The family on the fridge

There was a pocket of time during my 80s childhood, nestled amongst Teddy Ruxpin and Twister, Cabbage Patch Kids and Casio keyboards, when miniature license plates were very popular. Shrunken replicas of the same number plates found on every car, these child-sized vanity plates were affixed to the back of a bike or used as room decor.  I was the not-so-proud owner of a pink and grey Huffy Sea Princess bicycle, replete with white banana seat. As an eight year-old, I was barely competent at riding the Sea Princess, but was nevertheless fully convinced she needed a license plate.

In truth, I didn’t even like riding my bike. Learning to ride was a traumatic experience, stopped and started several times until I finally obtained the merest sliver of cycling success thanks to a training method imparted by a family friend. All I can remember is a dog leash somehow fastened around my waist, and my dad jogging alongside, holding the other end, as I pedalled shakily, panting with fear, barely holding back tears. Maybe subconciously I thought the license plate would legitimise my standing as a cyclist; it was obvious even to 8 year-old Lauren that my grasp of this skill was tenuous at best. Maybe it went even deeper than that. My name, emblazoned on an actual product for sale, confirmed my existence in a world beyond my home and imagination; Lauren-as-real-person, capable of great things yet to be achieved. 

Bike license plates were often sold in shops that stocked an eclectic selection of objects falling under the broad category of cute: teddy bears embroidered with ‘I love you’, sachets of potpourri and shell-shaped fragrant soap for the ‘guest’ bathroom, adorable themed sticker packs (any self-respecting 80s American kid boasted a sticker collection) and personalised notepads, mugs, hair barrettes and pencils. They were invariably found on a rotating display shelf, in alphabetical order, from Alex to Wendy; Zara hadn’t yet come into fashion. I walked exuberantly over to the display, spinning it squeakily until the L section whirled into view, willing that today would be the day my license plate and I would be united.  Laura was always there, and further down the list, Linda, Louise, maybe even Lynn, but never, ever Lauren. I was the only Lauren at my Montessori primary school, a place where offbeat names were not out of place. I counted Gaetano, Heinz, and Lavinia amongst my classmates; I don’t know whether they too yearned for name legitimacy with the same ardour. 

I was the lone Lauren at high school, but by then my perspective had shifted. Theoretically, being the sole Lauren meant that I might set the standard to which other Laurens could aspire. I could be enthusiastically, genuinely me, and wear my name, and its relative uniqueness, with pride. I would eventually meet other Laurens at college. I didn’t compare myself to them, we were all different shades of Lauren. College Lauren had gained a confidence and self-assurance that young Lauren was still realising. Young Lauren wanted to fit in.  I wanted to be Lauren who whizzed past on her bike, streamers waving , bell ringing, dust flying, smoothly, swiftly gliding, the LAUREN license plate trailing in my athletic wake, signalling that I had been there, that I had made my mark. 

Although I became marginally better at riding my bike, I never found a LAUREN plate. It was several years before I embodied the confidence envisioned in my cycling fantasy, a confidence that never extended to riding bikes. I still hate cycling; ‘athletic’ is not an adjective that will likely ever be associated with me. There is a beautiful red coaster brake bicycle presumably still languishing in a corner of my parents’ dusty garage. It was purchased aspirationally before I started college. In my mind’s eye I saw myself as the picture-perfect college student, leisurely pedalling along the tree-lined Middle Path of campus. In reality, my bike lived a forlorn life locked in a bike shed outside of my dorm for a year before I brought it back home. I never once rode to class. I made my mark in other ways. 

Although this is a story about many things, it began as a story about being seen. In my quest for personalised trinkets, I was looking for myself in the world, in a very literal way. As a child, having a name nobody else had seemed unhelpful and vaguely annoying, just another thing that made me different. I already knew I looked different from the other kids, with my chunky Garfield glasses, my pigeon-toed feet,  my lack of gracefulness and my cafe au lait skin. I knew that my family was different; in the early 80s mixed race families were not the norm.  I didn’t see people who looked like me and my family in books or on television and movie screens. I was largely unbothered by this, probably because I wasn’t expecting to see them. I knew I was different and I was mostly okay with that. 

As a 21st century parent, I am grateful that my daughter sees people with hair like hers playing lead roles in films, and that a national energy company featured a Black dad, a white mom and their mixed kids in its television ad spot. My children notice the number of Black, Asian, Muslim, queer and disabled characters they see or read about across media types. An advertising spread I tore from an Aldi flyer was stuck to our fridge for a couple of months.  The family, cosy in winter pajamas, were kinky-haired, brown-skinned beauties, the first non-white family I ever recall seeing in an Aldi ad. We yearn to see people who look like us in the world, in part to confirm our own existence, but also to reaffirm what is possible. The Aldi family reassured me that my reality wasn’t a once-off.

Photo spread by Martin Scholler for the article, ‘The Changing Face of America’ by Lisa Funderburg

National Geographic, October 2013 issue

The Takeaway:

Help your child find—and see— themselves in the world

Want to know MOrE?

Although I’d like to think that 21st century humans inhabit a more enlightened age, where cultural heritage is celebrated, regardless of whether or not someone has grown up in their country of residence or are a recent arrival, it’s a sad fact that there are most likely people in every country of the world who believe that non-natives or immigrants are somehow bringing down ‘their’ country. They are stealing jobs, sponging off the government and insisting on changes to the way things have always been done; they are calling themselves ‘Australians’ or ‘Americans’ but they are not embracing American or Australian values and customs. The bigger question, of course, is what makes someone a ‘real’ American/Australian? If we want to get into it, I could argue that, save for First Nations peoples, nobody else can really say they are more American/Australian than any other immigrant. Only Indigenous folk were here before anyone else and thus are the ‘true’ arbiters of the American/Australian way of life. What I have found is that when most Australians say Aussie, they implicitly mean white, which is interesting given that the most Aussie of Aussies are not white.

Written in simple, rhythmic prose accompanied by vibrant illustrations from Ronojoy Ghosh, Mem Fox’s ‘I'm Australian Too’ is the best children’s picture book I have seen to date that presents the multicultural reality of modern Australia in both a celebratory and unvarnished light. Fox acknowledges Indigenous Australians as the original owners and custodians of the land (“our mob’s been here forever- now we share the place with you”), historical European and modern Asian immigrants, as well as refugees from Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan (“our boat capsized, but we were saved”) and Somalia. As someone who regularly visited asylum seekers/refugees at the detention centre in Melbourne when that was still allowed, I most appreciated a page near the end of the book. In the illustration, a small brown girl is standing behind a large stone wall topped with electric wire. She holds an open bird cage in her hand and looks towards a white dove, flying over the wall. The verse on the page reads, “Sadly I’m a refugee-I’m not Australian yet. But if your country lets me in, I’d love to be a vet.”