Dear Not-Quite-Tween Daughter: A Conversation on Modesty

by Merry Gordon

Dear Not-Quite-Tween Daughter:

It’s early, I know. The fact that you’re a girl barely registers with you. You still smell of recess and little kid sweat and school cafeteria and it’s all I can do to get you to brush your hair once a day. Knots of whispering females are cropping up under the bleachers at snack time to trade secrets and lip gloss, but you’re still out there on the soccer field kicking the collective rear of every boy in your grade—you are not the kind of girl who’ll be sidelined by your gender, and for that I’m grateful.

But a time will come in the none-too-distant future when we will bond over PMS-fueled ice cream benders and watch YouTube videos on how to best conceal a surprise zit on class picture day. You’ll borrow my mascara in the mornings, steal your dad’s razor to shave your legs for the first time…and eventually you might try to sneak out of the house wearing an outfit that raises an eyebrow. Maybe you’ll wriggle into your seat at church and tug on a too-short dress or shake your hair over a strappy shirt. It’s possible you’ll test boundaries; most kids do.

And if this happens, your father and I will both take a deep breath.

He will sit down, clean his gun collection and make a mental note of any boy over the age of twelve who has so much as glanced at you in the past six months.

I will put on my best MomFace and consider my next move.

What I won’t do is tell you ‘modest is hottest’. This is why:  I spent years preventing your Hannah Montana-loving eyes from seeing the “Wrecking Ball” music video. I steered you away from hyper-eroticized fashion dolls. The last thing I’m going to do is confuse you with a cute catchphrase implying that covering up will make you physically desirable.

I also won’t force you to change your outfit. I don’t own your body. You have been endowed with the sublime gift of agency, and I will not, even in that lovingly passive-aggressive way mothers have, attempt to take that away from you.

Oh, we’ll still have words about modesty and why it’s important—don’t get me wrong.

But maybe before it gets to this point, we should sit down and have an honest conversation that doesn’t dodge the tough stuff and couch doctrine in platitudes. I owe you that.

So here goes…

Let me tell you something. I have great legs for a woman my age. I could still rock a mini like it’s nobody’s business.

I just choose not to.

Maybe you’ve heard someone say that women should be modest because they don’t want to tempt boys into immorality, but that’s not what makes me pass up the Daisy Dukes and bandeaus.

I don’t dress modestly because I feel some kind of obligation toward male moral agency—and I don’t want you dressing modestly only so Johnny keeps his eyes on his math notes instead of on your backside. Making men the sole focus of modesty gives license to the idea that they are no more than club-wielding cavemen incapable of controlling their carnal urges, and I have a little more faith in humanity than that.

Here’s why I choose to cover up. I dress modestly because I believe that one way to close the gender gap is to stop giving so much importance to the thigh gap. My contribution to the world goes beyond cleavage:  I will not objectify myself. But most importantly, I choose modesty because I understand my divine nature. I believe that my body is a temple. I believe in glorifying God with my body—and with my spirit, which is the far harder lesson. I believe that modesty is more than what I wear.

You are ten now, all scabby-kneed body joy and breathless with hope. But I can’t keep you little forever:  crushes and stick-on nails are just around the corner. They lurk there in the shadows, with Temptation and Doubt and all the other trials that cross the path of teenage life and make you wonder if it’s worth it to hike up your skirt a little for the attention.

Before that time comes, a promise:

I will show you how to be beautiful and not merely hot.

I will teach you that your body is a miracle, not something to be afraid and ashamed of.

I will talk to you about sleeves and necklines, but also about modesty in thought and in word, the kind of grace that calls attention to your divine potential as a daughter of God and helps you focus on what is truly meaningful in life.

