She

Essays, Featured — By Sarah Thebarge on September 23, 2009 at 12:00 am

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A few years ago, I got sick and lost some weight, and I never managed to put it back on.

So my clothes, while they’re in good shape, hang on my frame and make me look like one of the Papua New Guinea natives who retrieve ill-fitting clothes dropped in bundles from missionaries in airplanes.  At least this is what my friend tells me.

So tomorrow morning, she’s taking me shopping for a new wardrobe.

There’s nothing like clothes shopping to make a girl feel insecure about her body.  It seems all females have at least one physical flaw that keeps them feeling vulnerable, like Achilles’ heel.  Either her chest is too big or too flat, her butt is too big or too small, her hips are too narrow or too wide.  Nothing ever fits quite right.

A few years ago, I was trying on jeans in the fitting room of a department store.  They were a little snug, and I thought about asking the fitting room attendant for the next size up.

But then I imagined her gloating as she strutted to the rack for a bigger pair.  “I told her she wasn’t a size two,” she’d mutter under her breath.  “Those hips are at least a size six.”

It was such a humiliating prospect, I bought the small jeans and took them home, confident if I ate nothing but air for the next six weeks, they might eventually fit.

After years of similar experiences, I’m a little nervous about tomorrow.  You’d think after a while, the insecurity and angst would fade.  But this is one job that doesn’t get easier with experience.

In spite of all years I’ve spent being a girl, I’m still not very good at it.

—

When my mom was in junior high, she started her period on the school bus one afternoon.  No one had prepared her for this eventuality, and she was terrified. When she got home, she locked herself in her bedroom.

One of her brothers knocked on her door and asked her if she wanted to play.

“Go away,” she sobbed into her pillow.  “Can’t you see I’m dying here?” She was convinced she’d contracted a terminal disease on the way home from school and would be dead by morning.

To spare me a similar experience, she made sure to prepare me for this event.  It happened just like she said it would, and I came home from school and told her I’d started my period.

I had always expected this moment would be confidential, a special secret known by only me and my mom.  But she proceeded to make a public announcement to my siblings and my grandparents.

Then she called my dad at work to tell him, and to ask him to stop at the drug store on the way home from work to pick up the necessary supplies.

When he got home, he handed me the bag, pinched my cheek, and said, “My little princess is a little woman!”

I was angry, humiliated, offended and annoyed, all at the same time.  I always thought turning into a woman would be a sophisticated, refined transformation.  It didn’t feel like that at all.

As the newly-minted hormones surged through my system, it occurred to me this little princess was turning into a little bitch.

My mom’s identity as a woman has always seemed idyllic to me.  She got married right out of high school, had five children, and spent her days making a home for dad and us.  And she loved it.  When I was growing up, she told us over and over again, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than be a wife and a mom.”

For a long time, I assumed I was going to follow in her steps.  The rhythm of running a home – packing lunches in the morning, taking the kids to school, cleaning the house, making dinner, putting the kids to bed, and spending time as your husband’s supportive confidant – seemed to offer comfort and security.  Maybe even identity.

When I was in second grade, my mom announced she was pregnant with child number five.  As her pregnancy progressed, I took on more and more responsibilities around the house. I came home from school and made dinner.  I did the laundry.  I read my brothers bedtime stories and tucked them into bed.  When my little sister was born, I took care of her, too.  I took her out of church when she started crying. I changed her diapers.  When she turned one, my parents moved her crib into my room, and I got up with her whenever she cried.

By the time I got to junior high, I felt stifled by this life.

I’m still not sure what happened.  Maybe I realized I was different from my mom.  Maybe I got tired of performing a role my family had assumed for me.  Maybe I was asserting my independence.  I don’t know, but for whatever reason or reasons, by the time I turned thirteen I was burnt out.

My friends would sit around at slumber parties and fantasize about their future husband and children, but I couldn’t join in with them.  “I don’t want a family,” I told them.  “I’ve already raised mine.”

