Clarity

This is the person that I was dating in January of 2005. I feel that a visual is important here.



Dear Bethany,
Very soon, things will start changing quickly. Pay attention to this:

• Be forgiving with yourself - yes, there is a lot that you don't know, but how could you know it? Experiences will only happen when you're not striving and convictions will only develop over time.
  
• Yet you know how little you know, and so it follows that, for now, you should hold loosely to your plans and even more loosely to your opinions.
  
• Relationships will never be all good or all bad, all loyalty or all disappointment, all enamored or all bored, all serious or all licentious. You have seen this! You know it's true! So don't expect it now, or ever; enjoy what there is to enjoy and then don't be surprised if it ends.
  
• It is not your fault if the excitement between you and another person cools. You can drive yourself crazy trying to know what to be that will make them want you, and nothing will work. Please know, it is not your fault.
  

I don't want to tell you to never again fall hard, head over heels, for someone. Really, there is nothing more fun. But look at Matt and be honest with yourself. What life do you want in the time ahead of you, and does he fit? It won't take you years to figure this out, just a good night's sleep (nothing less than 8 hours) and a half hour of solitude and thought sitting on a hill somewhere.

I'll tell you what's going to happen:

This relationship will end, raggedly. Now, don't panic! Here is my advice, and I hold to it: right now, make it your goal to enjoy what is good. Don't let any one piece be the center of your life, but use your friends, your work, and your goals to fill your time instead. Sleep enough, and think clearly.

And remember that soon you will be in the position to disappoint and betray.

That relationship will end, again, raggedly, and then another, and then another. Some won't matter, but some will hurt and continue to hurt. And THEN, you will know how to make decisions and you will be rewarded. Look forward to it.

Link to NPR article and interview with You Were Always Mom's Favorite author Deborah Tannen:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112527898


In her interview with Susan Stamberg, Tannen observes that "In some ways, siblings and especially sisters are more influential in your childhood than your parents," because of closeness in age and because you "go through history" together. For many women, sister relationships define their personality and what they are interested in, as their role in the family becomes what Tannen calls "a starting point to decide who you are going to be".

As it turns out, all three of my roommates this year come from "girl families" - a term that my sisters and mother and I use to talk about other families with two or more daughters and no sons. (Every once in a while my mother will say "Sometimes I wish we had two more kids" and one of my sisters or I will say "Yes, but what if one of them had been a boy?" To which she always says "Hmmmm, you're right about that".) Two of my roommates, Lauren and Lizzie, both have one older sister, and Megan and I are both the oldest (she has one younger sister and I have two). All this makes for a wonderful apartment dynamic - we feel perfectly comfortable sharing a bathroom or asking a roommate to please take their clothes out of the dryer! and no one seems to mind the amount of stuff that accumulates on tables, countertops, refrigerator shelves, windowsills, sinks, couches, and corners of the living room floor.

After listening to this interview about sister relationships, I was curious about my roommates' families because I do remember being competitive with my own sisters and being very aware of my identity in the family. In addition to being "the little one", I was "the thoughtful one", both because of my affinity for literature and writing and because I have always been the one who, for example, did dishes before my mom got home from work, started planning birthday and Christmas gifts months beforehand and organized an anniversary party for my parents. (Is this typical for an oldest sister? It certainly was true of Mary Ingalls, Meg March and Jane Bennet, a fact I always chafed at.) My prom queen middle sister was "the social, athletic one" who dated guys who had tough backgrounds or dubious immigration statuses. My valedictorian youngest sister was "the driven one" who never dated at all and only wavers in her career choice when she's not sure if she wants to be a neurologist or an obstetrician. My parents talk about us in these terms, too, which irritated me until recently, when I realized that I didn't actually mind this role too much.

My roommates described their families falling into similar patterns; Lizzie was called "the professor" by her teachers and parents because, as she describes it, she was a chubby little girl with glasses who loved school from the very beginning. Lauren remembers her parents saying "Beth is the artist in the family - and Lauren is a good artist too but she's more into writing", a phrasing that I remember from my own parents as well. (Megan denies that her parents were ever involved in this kind of pigeonholing, but I'm suspicious.)

We all remember settling into habits of getting along with our sisters that would last for a year or two until they were disrupted by changes in school, one sister learning to drive, or one sister moving out. Competition manifests itself in sometimes obvious, sometimes insidious ways. Lauren describes going home to see her family after being the first sister to move out, and feeling more comfortable staying away from topics like her new apartment, teaching, and going out in a new town. Lizzie senses a new shade of awkwardness and reserve in her relationship with her sister now that she is dating one of her sister's friends.

Even more important than proximity in age, though, are similarities in personality and interest. Lauren feels closer with her sister than her parents because they are both creative and artistic, whereas neither parent is. In my family, my parents will always back each other up and my sisters and I will advocate for each other when one of us argues with our mother or wants to do something Dad finds a little too daring. And as we get older we share the roles of "problem solver", "wild child", and "mom's favorite" between us a little more equally.

College Writing

After hearing Sarah's commonplace entry and discussing journals last week, I was curious to go back and see what I had written during college. I wrote quite a lot (even for an English major) and most of it was very personal. I had a professor who asked us to hand in two pages or more of writing every Friday and he would read a few aloud on Monday; the point was to write without being graded and it started in me a lingering interest in confessional creative nonfiction that went beyond this one course.

