Tag Archives: women

Powder Room Diplomacy

Posted on by under Gender & Place

The year is 2007 and our bags are packed with “layering tanks” from American Eagle, flat irons to steam our hair into long, flat planks, and short denim skirts. The manufacturers have carefully ripped the skirts to look like the storied clothing item of a ranch hand or someone who has army crawled through a field of barbed wire.

Well, not ALL of our bags share these contents. Mine didn’t.

It’s senior ditch day and I have packed the few items I imagined would be necessary for the sort of girls weekend where we’d eat ice cream out of the carton in between fistfuls of Cheetos: comfortable sweatpants, a swimsuit, and a small bag of hodge-podged toiletries and makeup that I don’t intend on using. photo-1453761816053-ed5ba727b5b7

When the other girls begin to rip open their overnight bags at the bed and breakfast, I realize my mistake. This is not that type of weekend at all. There are seven of us on the trip. Four of the girls are my closest friends at school while the other two are more acquaintances, friends of the others who tend to pull them in a direction where I fit in less.

Even though the temperature is well below swimming weather, the girls insist on shimmying into their bathing suits so we can take pictures on the dock. While my friends wore various iterations of the bikini, I brought what can only be described as a swimsuit designed for moms with ample bosoms. The Lands’ End two-piece is a tasteful navy and features underwire support for D-cup breasts and a control-top skirt designed to tuck in postpartum bellies. Even with these precautions, I nervously tug at the hemline, not having had the appropriate amount of time to tend to my forest of upper leg hair.

I take cues from my friends during the self-timed photos, imitating their pouty lips as we huddle under towels for warmth. I follow just a slight step behind, in the same way I’d slurred along with the lyrics to songs I didn’t know on the car ride up.

After our photoshoot, we decide to go out to dinner. I throw on a pair of jeans and declare myself ready, sweeping back my frizzy hair whispies into a messy bun. As I plop down on the bed to wait for the other girls, the rituals of the powder room begin.

Not only have my friends brought nice outfits for going out, they brought several nice outfits, each with corresponding layers of tanks and cardigans, items branded with size zero and XS labels, currency to be traded for the tiny clothes brought by the other tiny girls.

From endless compartments in their luggage and small floral zippered bags, they produce little black vials and canisters and line them up across the bathroom counter. Some girls use stubby makeup brushes to apply “bronzer,” something I’ve never even heard of. Not only do they know how to expertly apply it to the bridges of their noses and across their cheekbones, but they happily chirp back and forth about the merits of brand A and some horror stories about brand B, which they had switched to after trying brand C.

photo-1453822858805-7c095c06011eThese girls speak in a diplomatic language I don’t know, bartering trade agreements: help with the hair straightener in exchange for help applying “smoky eyes,” or a slinky sundress traded for a ruffled skirt that rests confidently at the upper thigh. One girl forgot her serum or pomade or spray and needs to borrow from someone else who happily supplies the product she can’t live without.

Alone in my bathroom at home, I’d cheer myself on for allotting enough time for a flick of a mascara wand across my lashes, or on an extravagant day, a swath of crusty bronze eyeshadow extracted from a cracked Cover Girl palette held together with a rubber band. I didn’t own a straightener and only occasionally pulled out our dusty hair dryer from a basket of abandoned hot tools, predominantly unearthed for formal events and Halloween.

Looking back at pictures of myself, I notice a layer of oily skin sheen and a characteristic zit by the corner of my mouth. My noise was spotted with wide open pores and many sprays of hair trailed around the outline of my already-too-thick eyebrows.

Even just looking into the face of high school Meredith makes my armpits sweat as I remember the way clothes chafed and tugged in all the wrong ways. My closet was full of clearance tops from Old Navy.com that I liked in theory, but never looked the same after a wash or two. Everything was either stretched out or rolled up my body like a window shade. The poor quality fabrics occasionally caused me to break out into hives and made me sweat everywhere they brushed against my skin.

Sitting in the bed and breakfast, it strikes me that no one sees fit to convert me, to make me their project. I long to be transformed by a fairy godmother with an eyebrow pencil and experience with contouring, but instead I sit silently, trying find small things to do to extend my preparation time. Clearly, it’s supposed to take longer.

My mind doesn’t often go towards beauty and grooming. It never became a part of my routine, and so I don’t often think about hair and makeup; I’ve long been accustomed to my bare, natural face, which most days makes me grateful.