I heard my mom say she loved being a wife and mom, and I started to think maybe I’d been switched at birth.  The occupations of wife and mother were the last two options on my list of things I could do with my life.

“I’d rather be a garbage collector than a mother,” I confided to my diary one night.

I began coming up with other options for my future.  I decided maybe I wanted to run for president.  Or become a famous singer.  Or maybe write riveting novels. Or perhaps start an orphanage in China.  There were so many possibilities. I could really do something with my life.  Anything, really.

I became the protagonist of my life’s narrative and boys — any boy, every boy — became the antagonists.  The way I saw it, boys were my only obstacle to realizing my potential.

The only thing that would keep me from being president was marrying a boy who wanted to be president more than I did.  The only thing that would keep me from giving amazing concerts was if I had to stay home with the kids.  I couldn’t write a novel with little brats underfoot.  And China?  I’d be lucky if I could escape the house to go to the supermarket for a gallon of milk.  How could I possibly travel to another continent?

This conclusion drove me to become a militant feminist before I even knew what feminism was.  I didn’t know what to call it, but I felt passionate about preserving my independence.

I talked politics with my dad.  I made my math teacher tell me how to calculate mortgage interest so I could buy my own house some day.  I stayed up late reading science books and writing rough drafts of my entrance essay to medical school.

I spent the rest of my time fending off boys.

—

The summer between ninth and tenth grades, my family drove from New Jersey to Kentucky, where my dad spoke at a camp for a week.

The charm of southern gentlemen, which I love now, was completely lost on me then.  I described them as “sentimental and mushy” to one of my friends later.

One of the boys at camp was named E.J.  Tall and thin, he was just out of high school and about to enlist in the Marines.

I was standing by a tree watching my brother play basketball one afternoon when E.J. came over to me.  He put his hand on the tree, just above my head, and leaned in close.  Too close.

“Tell me something about yourself, beautiful lady,” he drawled.

Without thinking, I looked him square in the eye and answered, “I’ll tell you three things about me.  My name is Sarah. I’m from New Jersey. And I don’t like boys.”  With that, I ducked under his arm, and ran away.

I recounted this interaction to my friends with pride.  It seemed I was beginning to convince myself, and everyone around me, I was too capable and talented to be just a wife and mother.

And then one day, I was in my bedroom with the window open when I overheard my dad and one of the deacons in the back yard, talking about our family.

“Lenny, he’s going to be the next Michael Jordan,” my dad said.  And it was true, my older brother was an excellent basketball player.

“And Sarah, well, she’s going to be the next Julia Child,” he said.

I had never heard of this woman before.  I opened the window wider and leaned my head out.  “Hey dad,” I said.  “Is Julia Child a singer?”  If my brother was going to be a famous athlete, I wanted to be the world’s next great soprano.

My dad looked up at me and laughed.  “No, honey, she’s a cook.”

I was incensed. A cook?  A cook??? As in the stand-in-the-kitchen-slaving-over-a-hot-stove kind of cook?  I slammed the window shut and sat on my bed fuming.  So my older brother got to be famous for his world class athleticism, and all I was going to be known for was my flaky pie crusts?

Not on my watch.

During high school, I continued my pursuit to find an identity outside of my domestic abilities and marriage prospects.

And then I met Scott, and everything changed.

I was fifteen, and he was seventeen. He transferred to our school and became friends with my older brother.  And I fell in love.

Scott was cute, he played the piano, he was our school’s fastest point guard, and best of all, his mom liked me.

I began offering to cook dinner for the family when I knew he was coming over.  I got my parents to take me to the eye doctor, where I traded my glasses for contact lenses. I got up for school an hour earlier than usual so I’d have time to do my makeup and curl my hair.

My parents noticed this dramatic change, and encouraged it.  My mom took me to look at wedding dresses “just for fun.”  Every Sunday when the newspaper came,  she gave me the jewelry store ads so I could daydream about my engagement ring.

