Pretty pink things

Pink things are sneaking into my bathroom and stealing into my bedroom, insinuating themselves uninvited. In the bathroom, a pink toothbrush and soapdish, a pink pot plant container for the maidenhair fern and a pink spray bottle to keep it misted and moist. By day, I wear sober blues and sombre blacks. At night, I climb into pink pyjamas with even a touch of pink lace beneath. 

My friend Yvonne swears by the power of pink. “Try it and you’ll see,” she tells me. And despite being well over sixty, she always wears pink and the men come flocking around. Though she works out regularly at the gym, she stands looking helpless when a suitcase needs to be lifted into a bus in Yorkshire or up some steps and over a canal in Venice. It works every time.

But I vowed to stop wearing pink at the age of eleven. After playing ‘Remembrance’ at a recital put on in an old folk’s home, I got up too early from the piano to bow. Blushing at the hissed reprimand from the singing teacher, I blamed the snuggly pink cardigan I had on, newly hand-knitted by my mother. I swore never to wear pink again, renounced ruffles, flounces and lace, anything that said girly and immature. 

On the Saturdays that I took my two small daughters to ballet lessons, the mirrored room was full of girls in pink leotards and pale pink ballet shoes, pink hairbands and sometimes even ballerina pink painted fingernails. But when, at the age of four, Anna was cast as a rag doll instead of a bunny rabbit in the end-of-year production, she refused to ever go back. A couple of years later, she stopped wearing pink, and dresses, altogether declaring that she didn’t like pritzy girls. I knew exactly what she meant: pretty, ditsy princesses, preening, and prancing, with tosses of ribbon-plaited hair like the My Little Pony toys that they played with.  My favourite toy had been a wooden tip truck that my father made.

In the shopping street on the weekend, fathers run errands with preschoolers dressed in pink tutus and gumboots in tow. As people stream in to see the New Zealand Ballet perform Swan Lake, the diminutive would-be prima donnas in punk tutus with hair tightly coiled, walking hand-in-hand with their mother draw smiles and murmurs of “How sweet; isn’t she cute,” from the grownups.

When my preschooler chose a pink t-shirt and purple tights, when my mother bought a loose pink floral top, when she and her elderly friends filled their gardens with the delicate pinks of rosebuds and peony, sweet pea, azaleas and camellias and their homes with the various variegated pinks of orchids, the choice could have been driven by cultural conditioning, but I think it’s innate, instinctive.

Pink seems to signal fragility, a promise of readiness like unfurled rose petals or the bloom of under-ripe peaches, saying “Look after me, take care of me, protect me.” 

Or maybe it’s the other way round: perhaps we wear pink because we can afford to be delicate and vulnerable; when we’re very young because we don’t yet need to hide our sexuality; in our later years, because we no longer need to. We don’t expect to be wolf-whistled or leered at, we’re not driven by our physiology to put our fertility on display or to hide it under loose black hoodies that let us pass unnoticed in the street. 

We’re not propelled, despite ourselves, to find a partner and start making babies. That turbulent passage in our lives when our self-confidence soars and plummets, and our sexual attractiveness waxes and wanes with our monthly cycle is either ahead or behind us. 

These stretches of life on either side of the reproductive years are simpler and less complicated, like the Japanese tradition of walking and picnicking under the pink cherry blossom.  Beautiful in itself, the blossom is a sign that winter is over, spring has begun. And when the blossom falls, it showers down on the lawn like a snowfall of gentle caresses from above before it browns around the edges and decays. 

The stretches of life on either side of the reproductive years are simpler and less complicated. And so pink has come and gone in my life; but now it’s coming back.