I have a vague memory of my 2 or 3 year old self doing something really weird. I stole my mom’s lipstick and my dad’s chapstick, and I sat in the back of the hallway and ate them both. I guess I figured that since they go on your lips, the must be food.
I would have been about three or four when I first discovered the true nature of Woman Stuff. I was rummaging around in the bathroom, and discovered something that … looked weird and mysterious, and I had no idea what it was. One end appeared to be the handle end of a pair of scissors… but the other end, instead of having blades, had these two crescent-shaped metal things that clamped together when you brought the handles together.
It was interesting and incomprehensible, so I naturally took it to my parents. “What’s this?” I asked.
My folks were sitting in their recliners, reading. My dad looked mystified. Mom, on the other hand, simply said, “Those are eyelash curlers, baby. Those aren’t a toy. Put them back.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll put them back. What do they do? What are they for?”
“They’re for curling mommy’s eyelashes, honey.”
Now this confused me somewhat. Curling eyelashes?
“They’re a makeup thing, sweetheart. A woman thing. Put them back.”
I didn’t understand, but I knew, even at age four, that adult people, particularly female adult people, did LOTS of stuff that I did not understand, and never likely would. I put them back and forgot about them.
…but from time to time, “woman stuff” continued to crop up, and to confuse me. Woman stuff almost never made sense. Furthermore, in some dim childish way, I intuited that when I was older, more and more man stuff would make sense… but most woman stuff would remain forever a mystery.
And with each new item of Woman Stuff, the mystery grew deeper.
One day, while rummaging around in the bathroom, I found an odd object. It was about five or six inches long, cylindrical, and sealed up in a thin paper wrapper. There were quite a few other objects just like it in the box. (The box was a lacquered trinket box, by the way, unlabeled… NOT the box the objects had come in… so I had no clue what the things were).
There were plenty of them, so I tore the wrapper off the one, to see what it was.
It made even less sense with the wrapper off. It appeared to be a cardboard tube of some sort. Inside the cardboard tube was an odd little bullet-shaped thing with a string on it. Some kind of firecracker, perhaps? The cardboard tube did appear kind of roman-candle-ish, implying considerable explosive power. Some kind of launcher? Why unmarked? Even back then, fireworks always had warnings written on them… but this object seemed deliberately uninformative. NO text whatsoever, no diagrams… not even any color or attempt to make it look interesting… almost as if it didn’t WANT you examining it too closely…
I carefully took the thing apart, being careful not to pull the string, for fear of an explosion and a faceful of brimstone and confetti. You could lose an eye, you know.
The bullet-shaped thing was not a firecracker. It seemed to be made entirely of paper… and cotton, for some reason. What the hell was this thing?
It seemed to be made of stuff normally used for cleaning stuff up… but what could you clean up with a little puff of paper and cotton? Very small messes of some kind?
The more I looked at the parts, the more it looked… incomplete. It seemed like this was just part of something, like it was meant to be inserted into something else… but if it wasn’t complete, why was it wrapped individually? And where were the other parts that it belonged to? And whatthehell was it for? Paper? Cotton? String?
Plainly, I had gotten as far with my investigation as I was going to get. Time to seek further information. I wandered into the kitchen with the fragments in my hands. “Hey, Mom,” I asked. “What’s this thing?”
Mom glanced at me, glanced at my hands, and answered without missing a beat, “That’s Woman Stuff, honey. Don’t take any more of them apart, those cost money.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Throw this one away?”
“Please.”
And that was the extent of the conversation. It was Woman Stuff. Asking further questions was pointless; at best, it would be uninteresting, and at worst it would be incomprehensible. I threw away the parts and moved on to something more interesting to my six-year-old mind. It wasn’t until years later that I found out what a tampon was.
Now the whole point of telling that story was so I could tell this one:
It was less than a year afterwards. We had gone to visit the grandparents. The old people were all settling into their chairs in Grandpa Havoc’s huge old living room, and the Old People Talk had begun. Time for me to go find something interesting to do. I wandered into the bedroom where my stuff was and began going through my suitcase. Comics? Coloring book? Hey, what was THIS?
…and I drew from my suitcase an odd teal-colored box. It was labeled with some odd word I didn’t recognize. It had text on it, which identified it as … some sort of hygiene product… but aside from that, it seemed remarkably vague about what it was supposed to be. Whatthehell? What was it doing in my stuff, anyway? First there was this “brushing the teeth” business, and now something new I was supposed to do?