For my sixteenth birthday, my parents gave me a copy of the movie “Cinderella.”

I dreamed Scott was a prince and I was a princess, and he had come to rescue me.  It was heaven.

Scott said he wanted to be a missionary pilot to Australia, so I read every book about Australia I could find.  I planned our imaginary wedding. I decorated our imaginary first house.  I named our children.

I decided that we were all going to live happily ever after.

—

The following year, my dad moved our family out of state.  I heard Scott started dating a girl, and then he married her. I lost track of him after that.

I started dating a guy in college, but I didn’t have quite as big a crush on him as I’d had on Scott.   It didn’t matter, though, because the relationship didn’t last long.  For whatever reason, we just couldn’t seem to get to the same place in our relationship at the same time.  And so we broke up.

I spent most of college trying to establish my identity.  It seemed I had one foot firmly planted in academia, pursuing careers in writing and medicine, and another foot firmly entrenched in the family tradition of marrying early and mothering a quiver-full of children.

It seemed it would be possible to do one of these things well, but I would fail if I attempted both.  This conclusion made me feel that I had to choose a path, but I didn’t know which path to take.  I looked to history for guidance, but this created more questions than it answered.  After reading a few books on feminism and women’s roles, I started making flow charts to map out the course of women in history.  Even then I couldn’t keep it all straight.

One Saturday afternoon, while my roommate and I were sitting on top of the dryers waiting for our laundry to dry, I delivered what I discerned to be a brief history of women:

For the first few thousand years, women stayed at home. While their husbands hunted and fished, women raised children, made clothes, and cooked the meals.  When the Industrial Revolution began several millennia later, women – especially single women — were free to leave their agrarian, patriarchal homes and venture into the city. They lived in communities and worked full-time.

Then men began to give up their farms and urbanization began, and droves of men came to the cities and took over the factory jobs, forcing women back into the home.  And then came World War II.  So many men were away at war, it became socially acceptable once again for women to leave their homes and take their places in the workforce.  But then the war ended, the GI’s returned, and women were driven back into their home.  Women spent the majority of the ’50s and ’60s at home, and instead of simply being expected, this role was now glamorized and glorified.

And then the feminists reared their heads and let out a roar that shook the country, maybe even the world.  They were independent, militant, vitriolic.  They gave men a scathing review on the way they’d been running society, and attempted a coup.  Once again, women left their homes in droves, determined to assert their intelligence and independence.  But it seems that for many women, this was an empty and unfulfilling pursuit. Many of them also found they could not manage both a household and a full-time job.  So in the ’80s, after a few decades of feminism, women once again retreated back into the home.

“And now we’re in the postmodern era where there is no standard,” I explained to my friend as the dryer buzzed.  “There is no expectation. There are no established roles.  The new message is that women can do anything, which women often interpret to mean they can do everything.  So they try to have a marriage and a career and a family and end up feeling guilty all the time because they never do anything really well.”

As I jumped down from the dryer and began to fold my clothes, I concluded, “If the history of women were a person, she would definitely be schizophrenic.”

A few months later, the dean of women asked me if I’d like to be an R.A.  “I think you’d make a great mentor to younger women,” she told me.

I wanted to tell her I felt conflicted and confused, and I didn’t think I’d be able to lead other women if my own compass hadn’t yet found due north.  But I couldn’t find the words to articulate my uncertainty.  So all I said was, “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

I took the job.

I encouraged the girls in my dorm to organize their finances, finish their education, travel to new places, read good books, and think for themselves.  I mounted a dry erase board in the hallway, and every week I posted a new quote.  After I read an anthology on feminism, I wrote, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

The night before the senior banquet, when all the girls were fussing about how they were going to look in their dresses, I wrote, “Clothes don’t make you look fat; fat makes you look fat.”

No one found that quote as funny as I did.  But I stood by it because, while it wasn’t necessarily tactful, it was true.

