I BOP

I’M NINE YEARS OLD, my jeans are pegged so tightly at the ankles that I can’t feel my feet, and a single ponytail—well ratted with Aquanet and a pick comb—juts out over my ear like a handle to my head. I have a pink plastic boom box, a cassette tape of Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, and I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror, dancing side-to-side and singing “She Bop” into a whisk.

This was before Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center and the Filthy Fifteen—a list of songs with questionable content including Prince, AC/DC, and “She Bop,” because apparently it taught adolescent girls how to masturbate and I’m like, Tipper, let’s get real, okay? I did not learn how to masturbate from Cyndi Lauper. I learned to masturbate from a female stagehand in a community player’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was playing Violet Beauregard’s mother, minding my own business while my daughter turned into a blueberry night after night, while over at the University of Michigan, that stagehand was getting liberated in some Womyn-with-a-Y Studies class and on closing night, she gave me book called Sex For One. To educate me. To guide me. To help me get in touch with my inner Venus, which I most certainly did not want to do. What I wanted to do was stand in front of the bathroom mirror and sing along with Cyndi.

“She bop—he bop—a—we bop, I bop—you bop—a—they bop, Be bop—be bop—a—lu—bop, I hope he will understand, She bop—”

“She what?” my mother asked. She was in the next room, grading fourth grade spelling tests.

“Bop,” I told her, squinting at my reflection just like Cyndi did in the “Time After Time” video. “She bop.”

“She can’t bop,” my mother said. “Bop is not a verb.”

Grammar was an important thing in our family. While my friend Becky and I were welcome to ride our bikes to the library, me and Becky most certainly could not.

“It is so a verb,” I said, irritated that my performance had been interrupted. I put down the whisk, hit stop on my boom box, and stood in the doorway so she could see my indignation. “Bop is totally an action word.”

My mother looked at me over her glasses. “Try it out in a sentence—” I always had to try stuff out in sentences— “We bop, I bop, they bop,” she demonstrated, oblivious that she was reciting lyrics. “You bop, he bop—”

“See, that’s grammar!” I said.

“It is not grammar,” she said.

And I said, “Cyndi Lauper says it’s grammar!”

I’d recently watched that episode of the Cosby show where Vanessa wants to wear makeup and her mother says no. Vanessa’s thirteen and snotty and says, “Rebecca’s mother lets her wear makeup!” And Claire says, “I am not Rebecca’s mother! If you want to live by her rules, go live in her house. But under my roof, you will do as I say!” I think I imagined a similar exchange between me and my own mother—I mean, my mother and I— but it didn’t happen. She wasn’t some sitcom character with scripted dialogue; she was a very real woman trying to juggle a marriage and a career and a kid. And sometimes I made her crazy, and sometimes worried, and often, proud. But the thing with Cyndi Lauper and the grammar? That just made her tired. I remember she took off her glasses and looked up at the ceiling as though the rules of parenting might be stenciled in the paint. “Someday,” she said, “if you decide to have children of your own, you’ll understand.”

Memory is a tricky thing. I can generally remember the scene, and usually, the tenor of voices and general subject matter—but exact dialogue is a rarity. Not in this scenario. “If you decide to have children of your own,” she said, “you’ll understand.” I remember it so clearly, every word. “If you decide,” she said. “If you decide.”

Every month or so, I come across an article telling me what a woman or a girl should or should not do. How she should and should not act. What she can and cannot say. Can she have a job and a family? Can she have a family and go to college? Can she go to college, period? Can she be a rock singer or a CEO or a writer? Can she write if she has a child? If she has a second child? When are you going to have your second child? When are you going to get married? When are you going to get a 401K? Did you bake the baked goods for the bake sale or buy the baked goods for the bake sale? Did you stop calling yourself a feminist because Susan Sarandon stopped calling herself a feminist? Did you opt in or opt out, nevermind any mention of the financial position a woman would need to be in to make that choice in the first damn place and please, please please please, can we stop? Can we find a way to tell our stories, weigh our options, get advice and/or back-up and/or support when and if we need it without being told, every month, what we should or should not do, can or cannot say?

If you decide, my mom said to me when I was nine.

She said it when I was fifteen, too. And twenty-six. And thirty-three. And yesterday.

If you decide.

In the moment, of course, I missed all of this nuance. All I heard was Someday You’ll Understand. When you’re nine, nothing is as infuriating as being told you can’t understand something until later. I flounced back into the bathroom, turned the pink boom box up as loud as it would go, and faced my reflection: the ridiculous ponytail, an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt a la Flashdance. Never, I told myself. Never, ever, ever are you going to grow up and get stupid about important things the way grown-ups sometimes are.