How to make me feel like a woman possessed

By Ruth Wajnryb
August 14, 2004

I returned home from this year's Sydney Writers' Festival swankily sporting an Allen & Unwin black canvas carry bag, which I thought would come in handy for many a carrying need. But it quickly ended up in my teenage daughter's room. On subsequent occasions, I noticed it slung over her shoulder, serving her in the handy way I had imagined it was going to serve me. Subtly, imperceptibly and in the total absence of language, "my" bag had switched its possessive adjectives and become "her" bag. Funny that.

I'm a generous soul but I do prefer things to be explicit. So, as daughter sat with bag in the front passenger seat as I drove her to some event, I commented on how handy the bag was for a wide variety of schlepping functions.

Here's what followed in the mother-daughter exchange, during which both parties invest considerable effort in the avoidance of markers of possessiveness:

M: "I see the bag's working out rather nicely for you."

D: "It does."

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M: "It does?" (rising tone)

D: "Yeah." (long pause). "You know, like, it'll do".

M: "That's it?"

D: "Yeah" (further pause). "It's not very flash, like."

M: "No. It's more handy than flashy, I'd say. But it's not 'it'll do', is it? Because you're using it, here and now. It's not a comment on projected utility in the future. We're talking about now, like, there's the bag, on your lap, right now."

D: "Yeah, well, like, OK, that's why I said, 'it does'."

Two aspects of daughter's language struck me. One is the nonchalance of "it'll do". Here's a girl who's appropriated my bag, commandeered it the way governments take over private vehicles for military transport in times of martial law, and the best she can say about the item is that "it'll do".

"It'll do" means a kind of base-line functionality a barely satisfactory, if it were an annual performance review. I suspect I'd have been a lot happier to have given up my bag if daughter had truly valued it. But "it'll do" seemed to fall a good way beneath the required amount of value that would have made my sacrifice worthwhile. The second aspect of daughter's response was the novel adaptation of "it'll do" to "it does". In hindsight, I reject her explanation that the switch from future projection to present tense was meant to denote a here-and-now time sense.

Instead, I strongly suspect that "it does" was a subtle assertion of ownership. It meant: "this is my bag now". It had an in-your-face defiance about it, a surety that is the hallmark of youth, a smugness that bespeaks "finders keepers, losers weepers", and the drop-dead arrogance of an implied "get a life".

Her parting shot, of whose irony she seemed quite oblivious, was, "But hey, Mum, any time you want to borrow it, consider it yours."