How to Be Subversive

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” –Albert Camus

I come from a subversive stock. No, my parents never overthrew a government, but they were people who looked at certain institutions and made fun of them. The first time my mother saw my new baby, she said, “With that much head, you expect more body.” Another time, after my father had broken a bone in his neck and I said he looked like a poet because his hair had grown so long, my mother said, “Yes, a poet coming out of a drain,” because of his neck brace. Their wit and intelligence made it hard to condemn this behavior. When my father was a visiting writer at Bread Loaf, a venerated literary summer school, he kept threatening to put on what he described as his “Irish serf hat” and grovel on the lawn of the director. He refused to socialize with the acceptable, high value people and instead hung out with the runaway nuns, very common during the seventies.

photo by Tamara Harhai

When I transferred to a private school in tenth grade, it became clear to me I was up against a certain acceptable dress code: Fair Isle sweaters, small gold earrings, topsider shoes, straight-leg corduroy pants, which I defied by wearing a leather bomber jacket over a dress that had stamped on its pocket, PROPERTY OF THE WOMEN'S DETENTION CENTER. In other words, a jail dress, both items purchased at an amazing outdoor flea market called Englishtown.

We were not sensible rule breakers: queuing always made sense in Europe, my parents paid their taxes, and I was encouraged to obey the law. Most of the time. But there was a lack of respect for things that were considered sacred in some families: unwrapped Christmas presents, my mother’s hatred for Walt Disney, and my father’s refusal to behave like the genius he was. No one should call this Harvard PhD “doctor,” and no one should call my mother “ma’am.” If a family had special traditions, say matching pajamas or saying prayers, we regarded them as lacking authenticity and, happily, sneered.

This was not always my choice. I liked things that were delicate and collectible, not Hummels for God’s sake, but when my mom asked me why I bothered cherishing small groups of shells or glass animals, I told her it felt good to surround myself with objects that meant something. My bedroom was like a monk’s cell with slanted attic ceilings and plaster walls that refused to hold anything pretty or colorful. My bed was a box built into the wall with a window that looked out on the fields behind our house, a window that was covered with ice for most of the winter.

I longed for frills, a vanity that held makeup. Still, my mother wore next to nothing on her face and did not find my quest for femininity represented by a longing for magazines and products understandable. I see this disregard for a particular type of vanity as a powerful repudiation of a traditional pressure to be attractive, but it also makes me sad. I wanted to be pretty, yet I respected her lack of self-care. Of course, my mother was beautiful, so maybe she could survive without lipstick and mirrors. There were few mirrors in our house, and the ones that existed were often inadequate.

As I grow older, I am grateful not to have carried this quest for ritual into my life. What they supported was equity, intelligence, kindness, and peace. Sometimes I question whether my mother’s hatred for organized religion and my father’s contempt for petty intellectual hierarchy have caused me to be judgmental and negative. But, looking at the state of the world, I think their refusal to compromise was both noble and prescient. 

– Molly Moynahan