control is an aphrodisiac

the language of my lineage

“It’s just so masculine,” my boyfriend says. He is listing off all of the reasons why our relationship is over, one of which is that my name, Tarzan, is not to his taste.

Once we’ve reconciled he’ll suggest a different name for me that he likes better, and, because being controlled is my primary love language, I will try it out for a while before going back to the name I gave myself. 

But he has another more urgent reason for ending things.

“Your moustache,” he continues, and something inside me shrinks down to the size of a shrivelled green pea. I force my quick-thumping heart to make itself smaller, quieter. “It’s just not attractive to me. I’ve told you this before and you’re still not taking care of it. It makes me feel like you don’t really care about me.” 

Control: my home province, my resting heart rate, my place of safety and comfort.

It has been my mother tongue for as long as I can remember, the language of my dreams, the language you speak before you know what language is. More than anything, it is the language with which men love.

This old form of control had found new expression, couched in the rhetoric of “you will do this if you really love me.” It was a powerful aphrodisiac. Rather than running the other way, I bought a home waxing kit and married that man. 

My “moustache” was no more than twelve offending brown hairs on the lower corners of my upper lip, but it would be a subject of conversation throughout my marriage, an important point of reference that seemed to encapsulate all of the ways I fell short as a wife. All the ways I withheld love from my husband. 

This made sense to me. He spoke my language with startling proficiency, almost as if it were his mother tongue too. And as much as my husband did it to me, I did it to myself.

We would be cruising down HWY 406, my hair whipping around in the wind from the open window, and I’d flip up the passenger side mirror to check my lipstick. The late summer sun would catch a single errant hair on my upper lip and cause my stomach to drop through my pelvic bowl and slop down my legs.

Fuck. This is a huge fucking problem. You are going to hear about it later. 

The summer sun was supposed to temporarily bleach away my loathsome moustache, the wax kit hibernating in the back of the cupboard from June until September. I’d pick up my phone and set a reminder for later that day, then turn my head away and arrange my face into what I hoped was a natural gaze out the window, my heart pumping three times faster than normal. 

This is how I am wired. When men try to control me, it registers as love.

This pattern is a multi-generational fungus that grew on both of my ancestral branches. The tighter the locus of control, the more I bend and contort, rearranging my parts into the shape most likely to keep me safe and make me worth loving.   

But eventually, inevitably, the moustache grows back. The painstaking work of reshaping myself becomes too great a task. Something, either me or the mould, breaks.

The work - perhaps the most important of a person’s life- will be to collect up the scattered parts and let them find their natural shape. It is uncomfortable and painfully disorienting. I forget myself more times than I remember. The shape of my self is like water sloshing around in a bucket. With each new discovery, the self takes form, like a droplet of water turning solid.

I have armpit hair and smell like sweat.
I love cigarettes but rarely smoke them.
I am a below-average cook who eats a lot of bagged salad.
I love Kanye more than anyone in the world has ever loved Kanye (other than Kanye).
I am a future Gold medalist in the sprint canoe, Western Ontario Division.
I’m a really good mother.

These tiny manifestations of self are like treasures I carry in my pocket. They give me definition. Who is this woman? What does she like? Where are her boundaries? Who will she become? Often there are more questions than answers.

But here is one question that does have an answer. The next time someone asks me why I left my marriage (please never do that to a divorcing person), I will tell them:

To discover the shape of Tarzan