All of my love forever,

Mommy

On Mothering: Ma Vie En Rose (-Colored Glasses)

by Merry Gordon

I used to travel. That was before the kids (these days, just passing the Asian food section at the grocery store seems exotic). But back then, I had overheard enough wistful adult conversations about wasted youth to know I’d better take on the big, romantic world long before the grim reality of mortgage payments and stretch marks set in. By 16, I was hoarding copies of Travel + Leisure under my bed; by 18, my bags were packed.

My first destination?

PARIS.

Everyone comes to Paris with expectations, but mine were absurdly naïve. My France was a hodgepodge of fashion spreads in Elle, a Renoir pocket calendar and the Madeline books—oh, and that mildly dirty nursery rhyme involving naked dancing ladies and a hole in the wall. In the Paris I imagined, everyone wore berets and Dior and Chanel No. 5 and ate croissants in corner bistros. Paris was sexy, très chic. I stepped off the tour bus and took in my first view of the city.

It wasn’t the Eiffel Tower.

It wasn’t lovers kissing in a boat on the Seine.

 It was a naked man urinating into a cardboard box on a litter-strewn curbside.

Très chic, indeed.

Nearly everything about Paris echoed my first let-down. The Eiffel Tower was overpriced and crowded, the bread was stale, and I got insulted by a trio of sweaty French boys on the Champs-Élysées (at least I think I did—while I’m not exactly sure what they said, some gestures are probably universal). The Mona Lisa was small, and even a twilight cruise down the Seine was interrupted by a mizzling rain and Eurotrash techno thumping from the open door of a club.

I left disappointed, but eventually I got over Paris.

I got over myself a little too. I grew up, got married. My priorities changed. By 25, I was hoarding copies of Baby Talk under my bed; by 27, I was exhausted on a delivery table waiting to hear my newborn daughter’s first cry.

The nurse beamed down at me. “Congratulations! You’re a mommy!”

But once she handed me the discharge papers, it was like Paris all over again.

Expecting to jump right out of my hospital gown and back into my size five Calvin Kleins, I was shocked to find myself still shuffling around the house in my husband’s sweats four weeks postpartum. Having been assured by glossy La Leche League pamphlets that breastfeeding was both serene and natural, I was unprepared for round-the-clock feeds (involving six pillows and another pair of hands just to get the position right) and more howling on my part than on my daughter’s. And that whole Gerber baby thing? After a vacuum delivery, my precious newborn looked more alien than adorable. How was I supposed to fall in love with this lump of flesh that only had the capacity to scream, poop and projectile vomit?

But I did.

It started small. One particularly desperate night, I sang Pink Floyd because I’d run out of lullabies. About halfway through “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” I felt that little head finally snuggle into my shoulder and my universe shifted. All those books and blogs, and nothing could have prepared me for the reality of parenting:  one moment you’re a chorus away from tipping the kiddo’s pacifier in Benadryl, and the next moment a milky sigh and the clutch of a tiny finger elevate you to a zen-like understanding of the cosmos. Powerful stuff, that.

I finally got it. It wasn’t like American Baby promised—I’d been up since 2 A.M., I couldn’t remember the last shower I took, and most of the pillow talk between my husband and I that week had involved our daughter’s stool consistency—but the moment was real and potent and entirely untranslatable in the airbrushed perfection of parenting magazines.

Because of my experiences as a mom, I think of Paris differently now. I was so obsessed with the Travel + Leisure version of the city that I got hung up on a couple of stale croissants; I should have been paying attention to the gypsy guitar player scattering those crusty remnants to the pigeons and singing “Hotel California” in broken English. And maybe I got harassed by a Gallic Casanova or two, but one of them did bear a passing resemblance to Johnny Depp. I burnt my finger during sightseeing? It was on a prayer candle I lit in some tiny, off-the-beaten-path medieval chapel I had ducked into to escape the drizzle. How could I not have noticed the beauty in that?

Parenting is just like Paris, all a thousand tiny unexpected moments that are imperfectly perfect—sometimes only in retrospect.

