, could he? Because then he could be accused of looking at my breasts.
Maybe I was hoping he would say something.
But I doubt it. Because I was still horribly afraid of him and my room still only had a lock on the outside of the door and I could still see the flickering light of the TV from my white-curtained room when it was late at night.
And I knew that somehow, some way, it was not normal for a girl to care if her daddy was still up and awake. I knew a normal girl would feel safe, knowing her daddy was there to protect her if she needed protecting.
I knew, in my bones, what was normal and what was not, no matter what I had been taught, no matter what happened in my house, and there you have the beginnings of not being able to trust your intuition, your heart, your mind.