– In the family in spring it is tradition to grow out of the bunad and forget to sew it out. Do not worry about it.
It was mom who came with the comforting words. I had plucked up the courage after skulking against the closet for several weeks, and now stood there trying to squeeze skeleton, marrow and fat into a garment that was at least two sizes too small.
Last year went exactly that. On an empty stomach and with two sports bras that distributed the breasts evenly over the entire torso, I got the embroidered wool stack on and went out into the streets to celebrate Norway. While the rest ate ice cream and sausages, I drank water and concentrated on something as vital as breathing. When I got home that night, and the buttons that had been living at their breaking point all day could finally pop up, I had a kind of bruise belt around my entire waist. Some might call it self-harm, I choose to see it as stamina, but I promised myself to fit it perfectly for next year.
But then you have to something happened somewhere between the autumn darkness, Merry Christmas and Happy Easter that made me forget everything I had promised myself, consciously or unconsciously. Because now I stood there, one year later, sucking the stomach all the way into the central nervous system that I use, defying a number of physical laws, without it helping. For the first time in 24 years, the vest just didn’t go back.
I was alone, but acting to myself, nevertheless, to camouflage the shame, looked questioningly into the empty room with an exaggerated pantomime grimace, pretended that I did not understand how on earth this could happen to me. What had happened in the past year that had led to this?
In a weak for a moment I toyed with the idea that it could be due to the awful weather on May 17th last year. It was perhaps not completely impossible that my bunad had simply shrunk that day as a result of several hours outside in pissing rain and sleet? After all, it is made of wool.
Or it was maybe it was true what I had been told when I got it, that one day the most incredible thing happened, that the bunade would take up so little space in the closet that it shrunk to fit in. It is certainly a fairly well-known phenomenon. Every year at this time of year the sewing rooms are besieged by women like me who have had their bunads shrunk overnight, completely without warning. And unfortunately they can’t help. There are too many of us for that.
– Watch it’s like you’ve grown up now, said mom.
Yes thank you. It became clear to me as I stood and felt the national romanticism in me die and the self-loathing flourish, that I simply did not know what it was I agreed to when my grandmother and grandfather asked me if I wanted a bunad as a graduation present. It was green and beautiful, and I felt so inwardly proud and beautiful as I splashed around carefree with a stick and a loop, smiling broadly with the regulation as the adults welcomed me into their ranks.
I knew not then what I know now, that I had made a deal with the national devil himself. That the green woolly stack that was my flirtatious companion would, in a few years, develop into a brutal bully, a bully bought and paid for at an unreasonably high sum by my dear grandparents, I do not for all intents and purposes want to disappoint. That I, stupid as I was, had happily invited a mocking truth witness into my innermost space, who would forever shame me for not being a flat-chested, emaciated 15-year-old anymore, or that my body had quite naturally changed after that the children came. It is invariable, regardless of whether the starting point is lean or fair. We are changing.
Before raised I furrowed my eyebrows when people told me they had sold their bunad, said it was too much to manage, besides it was so expensive to keep it the same. Laziness, I thought. But in recent years I’ve started to wonder what the rest of us are really up to. It’s as if we’re all afflicted with a festive version of Stockholm Syndrome. We have developed a perverse love relationship with an abuser that we are not trying to get away from.
We laugh it off the pain she inflicts on us, holding our breath and drying our tears so that no one will suspect that we are actually suffering. We put on shoes with a chafing guarantee, hold on to silly headgear in the wind that, for obvious reasons, never caught on abroad. Also on the national day itself, when we should really feel free. She really deserves a beating, as misogynistic as she is, but instead we stand there and flog ourselves red, white and blue. It is clear that we will not be saved.
I stood there in the bedroom with a bunad that almost fell apart, and shook off my undeserved shame and bad conscience. Now it had finally happened, what I had been waiting for and dreading. Maybe it was a good thing, maybe this was what was needed for me to be freed from the tyranny of the Bunadan. Fuck empty stomach and itchy wool. Now I’m going to go to the shops and buy myself a far too expensive dress that holds good food and bubbly liquid. And then I’m going to book an appointment with the homemaker for the autumn and sew the dress just a little too big, so that I have something to grow into.
It thinks I’ll be pretty good.