Every time I try to explain this to one of my non-parent friends, I feel a bit bad—not in a condescending way, but in a way that recognizes the inadequacy of trying to describe the indescribable. Wait a sec. So it’s not like the magazines? There’s screaming, and spit up, and sleep deprivation-induced hallucinations, and you’re telling me this is a good thing? That you’d go back and do it all over again?

Oui. 

Thoreau is my homeboy: Strap on your hiking boots and step up your writing.

by Merry Gordon

When I’ve stared at the blinking cursor so long it’s burned a permanent vertical line in my retinas, I think of my favorite inspirational writing quote:  “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” I remember the first time I read that, how it resonated with me. I poked around a little until I found attribution for it in the form of one Henry D. Thoreau, author of Walden and all those other things I pretended to read but didn’t in AP lit.

So I finally picked up Walden for real this time and soon I was crushing hard on Henry David…he of the original hipster neckbeard, the skinny-dipping and cabin building, the civil disobedience. This guy had a solution for writer’s block, one that hadn’t occurred to me in the asphalt jungles of suburbia:

N A T U R E.

I don’t generally do nature. First off, I’m from Cleveland. It wasn’t too many years after I was born that the oozing Cuyahoga River was so polluted you could set fire to it. When we went swimming as kids, it was in our underpants in a plastic kiddie pool in the driveway, not in any of Ohio’s less-than-pristine waterways. I have always lived within ten minutes of a Target, I wore hiking boots with lace slouch socks only when the outdoorsy/vintage look was hip, and the closest I got to the forest was the Woodland Pine scented candle we put out every Christmas. I didn’t even go camping (without flushing toilets and suitcases and a 3-jet hot tub on the balcony) until I hit my mid-30s.

But this year I slung a backpack over my shoulder and resolved to try the Thoreauvian approach to writer’s block anyway.

Step one:  Get into nature. Not just get out into nature…get INTO it. Nature is messy. It’s beautiful mountain vistas and trailside wildflowers, but it’s also mud and pine sap on your adorable new L.L. Bean boots and a cloud of mosquitos swarming across your perfect blood orange sunset. Embrace the less-than-National Geographic moments. The unexpected contrast between the mundane and the sublime is often enough to jar your mind back to inspiration.

Step two:  Write. Journal, blog or blurb like crazy. Thoreau would have killed it in the blogosphere (in fact, he is…over 150 years after his death). His journals filled 47 manuscript volumes, and most of the time I can barely manage a 140-character tweet. Thoreau observed and recorded everything…some really sweeping, epic stuff, like the divinity in a snowflake, and some really boring stuff, like tables of plants blooming and water levels. Point is, he mined the little, sometimes tedious details in flora and fauna until he struck literary gold with such nuggets as, “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” That’s deep.

Step three:  Look for connections and metaphors. Ultimately, going out into nature is as much an inward journey as an outward one. If we look at the natural world as a microcosm of the infinite and search to see our connection to it, our once barren creative fields suddenly emerge white and ready to harvest (ooh!—see what I did there?). Thoreau was acutely aware of this. Even humdrum rural sights like the stream he walked by nearly every day of his life provided food for thought:  “Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.”

Getting my nature on didn’t come naturally. At first, stripping myself of the suburbs to connect with Mother Earth seemed a little too granola for a girl whose hiking is generally confined to full parking lots at outlet malls, but being outdoors lent a meditative quality to my thoughts that the agitation of day-to-day life in a major metropolitan area never would have allowed.

I still live in the sprawl, but I don’t restrict my headspace to my zip code anymore. My “woods” consist of a few vacation snaps on the fridge and a half-dead succulent on my kitchen table, but if nothing else Thoreau has taught me a little more about how to simplify and live deliberately, and that’s something worth putting on paper.

The Reading Girl's Guide to Romance, or the Care and Feeding of Literary Crushes

by Merry Gordon

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man (in possession of a good fortune or not) might just be a hard sell on a writer chick.

You know why?

