love heart parade
I’ve lived in Australia for nearly twelve years and have been aware of Australian linguistic quirks even longer, but there are a few Aussie turns of phrase that continue to amuse me. Taking pole position, without a doubt, is ‘carry on like a pork chop’. This most colourful expression, as I understand it, describes someone who is being overly dramatic. The connotation is negative, but playfully so. One might say that a child who wept and wailed over a grazed knee was carrying on like a pork chop. The phrase has always tickled me because by the time a pig becomes a pork chop, my assumption is that no carry-on remains. As one of my children once put it, ‘Pork chops can’t talk.’ An Australian friend said she heard the phrase has something to do with the sizzle and sputter a chop makes when it hits a hot pan. Perhaps. It doesn’t really matter. I have fully integrated this phrase into my vocabulary; every time I say it I smile to myself, picturing a juicy pork chop dancing a jig.
Another distinctly Aussie linguistic habit is to refer to hearts (the shape, not the organ), as love hearts. Perhaps the reasoning behind this is to delineate between the blood pumper and the love symbol. I would posit, however, that context readily clarifies which heart is being referenced. If a 4 year-old asks me to draw a heart for them, I am 99% certain they aren’t intending to colour in the left and right ventricles. Furthermore, if we have love heart, why don’t we have blood heart? It stands to reason…
As we approach the second week of February, love heart season is upon us. At work I typically prepare some sort of heart-themed art experience for Valentine’s Day, a pink/red/purple-tinted card for mum and dad, glittered and glued with love from their darling child. This year, however, I am going to flip the script. Instead of making cards expressing love for their parents, the children will make love heart art affirming love for themselves. Although the concept seems simple, it requires some thought. In order to determine what we love about ourselves, we must first consider what makes us who we are--physical features, skills and talents, personality traits, our special ways of being.
I have distinctive dark curly hair. I truly love my hair; on the extraordinarily rare occasions that I have straightened it, I felt viscerally un-Lauren. This wasn’t always the case. As a child I ached for long, fine, straight, tangle-free hair. I imagined a silver-plated comb gliding effortlessly through my silky locks. Annabelle, whose hair is even curlier and kinkier than mine, desperately wanted what she termed ‘princess hair’---the long plait of Elsa or the flowing golden mane of Rapunzel. She regularly proclaimed that she hated her hair and wanted to get rid of it. Indeed, sometimes she still says this, and jumps at the prospect of getting her hair straightened. Anyone who knows Annabelle, however, probably can’t imagine her with any other hair. As she grows older, she is slowly starting to embrace her curls. She takes pride in the fact that her hair texture and curl was gifted to her from her granny and the lineage of strong Black women who came before her.
Our physical features tell the story of our ancestors. In acknowledging and celebrating our features, we are paying tribute to our elders. When someone says to me, ‘I don’t see colour. We are all part of the human race’, I want to say to them, “See my colour. See my kinky curls. See the curve of my hips, the fullness of my lips, the roundness of my butt. This is who I am. It is my story.’ Yes, I am much more than my appearance, but my appearance marks me as part of a family, a people, a history. If you erase my colour, you erase a huge part of my identity.
Illustration by St. Louis based artist Kat Kissick.
Find her on Etsy at Kat Kissick Art.
The Takeaway:
Embrace what makes you unique.
Want to know MOrE?
In my experience, self love is sometimes more difficult as we age. Young children, naturally egocentric, generally find it fairly easy to identify what is awesome about themselves. Preteens and adolescents can struggle with self esteem because they are at a point in their lives when comparing oneself to peers is at a pinnacle, and perceived faults are magnified under the influence of raging hormones. Even grown folks, who theoretically should know better, are hard on themselves, because the body they have or the things they can do now may not compare to a younger version of themselves. However, like any skill, the more we practice self love, the better at it we become. An easy way to spark self love is by giving compliments. When we recognise something we like about someone else, we also shine light on what we like about ourselves. This Valentine’s Day, take some time out with the people you love to talk about the things you like about yourself, as well as the things you love about them. When we love ourselves, it becomes that much easier to love other people.