I don't remember feeling that there were personalities battling it out inside of me, but I do remember being preoccupied with perfecting myself. I could not decide what I was going to study and what I would do as a career. I was the (gamma?) girl with too many options, terrified that if I chose one path to the exclusion of all others I would limit myself and be miserable:

"There is something else I thought about a lot during Thanksgiving break and again during winter break. It’s depressing to me to see what happens to some people when they get older. Right now I feel like I can do absolutely anything I want to, I’m not stuck in a job or any particular way of life yet. There are things I don’t like about myself, but I still have time to fix them. I have time left to do a lot of things, and my mind is quick and my body works the way it’s supposed to . . . . I like the way I am now, and I want to stay this way. I won’t mind having more responsibility and less freedom or any of that, but will hate to lose the flexibility and sharpness I have now." (1.20.2006)

I was steeped in self-analysis, rethinking my behavior from four years previous, and from four weeks previous:

"Tonight my best friend and I sat in her room, finished a bottle of wine, and talked about religion for a while. The wine was not good, and it was worse after having been kept in a Nalgene bottle in her fridge for a week, but our conversation was excellent, as it always is. That is part of why I love her so much, because I never feel dissatisfied when I go back to my room after we’ve talked about something serious. She doesn’t do that thing that some people do, when they’re not really interested in the topic at hand – let the conversation pause for a minute, and then shrug, say “well, whatever” and start going off about some guy they met or how they’re nervous about the exam coming up. She rarely agrees with me, but that doesn’t matter much because if she did what would there be to talk about? " (2.23.2006)

"If it had been the first time this happened, I would not dislike myself as much as I do now. To make the same thoughtless, selfish mistake twice, not only with a friend but also with someone that I cared about deeply and at times thought I was in love with is, to me, inexcusable. There is absolutely no way to justify the fact that I was more interested in what I was getting out of the relationship than what the consequences might be for my friend. I look at this and I think, “I am so different from the kind of person that I want to be”. So yes, buried under my self-affirmation and pride in my independence, I dislike myself for the way I act and the way I treat other people. I doubt that I will ever be a wise or even a good person, and I am afraid that I will continue to use my friends and hurt the people I love.

What I hope is that after this year of repeated mistakes, self-doubt, and self-examination, I will have finally learned something. I have gained experience, certainly, and become very aware of my flaws, and I think that I needed to see what came of my decisions before I could begin to do anything about it. While I doubt this is the last time I will ever hurt someone, I have realized that it is not enough to know myself. There is value in experience, but it means nothing unless I also learn to treat other people well." (May 2006)

September 1

Bethany (6 years old) and Mary Grace (5 years)
picking blueberries behind Grandma Ober's house.
Missing from the picture is Claire (3 years at the
time), the youngest member of our very
girl-oriented family.




I began this week's post by searching online for organizations that demonstrate girls' agency in practice and written pieces that point to an awareness of girls' agency. I immediately turned up this article from March 30, 2008 which I vaguely remembered reading:



"Students of Virginity"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/magazine/30Chastity-t.html

The article focuses on (mainly religious) student groups that advocates complete abstinence from sexual relationships before marriage, loosely associated with nationwide organizations such as True Love Waits. I latched onto this article and this topic because it ties in very closely with my own experience as a girl growing up in a religious context, and because it highlights some of the complications of girls' agency as I am beginning to understand it. Janie Fredell (the Harvard student interviewed by the Times and pictured here) describes one reason for waiting:

She said she read in Mill that women are subordinated in relationships as a result of “socially constructed norms.” If men are commonly more promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it, she said. Fredell was here to turn society around. “It’s extremely countercultural,” she said, for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a feminist notion. Conventional feminism, she explained, teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. “I am an unconventional feminist,” Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.

But this reason seems to have been preempted by the perception that she grew up with, that it was wrong to have sex before marriage, and that practically no one was. The article opens:

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You have to think all of these things that we think.” They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already. At her public high school, everyone, “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

Looking at my own experience, this article, and an article describing a "Purity Ball" organized for girls and their dads, I really am convinced that this "choice", which is promoted as being brave, mature, and a mark of independence, is orchestrated by parents and communities before most girls are old enough to think about wanting to have sex.

12-year-olds? Really?

http://www.mywesttexas.com/articles/2009/04/04/news/top_stories/purity_ball-_4_4.txt

And Time mentions a 4-year-old

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1823930-1,00.html


There's much more to look at here - the first article includes an interesting aside regarding sons:

The topic, many agreed, is also one important for their sons. However, the ball's organizers said, an elegant evening with pink balloons, dancing and wedding-gown like dresses is likely not the best way to reach boys. What method is, they're still trying to figure out.

And of course, there's a consumerist aspect to this culture. The search terms "sexual purity" at the Christian Book Distributors website brings up 92 products, including jewelry, cds and books. I don't mean to rely on cynicism and a critical attitude in writing about this subject, because I come from this culture and still find a lot to love in the evangelical church. But as far as attitudes towards girls go, there is quite a lot that I would like to change.