At the end of the year, one of my friends recounted a conversation to me.  She said two girls in my dorm were discussing me while they were getting ready in the bathroom one morning.

One girl said, “Sarah’s so great.  She deserves a good man.”

And the other girl said, “Who’s to say that the reward for being a great person is a man?  I’d rather have a cash reward.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

—

After I left college, I had the opportunity to pursue degrees in medicine and journalism.  I worked full time in a clinic at an Ivy League school.  By all appearances, I had arrived.  I would’ve made my feminist ancestors proud, I thought.

But as soon as I obtained this position, I didn’t want it any more.  Suddenly, the thought of spending all my waking hours in an office seemed dismal.  The thought of spending my salary on myself seemed empty.

Around this time, I heard a pastor speak on women’s roles in society.  He said he and his wife had four children, and she was a stay-at-home mother.

She attended a women’s conference where she struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to her.  “What do you do?” she asked her seatmate.

The woman replied, “I’m the CEO of a snack food company.  And you?”

She answered quietly that she stayed at home raising a family, and that was the end of the conversation.  When she returned home, she confided to her husband how embarrassed and inferior she felt when she compared herself to the CEO.

The pastor told his wife, “Honey, the next time someone like that makes you feel inferior, you say, ‘You may spend your days making potato chips, but I am raising four future leaders of the next generation.’”

I started to warm up to this idea of husband and family.  I had been dating the same man for three years, and we started to talk about having a family.  We looked at rings, and he called my dad and asked for permission to marry me.

And then, when I was twenty-seven years old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

By the time I’d finished six months of chemotherapy and radiation, I had lost my hair, my breasts, my boyfriend, and my fertility.

One afternoon, my OB/GYN called me with some test results.  “Your ovaries aren’t working anymore,” he said.  “You might as well have a hysterectomy, because you’re never going to be able to use those parts anyway.”

When I hung up the phone with him, I fell on my bed, pulled the covers over my face, and I wept.

After crying for an hour straight, I began to think maybe I shouldn’t be home alone processing this news.  I called my best friend and, without going into detail about my conversation with my doctor,  asked if I could come over.  Minutes later, I was knocking on her door.

I could hear commotion as she scurried to the door.  Her three-year-old and six-month-old were having meltdowns at the same time.  She thrust the crying baby into my arms and said, “Could you please take him? I have to go deal with the other one.”  And she disappeared down the hall.

I walked into the living room and sat down in a rocking chair with the infant in my arms.  I began to rock him, and he stopped crying and fell asleep on my chest.

As I continued to rock him, I nestled my cheek against his sleeping form and thought about the parts I’d never use, the children I’d never have.

And the tears fell in torrents, mingling silently with his soft blonde hair.

One of the hardest things about being a girl is it doesn’t get easier with time.

Sometimes, like when you go through a break-up or gain ten pounds or have a sudden surge of hormones, it gets harder. But it never seems to get easier.

The ideals competing for women’s attention seem mutually exclusive.  The femininity of fairy tales clashes with the feistiness of feminism.  Either women need men to rescue them, or they don’t need men at all.  Either women are supposed to establish careers, or they’re not to work outside of the home.  Either being a wife and a mother means everything, or it doesn’t mean anything.

Every day I see this contradiction – not just in society, but in myself.  If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Gloria Steinem and Cinderella were duking it out in my head.

I am logical, confident, and independent.  And at the very same time, I’m fragile and insecure and emotional.  I am at a loss to explain this paradox.

I also can’t explain why, as girls, we spend our childhood learning all the classic fairy tales, and as women we spend our adulthood trying to unlearn them.

Though I have to say, I’ve known for a long time now that Goldilocks was a fabrication.  Not because bears don’t talk, but because I’ve never met a girl for whom anything – whether it’s a relationship or a pair of jeans or her own skin – feels just right.

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Tags: feminism, fertility, Gender Roles, Identity, Women, women's