I remember sitting on a couch at someone's home with a bunch of my classmates. All of us were teenage girls, waiting for an historical moment on Ed Sullivan. The Beatles were to make their first appearance in the United States. Was I holding my breath hyperventilating? I don’t know just seeing myself tightly squeezed waiting. We didn’t fully understand the gravity of what was about to happen. I don’t have a clue or how we found out, or who was there. This was February before my 18th Birthday in July. My hormones had just made an appearance. Doctors had no idea why I was delayed. I was bone thin from a battle with my mother about eating. The doctors put me on a diet to gain weight. I was to drink a chalky white drink: Metrical. A food replacement became a food addition for me, adding them to my, not so regular meals.
Before the Beatles, I was a teenage girl without hormones or breasts. I became an experiment in perfection. For a teenage girl this was my inconsistent beginnings to womanhood. They gave me one of the earliest birth control pills to regulate me. They were very strong and my stomach was always upset with nausea. Didn’t they know I was not to be regulated. I don’t even know if my mother knew they were birth control pills. I had been under another form of mother’s tutelage. My shoulders were to be held back for they were slumped. Promptly I was to walk the length of our house with books balanced on my head and with my tenacious personality I only had half measures of perfection and the books would fall. In the spirit of my mother against wanting me to be perfect in her eyes, I continually failed All this her lack of perfection she felt was to be fixed and portrayed in me. She gave me a shoulder brace. It was to pull my shoulders back.
I wanted a bra and instead I got a brace. While I didn’t need a bra I had gone and bought one. I had money of my own from various working endeavors. I always joke I was the first girl to get a bra and the last to need one. I got a bra when I was 14, then it was replaced with a brace.