I now have a basic grasp of the concept of cognitive load, that we each can give our concentration to only so many things, that I give mind space to things that others don’t have on their radar or would find trivial. The majority of the time, I’m not too upset with my cycle of forgetting about my beauty routine only to panic at the sight of my brows in the fluorescent light of a gas station bathroom.

But put me in a powder room or a hotel room or at someone’s parents’ house getting ready for a wedding and I start to feel the gap between my primping and that of the other women with me.

Now, I know to get up off the bed and humbly admit to my dear friends, I have no idea what I’m doing!

*Photos provided by Unsplash.com

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Holiness Standards

Posted on by under Gender & Place

Jesika, Jamie and I sat outside Sweet Frog, eating frozen yogurt. I dug down into the yogurt with my spoon and found a gummy bear. I chomped down on the sweet candy using the safe side of my mouth, but it still found its way to the cavity on my left. My mouth zinged in pain.

    “Dammit,” I said around the gummy. “That hurt.”

    “Just get it taken care of,” Jesika said.

    “Yeah, I know. I hate the dentist, though.”

Jamie pulled out the lipstick she’d just bought. “Isn’t it hot?” she said. She painted on a layer over the pink she’d put on at Sephora earlier. It was hot. It was an opaque neon pink. A Cyndi Lauper pink with electric attitude.

“You gonna wear it at the office?” I asked.

“Maybe. If I feel like it,” she said airily. It looked great on her tanned face. I looked over at Jesika whose face was powdered like an aristocrat, peach circles of blush painted on each cheek, blood red lips. She looked like a kewpie doll crossed with a vampire.

“Oh my gosh,” said Jamie.

“What?” I said looking up. “Oh.”

A group of young women were walking toward us. My stomach tightened a little as I put down my yogurt cup. The gummy bears smiled up at me. “Busted,” they said.

There were five of them. Each was dressed in what I could only call a uniform: long jean skirts–despite the 90 degree heat, long-sleeved tops and blouses, and uncut hair past their knees or carefully done up in pioneer women knots.

The girls wore no makeup. My own face paint, courtesy of Jesika’s industrious applications of the makeup counter’s free offerings, was starting to melt. I wished I wasn’t wearing that stupid purple eyeshadow which looked cool at the store and now felt merely ostentatious.

“Hey guys!” Jesika spoke. “How are you?” She smiled up at the girls and they came over and sat down with us. She and Jamie started talking with them at once. They’d all gone to the same church together in high school. I smiled at them and said nothing. Kept my eyes down on my dessert of drowned gummies. Thought about these girls. Thought about the many accusations, frustrations, and the general confusion in my own heart. Two months earlier I might have chosen to be one of those young women.

***

Whenever we talk about these girls, the many girls we know who are “in” this mode of dressing, Jesika laughs and rolls her eyes. She was brought up in that religious movement. “They’re just confused,” she says. “If they knew how great it feels to cut your hair and wear shorts and smoke Black & Milds, they’d be doing it. They wouldn’t think twice about their salvation.”

What she means–and what we who have been introduced to that particular faith know–is that the young women believe that their salvation hangs in a precarious balance. Along with their Christian beliefs come proscriptions against outfitting one’s body in a modern way: no makeup, no haircuts, no shorts or pants, no short sleeves. These admonitions are a part of the church’s holiness standards for its women.

Standards by which to measure a woman’s holiness.

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I dated one of the men from this faith for a year. Though I railed hard against the prohibitions, my own hair was growing longer–longer than I liked, my skirts were getting longer, my makeup got lighter, my decisions deferred more and more to him.

     “Don’t cut your hair–promise me you won’t cut your hair again this summer,” he’d said to me.

    “That’s not something I’m going to promise you,” I said.

But I never cut it again until we broke up. I wanted to fit in. To belong with him and his mother and sisters. When we broke up, I looked horrified at my closet. I piled up all the “modest” clothes and threw them in a dumpster. I bought the shortest shorts I could find, had Jesika hack off my hair to the chin, and applied black eye pencil like it was medication. Round and round my eyes I drew in deft circular marks, writing my own standards with each stroke.

*  *  *

We said goodbye to the girls and threw our empty foam cups into the trash.

    “My house or yours?” Jamie asked, looking at us.

    “Yours!” Jesika and I said as we walked to our cars. In my rearview mirror, I saw the girls in their jean skirts disappearing into the shop. I shivered. Then my eye caught Jes powdering her face again in her own rearview mirror. I giggled. I tried to wipe off some makeup but it only made a mess.