Because writer chicks are reader chicks.  And I don’t care how good you single men are:  Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott and a whole entourage of fictional top hats and tail coats got to our hearts first. 

For all the ladies who had a “type”—tall, dark and imaginary—and all the guys who’ve ever had to compete with a character, I give it to you straight:  the three stages of classic literary hero love (and how I lived happily ever after beyond the last page).

Chapter 1: Childhood

Little Women

I could never work myself up to pitying those penniless March girls.  Who needs money when you’ve got a hot Italian next door?  ‘Laurie’ Lawrence was everything my prepubescent heart could have desired:  quick smile, nice tan, and black eyes and volatile moods just European enough to make him mildly dangerous—all those “By Jupiters”! (Stop snickering.  At twelve, a couple of stick-on tattoos can turn you into you Jezebel.)  But my copy of the book was the abridgment, which left off charmingly with Laurie beginning to cast significant glances Jo-ward (squeee!).   Eventually, I stumbled upon Good Wives, the second part.  I threw that book across the room 3 times.  Beth dies?  Jo ends up with some old German dude?  And MY LAURIE hooks up with snottypants AMY?  What the heck, Louisa May Alcott?

Chapter 2:  Adolescence

Wuthering Heights

On to high school.  My hair was chemically enhanced.  Some of my classmates were chemically enhanced.  I wore black combat boots, too much eye makeup, and listened to the Cure.  I frequented cafés and used bookstores, which is where I found my next fixation:  Heathcliff.   I was so smitten I considered begging

Cover Girl to make their Oil Controlled Pressed Powder in Corpse so I could mimic the tubercular pallor of my new gothic heroine, Cathy Earnshaw.  That girl knew a Bad Boy when she saw him:  rebel, loner—oozing brutal sensuality, but sensitive enough to cry (and soak a tree in his own blood in a fit of lovelorn agony). Suddenly, the paltry passions of high school boys were hardly enough for me.  You want to hold hands under the bleachers, varsity football boy?  That’s nice.  But would you dig up my dead body thirteen years after my demise for one last kiss?  Now that’s hot. 

Chapter 3:  Young Adulthood

Pride & Prejudice

When sociopathic obsession and borderline necrophilia stopped being cool, I discovered Mr. Darcy—which is to say, the BBC helped me discover that Colin Firth would win a Regency wet t-shirt contest.  Having seen the miniseries in its six-hour glory, I devoured the book and fell in love with Fitzwilliam. He ruined college.  Frat boy come-ons under a haze of Axe now seemed so obvious after Darcy’s refined desire.  “What does he even do?” my male friends sulked when I found them wanting in comparison. Oh, you wouldn’t understand.  Gentlemanly things.  Horseback riding.  Letter writing.  Daydream inspiring. Tight breeches wearing. What’s that you say, Mr. Daaaahhcy?  ‘Every savage can dance’?  I am excessively diverted.  Let’s skip the ball and sneak back behind this shrubbery and I’ll put on my new lip gloss and show you what else every savage can do…

What was I looking for?  Just the boyish charm of a Laurie and the fieriness of a Heathcliff all wrapped up in the polished passion of a Darcy.  That’s do-able, right?

Apparently not.

But since Saturday nights alone with my books didn’t exactly satisfy, I found myself a nice guy.  He wasn’t rich (or Italian, for that matter), and he wasn't much more demonstrative than a casual arm around my shoulder.  While his manners were good, he lacked that urbane air of refinement. I never tried to change him, but I didn’t exactly put Laurie and Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy back on the shelf for good, either.

I  justified. 

I rationalized. 

I could have my boyfriend by day and my literary lovers by night and be faithful to all of them.

And it worked out pretty well—for a while. 

One night I was sick, and my boyfriend showed up anyway.  Reluctantly (as sinus infections aren’t nearly as romantic as consumption), I let him in and we watched Wuthering Heights for the umpteenth time.  As I sighed over the end credits, he turned to me. “All your lit crushes.  Is that really what you want?—I mean, they look good on paper, but is Heathcliff going to pick up Mucinex for you?” he asked, tenderly passing me two pills and sweetly ignoring the Kleenex plugs issuing from my snot-streaming nostrils.

