The color pink and I have had a love-hate relationship. Here’s what happened to make me hate it, and why after all this time, we are becoming friends again.

Weakness

Since I turned 18, I’ve hated pink.

That was around the time Mama was in the hospital for the first time after she had left my dad. It started with an intense bout of cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection brought on by her poor hygiene. After being hospitalized, her doctors had diagnosed a host of illnesses that included COPD, emphysema, congestive heart failure, and morbid obesity. We were told all these things were terminal, especially as she had them all simultaneously.

I felt overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of knowing that I was going to have to care for a woman whose health would only worsen in the coming years; to make sure she went to doctor’s appointments, took her medication, and ate right – all things she generally refused to do. There was no room for weakness. From now on I felt it was imperative that I project only strength.

Pink is a girly color, which in my mind back then equaled “weak.” After all, the only female I really knew was my mother, and she certainly epitomized weakness in my mind. She was always convinced she had physical illnesses and ailments. In reality, some existed and some did not, but her ideas about all of her ailments kept her from doing a lot. I’m also pretty sure she suffered from deep depression as she would often lay in bed for days, only getting up to go to the bathroom.

From caring for the yard, to work around the property, to my very physical job, to moving, I had a lot of heavy, hard work to do and I was already pressured to keep wearing skirts from my mom, who supposedly believed it was wrong to wear pants. (Of course, she also “believed” it was wrong to wear jewelry but then started buying me jewelry… so who knows.)

Having so much important responsibility for the functioning of our household, I put a lot of thought into making the way smoother for myself. One of the things I did was to try to make myself appear strong, confident, and as completely self-reliant as possible. Pink, in my mind, did not represent that image well.

Dissociation

So here’s the second thing about pink: it was my mom’s favorite color. She loved that bright flowery pink, and got a lot of compliments when she wore it. As a result, when she went out she began to wear pink all the time.

Fast forward – my mom passed away and I began a new life. In describing our home life and circumstances to a therapist, it really sunk in for the first time ever that my mom actually had been mentally ill. My therapist was able to reverse diagnose at least one of her maladies as having been schizophrenia due to the obvious strong delusions she operated under on a daily basis. As I’ve mentioned before, I always felt something was “off” with her as I was growing up. Only after allowing myself to admit her illness could I begin to process everything that had happened.

Like almost everything surrounding this entire situation, my reasons for developing a serious loathing for pink after that are complex.

I was very angry with my mother after learning she was mentally ill. I realized that if she would have simply owned up to the fact that something was wrong and sought medication and clinical help, we could have had a much more peaceful and much less painful life. My poems from this time (“Mama’s Recipes” and “Interview with a Ghost” for example) are all about trying to make sense of that fact vs. our reality. In just a few months, I went from being very attached and loyal to my mother’s memory to really hating her guts. Everything that reminded me of her, I banished.

A Statement

I’m 37 now, and it’s been a long time since all of the trauma. I’ve done a lot of hard emotional work, and a lot of healing. It has been several years now since I was able to forgive my mother. I won’t say pink is my favorite color or anything, but I have taken to wearing it more within the past year. When I do, I still don’t like a strong dose, but I’ll sport it as an accent – a racerback tank here, a pair of pink Keds there.

I am more at ease with myself these days than I’ve probably ever been. I have come to see being okay to wear pink again as a symbol; a declaration. I can be whoever I am – whoever I find inside of myself. That person does not have to follow a carefully constructed identity that promotes strength to the world because she feels so incredibly weak on the inside. That person can be who she is, and on days when she feels feminine and flowery, it is okay for her to wear pink.