The standards we live by vary. They are confusing. Chilling, even. We women are taught how to look and how to be from infancy. Those young women come to my mind often. But my own friends come to mind much oftener–the women who’ve shown me that feminine standards are variable, mercurial, and dependent on what we believe about ourselves at any given time.

*  *  *

Elena bio YAH

Fill in the Blanks

Posted on by under Role & Place, Uncategorized

If you had told my seventeen-year-old self what she would grow up to be, I think she might have cried. But then again, she never knew half as much as she supposed.

It all began early. In second grade I was set apart as “gifted.” Practically, this meant I stood waiting in the school stairwell on Thursday mornings, with a little boy name Todd, and a mini-bus came and delivered us to a neighboring school. It was the best part of my week. There, waiting in the library, were several other children, word puzzles, art materials, floppy disks labeled “Oregon Trail” and “Turtle LOGO”, and a magical teacher who made learning seem like play.

As school progressed, I rode the wave of privileges and honors. When I was in fifth grade, they let me assist the kindergarten teacher, in junior high I chose among special electives that were only available to kids ‘like me’. By the time I got to high school, I was enrolled in A.P. Everything, heading for Governor’s School, and chosen as a National Merit Finalist.

I was so very impressive back then.

****

When I was seventeen, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher when I grew up. And so I chose a college, and everything went swimmingly for about two years. But my interests were broad–or maybe I should say ‘scattered’. Toward the end of my junior year, I added some religion courses and decided not to student teach.

And with this choice, I stepped off the marked path, and began wandering in my very own vocational wilderness. Eventually I would end up in seminary, still longing for the day when I could finish this sentence: “I’m a _____________.”

If it wasn’t “I’m a teacher,” it could be “I’m a pastor.” Right?

But then our lovely, miraculous and terribly inconvenient babies were born. We welcomed two little girls, in two years. As graduation approached and I was changing diapers while learning Greek conjunctions, the thought of ordination exams-or a role as a full-time pastor-was more than I could bear. Again, I chose to get the degree without the title.

And again, “I’m a _____________,” was an open-ended statement. Sure, I could say, “I’m a mother,” but many of my friends were mothers and _____________. I had no “and.”

Without a professional certification, there was no point in getting a job just for the sake of getting a job. I made less per hour than we paid our babysitter. If I stayed home, the numbers worked. But still, it gnawed on me. How could it be that the little girl who was so smart, so full of promise, could grow up to become… me?

****

Here is a true statement: we would never talk to our friends the way that we talk to ourselves.

Did I consider my fellow stay-at-home-mom friends “failures”? No, of course not. They were making choices within a specific season of their lives. They were blessed to have spouses who made good salaries, allowing them to focus on their young children. They were doing what they needed to do, as were my friends who pursued their professions.

And I soon learned that the grass wasn’t greener for my “mother and _____________” friends. Their paths were not as straightforward as they seemed. Some alternated between full and part-time, and many felt as if they did everything, but couldn’t do anything well.

It seemed that we were all making this up as we went along.

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photo by Niklas Fridwall

As my children have grown older (both are in elementary school this year), I have added hats along the way. Two years ago I took a part-time job as a secretary, working for an organization and with people I love. I’m also (as you may have noticed) writing, or rather trying-to-write while volunteering at my kids’ schools, leading a community Bible Study group, and being the “on call” parent for snow delays, sickness, after-school activities, and random inservice days.

It’s good. It’s busy. It’s worthwhile. However.

The most difficult part of all this is that it is almost completely volunteer. Not getting paid is a blow to my ego, makes our finances tight, and sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not a real, contributing grown-up. Now again, would I ever tell a friend that you “are” what you “make”, or that volunteer work is worth less than paid work? No.

But there are times, many times, when I still find these thoughts needling into my sense of who I am. Especially when I am tired, or a child is screaming, or some activity was a disaster, or a blog post fell flat, my seventeen-year-old self sits on my shoulder and says unhelpful things like, “We could have been someone, you know.”

And I just nod, wearily, and say, “I know. I know.”

But when I recover, usually after getting a good night’s sleep, I also know that being a grown-up is more complicated than I ever imagined it would be as a child. And then, ironically, I often remember a picture that was posted in the halls of my daughter’s elementary school, a picture that stopped me in my tracks.

The kids were asked to complete this sentence, “When I grow up, I want to be a __________” and then draw a picture of themselves in this role. Down the row there were firefighters and teachers, police officers and dancers-all the typical kid answers-but the one that stopped me said this:

“When I grow up, I want to be a woman.”

And underneath this sentence was a smiling stick figure. I suppose it was a picture of me.