Reader, I married him.

He was right, of course.  Laurie’s charismatic rich boy naiveté would probably get grating when it came down to choosing car insurance or anything remotely practical (on the other hand, with his money we could just hire someone to do it and I could live like the trophy wife March sister Amy).

I had grown out of the emotional sturm und drang of Heathcliff—date nights that could end in impulse tattoos and restraining orders seemed less appealing the older I got. 

And while Mr. Darcy might be a perfect theoretical mate, I couldn’t imagine him scraping toddler vomit off car seats, or comparison shopping for tampons, or any of the other utterly ordinary acts of gallantry my husband performs on a routine basis.

Yes, writer/reader chicks are a tough crowd. But eventually we all come to a crossroads in our literary lives:  either we’re living in someone else’s stories, or we’re writing our own.  The latter is infinitely more satisfying, even when it doesn’t make for a great page-turner.  

Embracing the Other

by Merry Gordon

My daughter made this in church a couple years back.

When all the other little Sunbeams churned out cute little Sugardoodle versions of themselves, mine managed to take the same raw materials and produce a vaguely homicidal-looking clown with a mock turtleneck and a sunken skull. Oh, and two left ears.

(For the record, the daughter in question is a doe-eyed, waiflike pixie of a thing with a perfect Valentine face and blonde curls.)

Fortunately, my parental combat training kicked in before I could recoil in horror and/or crack a smile:  “What the—honey, how…interesting! Tell me about your picture.” <insert generic mommysmile here>

“It’s me!”

Gulp.

“I am a child of God!”

Truth be told, I hadn’t even seen the caption until she pointed it out (I was a little preoccupied with the pink-lidded serial killer stare). At this point, I finally lost it and doubled over in fits of laughter.

That my daughter would depict herself in that way was hilarious. Disturbing, and hilarious. But that wasn’t really why I reacted the way I did.

The absurdity of an ugly cartoon mug shot proclaiming itself a child of God was too much. If I was being honest, my gut-level reaction was that if this was a child of God, it was definitely not the same kind of child of God I was.

That’s when I stopped laughing.

Because if I could marginalize a simple drawing, I could marginalize a person.

 

In fact, I probably already had.

***

It’s easy enough to do these days. A glance at the headlines will tell you that there’s growing factionalism both inside and outside of the church—and the trolling in the comments underneath the articles will reveal plenty of otherizing going on.

Don’t recognize the word? 

You will.

Otherizing is responsible for a lot of the ugly in the world.

Otherizing takes differences—of opinion, of race, of religion—and blows them out of proportion to the point of contention and stereotyping. We stop seeing people when we otherize them; instead, we see typecasts, two-dimensional caricatures without intricacy or humanity, people Not Like Us. Otherizing makes difference look like deformity.

The problem is that to otherize someone is to devalue them.

And devaluing them only devalues us.

It’s like this:  if we believe ourselves to be children of God then we have to believe that statement applies to everyone else—equally. It’s not an exclusive club. Our membership in the church makes us no more or less children of God than anyone else we meet.

Perhaps the worst thing about otherizing is that it happens even when we’re trying hard to avoid it. For example, can we stop saying we’re “taking the high ground” every time we repress a snarky one-liner? That phrase reeks of moral superiority. It suggests we’re not even travelling the same road as the people around us when nothing could be further from the truth.

Getting past otherizing is hard.

It’s tougher than fast Sundays and subbing in nursery. This is Christianity in the trenches.

It means we must listen—not just hear—because we can learn something valuable from everyone. We must offer compassion without condescension and service without self-congratulation. If we’re smug, or dismissive, or even mildly patronizing across the ideological divide we reduce Christ’s message to a bunch of Pinterest clichés. Choosing to see divine potential and worth in those we disagree with does not compromise us—in fact, it strengthens us.

