Second hand love

SECOND HAND LOVE 

Except for birthdays, Christmas, and one new outfit for the first day of school, I rarely received anything new when I was growing up. 

I remember the first two new things I ever got. Around the same time, I received a new two wheeler bike and a new pillow. Other than being brand new, and not just new to me, they were not otherwise related. I didn’t get them both for a good report card, for instance. Or, way before bike helmets were a thing, did I get the pillow to tie around my head while I learned to ride a bike. 

They were probably months apart and mutually exclusive, but in my mind, they are inexorably related. 

The shiny, GOLD SPARKLY bike was a result of my mother winning a bowling tournament. Apparently she was a great bowler. Not just good - great. Consistent, strong, with aim true and direct. She won this bike, and I remember my parents coming home from the tournament, it must have been a weekend. We were all still outside playing, the dusk approaching. They pulled into the driveway and my dad opened up the trunk and pulled out the bike. The low sunlight glinted on the gold glitter paint. I stood around with my siblings, oohing and aahing. My father glanced up and down the line of us, a 1960’s middle class dad in his pressed shirt and shined shoes, a Colonel Von Trapp of the Chrysler factory. I was called over. I was given the new bike. 

Not my birthday, not Christmas, a brand new bike all for me! 

I didn’t care at the time that it was won, it was free, it was not purchased. I didn’t care that I got the bike because I was the right age and size for it.They didn’t go out and find a bike for me, that would suit me or fit me. It was not a reward or a present. I was basically in the right place and the right time. 

My dad wheeled me around on the grass to help me learn to balance, taught me how to steer, how to stop myself from falling, and how to get back up when I fell anyway.

It’s the only time I really remember riding that bike. Turns out I was slightly too big for it, and it quickly went down the line to the next sibling, and the next, and I moved up to the larger bikes my older sisters had outgrown. 

But for at least one glorious summer evening, bathed by soft light and cooled by the river breeze, I rode a golden bike that was brand new and all mine. 

The pillow was also free. My dad had purchased several new beds all at once. A bonus at work? A tax refund? My mom telling him 6 girls needed more than three beds? Who knows. I remember the bunk beds coming, being set up in the big upstairs bedroom, a double bed set up across the room. I remember the sisters who got the new beds being pretty excited about them. 

As a ‘thank you for your business’, the furniture company had thrown in a couple of pillows. 

So again, it wasn’t as though they bought me a new pillow, thought about it at all, it just showed up, free, and I was next in line. 

I kept that pillow for 20 years. I moved out with it. I once fell out of the top bunk, down beside the wall, crashed into the floor, and woke up most of the house. They found me on the floor, still asleep, clutching that pillow. 

I brought that pillow into the delivery room with me when I was having my son. At one point, him being breech, they were preparing me for an emergency C-section. They threw my pillow across the room! I gasped - HAAAAAA. Biggest breath I took that whole labour. MY PILLOW!! 

I was with my ex-husband for five years before I let him put his head on my pillow. Even with a new pillow now, and a new husband, it’s still a thing. Do not touch my pillow. 

I’ve examined this neurosis. In some depth. What the fuck is it with Yvette and her pillows? 

I think it’s because it was one of the only new things I ever got that was just mine. Most of my clothes were hand me downs. All the other (non present) bikes, toys, games, books, were from older siblings or cousins. There would be other peoples names written in the books, pieces of puzzles missing, dice gone from games. I remember the shame and embarrassment of wearing clothes to school that other kids recognized as having come from their homes, because my Dad liked to shop for used clothes. 

To me, that new pillow was not only mine, but mine first. Mine always. In a home where everything was shared, including if not especially our parents, having one item that was mine all mine was a touchstone of sorts. 

It was an identifier of individuality in a melee of Menards. I am me. I have this thing. I am separate from you because I own something you cannot have. I will not outgrow this thing. 

When I look back now, though, I don’t see a family of hand me down dressed kids. I see a mother who sewed matching outfits for her girls, who had to be convinced to buy herself a new blouse every ten years, who raised her family with consistency, strength, and an aim for our success that was true and direct. I see a father who took pride enough in his appearance to iron his shirts and shine his shoes to go to work in a factory. Who guided his children, taught them to steer, taught them to fall, helped them up again. 

I may have not had a lot of new things when I was growing up, but I never had second hand love.