When I got the box open, I found myself looking at rows of those little white-paper-wrapped fireworky looking things. Oh. Mom had accidentally put them in my suitcase. My little suitcase was about the same size as her vanity case; she’d prolly got confused in all the packing.
So I wandered into the middle of the living room, into the middle of the Old People Talk, held up an open box of tampons, and loudly asked, “Mama, what do you want me to do with these?”
My grandmother went bugeyed so fast and hard, I think if I’d been standing close enough, I’d have heard a faint “sproing!” sound. She did that a lot when I was growing up, in such a way as to make me suspect I may be related to Roger Rabbit on my mother’s side of the family. My grandfather and father immediately stopped talking… and froze, mouths open, as they saw what was in my hand.
All eyes immediately swiveled to Mom so fast I swear I heard their eyeballs click in the otherwise silent room.
“Where did you get those?” asked Mom, one eyebrow raised in mild irritation.
“They were in my suitcase. This is Woman Stuff, though, right?” I asked.
“That’s right, sweetie. They belong in my vanity. Would you go put them there, please?”
“Okay,” I replied, and toddled off to go do so.
“Wait a minute,” said my grandfather. I stopped. Mom glanced at him sharply. She knew him well enough to know he was up to no good, not with that grin on his face… but he was her father, so she couldn’t exactly stop him…
“Son,” my grandfather asked me, “do you know what those are?”
“Woman Stuff,” I replied.
My father stifled a snicker. Mom shot him a sharp glance. Grandma’s eyes unbugged slightly.
“Well,” said my grandfather, “you’re quite right. They’re Woman Stuff. Do you know what Woman Stuff is?”
This time, both Mom and Grandma shot him dagger-eyed looks. He ignored them. I saw all this, and simply assumed it was all part of the inky dark mystery of Woman Stuff. So…what WAS Woman Stuff? Well, yes, THIS was woman stuff, one KIND of Woman Stuff, but… what was the nature of Woman Stuff? The ESSENCE Of Woman Stuff?
Wow.
I’d never really thought about that before. I pondered my answer for a minute.
All four adults in the room were holding their breath. Dad sipped his beer. This must be important, I thought. Better get it right on the first try…
“Woman Stuff,” I finally announced, “is stuff that doesn’t make any sense, but costs money anyway.”
Dad sprayed beer across half the living room. Grandpa went gurk, got a pained look on his face, and burst out laughing, all at once, as if he’d been gut-punched by an especially funny clown. Grandma got that “my-brain-has-locked-up-on-me-from-sheer-shock” look, and Mom closed her eyes. I later realized that this was embarrassment, but at the time, I interpreted it to mean that I had answered correctly… after all, she wasn’t trying to correct me, now, was she?
I beamed with pride. I had gotten the answer right.
I wasn’t sure why Dad and Grandpa seemed to think it was so funny, though. Maybe they didn’t understand Woman Stuff, either.
“You can go put those away now,” said Mom, and I did, and moved on to more comprehensible, earthly stuff to occupy my mind… like a coloring book.
Y’know what? That was thirty-two years ago, and upon reconsidering the story… I’m not sure I’d give a different answer, even today…
When I was about three or four, I went out in a rowboat with some family friends who were fishing. When they caught any fish, I’d wrap it up in a paper towel, hug it and say “Poor fishy, poor fishy.” Then I’d dump it back in the water.
I guess they thought it was too cute to get mad about.
What the heck is a Nuk?
“Nuk” is a brand of pacifier.
Whatever I did was cute. I had my mother’s word on that.
At one of my first trips to a Mexican restaurant, a waitress set down a huge burrito covered in melted cheese in front of my dad and I promptly declared “I scared of dat” and hid my face for the rest of the meal.
One night at the dinner table, when I was about 6 or 7, I was describing a game we had been playing that day at recess. It was a “boys chase girls then girls chase boys” type of thing, except we were pretending that the girls had cooties and the boys had herpes. We had no idea what herpes were, but it sounded dreadful. When I told my parents this detail, they looked at each other then asked me, “do you know what herpes are?” and I said “no, but it it’s probably some kind of bug.” Indeed. They got a good laugh at that one.
Once when I was very young, maybe 3 or 4, I dumped all my mom’s spices into a pan and filled it with water, declaring I was “making soup”. It took a while but eventually they thought that was pretty cute.
Your mom and mine must be friends.
Sorry, Nurse Carmen, for reassigning your gender. Being the sister of two little brothers, I’m familiar with that phenomenon.
Wang-Ka, your stories are incredibly funny. But what was the last object you mentioned?
I loved my little sister so much I tried to bring her to school for show-and-tell.