And once I realized this, I never judged another person again.

 In fact, I became a shining bastion of tolerance and Christlike love scattering empathy like manna to the masses. I burst forth from the heavens on the wings of a Pegasus:  wars ended, flowers bloomed, trumpets sounded. Roll credits.

***

 (Actually, that’s not true. I sort of cussed out the guy who cut me off on the freeway this afternoon. “Stupid tool of a California driver” may or may not have been among the more printable epithets I had for him.)

But I am making a stand today, and it’s not about gay marriage or Ordain Women or anything else that seems to make the church newsworthy lately. It’s about looking inward instead of pointing outward. I may not always get it right, but I’m trying.

Because I owe that to my brothers and sisters.

Because Christ, who taught us to be one, is the opposite of otherizing.

Because we are all—and I’m looking at you, vaguely homicidal-looking, turtleneck-wearing clown—children of God.

The author and her daughters. Note the strong familial resemblance.

A Life More Ordinary

by Merry Gordon

Confession time:  I spend a lot of time trying to be the perfect Mormon mommy. No, scratch that—I spend a lot of time trying to look like the perfect Mormon mommy. Especially online. And the thing is, lots of us do. We’re writers, storytellers by nature. We selfie and app, we filter and curate…we embellish.

Hey, it’s not dishonesty.

It’s enhancement. Just “improving the shining moments,” as it were. All good writers edit, right?

Maybe it starts with untagging yourself in a picture so people won’t see—gasp!—dirty laundry on the floor behind you. And then it’s a reconstructed “candid” shot when the first one didn’t come out quite right. Suddenly we’re cranking up the exposure on already brilliant sunsets because magazines or Mommy Wars or whatever you want to blame it on has made us think some airbrushed Technicolor day-glo fiction is better than real life.

The poet John Keats once wrote, “Truth is beauty, beauty truth.”

Why did we stop believing that?

The whole foods lifestyle is taking over every fridge in America, but it’s like our virtual selves never got the memo. The less processed our food, the more processed our self-narrative.

Only in this age is it possible to sip an organic smoothie with one hand and use the other hand to run the angled shots you took of yourself drinking it through six effects to make your eyes pop, three filters to make the smoothie look a little less puce and your skin a little more tan, and a collage frame to edit out your messy kitchen countertop:  #natural!

#not.

It’s not that I don’t believe in putting my best self forward, and I’m not saying social media’s a bad thing*. There’s nothing wrong with using it in place of the journal I’m supposed to be keeping to chronicle life. But if I’m being honest, I’m hardly as pulled together as my profile persona would have you think. You see the cleaned-up 1%...and I worry I’m forgetting to enjoy the gorgeous ordinariness in the not-for-social media moments that make up the other 99% of my world.

Case in point:  that staged toddler birthday cake pic with lo-fi vintage party hats border is great. When I post that one, it seems representative. I look like Super Mommy, Supreme Goddess of All Things Pinterest, and you’ll never know that it was all of a nanosecond in my frenzied day. It’s a wittily-hashtagged pseudo-memory.

What you don’t see is the belly laughter twenty minutes post-photo op when I wrestled my little boy to the ground and picked the cakesnot** out of his hair (and then dug the crumbs out of my bra for the next hour).

That’s the good stuff. It’s not pretty, but it’s real.

No, I’m not breaking up with Instagram. But just for kicks, maybe I’ll try to live in the raw a little more. The off-camera. The unedited rough-rough-draft version of me. Because that’s beautiful too.

#nofilter.

*Except Snapchat. Look, I teach high school. I get how kids think. No app that tells thirteen-year-olds they can take guilt-free incriminating pictures because their photos will self-destruct is a good idea. But I’ll save that for another post.

**As any parent will tell you, this is a thing. Try not to think about it too much.