Dear Kate Hudson, (Epistolary Wednesday)

Dear Kate,

It used to be that we exercisers put on our grubbiest clothes, our holey-est shirts and the dirty sneakers we wouldn't ever wear if we were dressing for "regular" daily activities. But these days it's not enough that we are actually doing the work of exercising, that we are sweating and galloping on a treadmill or a cold wet sidewalk for forty minutes. No. Now we are supposed to look cute when we do it. But that's not news anymore. It's the reason Old Navy devotes a third of their women's clothing section to "activewear." And apparently the same reason why your new Fabletics line is showing up in my Facebook news feed twelve times a day. Like the next girl, I'm hooked by the promise of a good deal on running pants and sports bras, and Fabletics offers a first outfit for only $25. Better yet, join their VIP program and get an outfit at a reduced price, each and every month, for as low as $49. While I'm sure your husband, closet and budget can accommodate a new activewear outfit every month at $49 a pop, I'm not so sure about mine. Also, I'm finding on the message boards that "VIPs" get charged $49 whether they purchase an outfit or not. And most of them don't know this ahead of time. Should they want their money back because they neither need nor can afford a new outfit every month? Well, Fabletics will give them store credit to be used on a future purchase. (Ladies: beware.)

Kate Hudson, you're a genius or an opportunist depending on where one stands.  But your marketing bit is about "every woman": Every Woman Deserves to Look Cute in Affordable Activewear or some such spin. And this whole we'll-charge-you-for-nothing-and-not-give-your-money-back seems a bit disloyal of you, a bit antagonistic to the wellbeing of Every Woman, who as you ought to know, is for the most part working simply on making ends meet, acquiring winter coats for her children, paying dentist bills, or saving for retirement. You oughta know that Every Woman, by definition and common denominator, won't be purchasing that many pairs of yoga pants.

And I'm not sure how to even wrap my head around this statement, KH: "With Fabletics, we want to create a community...a movement, to help you live fit and achieve your passions in life." First off, joining the ranks of women duped by these monthly charges does not a community make. And second, working for clean drinking water in Africa is a movement. Civil rights for minorities is a movement. Feminism, the march on Wall Street, and breast cancer awareness are movements.

Wanna keep motivating women to exercise and purchase your products? Do it. But be straight up about it and treat us like we have some smarts and truly worthy causes to spend our money on. Because we do.

Dear Mama-of-a-Tween-Girl (Epistolary Wednesday)

It's Wednesday, and I'm writing letters...

Dear Mama,

So you’re in the dressing rooms with your tween daughter. It’s that sort of purgatory where the minutes tick by while she decides that something is too see-through or too baggy or too tight when none of it is and it’s not. It’s the place where it takes so much longer than you could ever imagine to try on a pair of mesh jogging shorts and a sports bra and decide whether they’re the right fit. You want to help, you are here to help, so you fetch different sizes and run them back to the dressing room. You describe the sizes, the fits, the colors; you make your recommendations. Finally, the two of you narrow down the yesses and you pile up the nos. In the silences of waiting on such decisions, you notice how beautiful she is—how she glows with the energy of the sun, as if she’s absorbed it all those hours at the pool and the beach and the backyard, and she radiates it back through her rosy skin and glossy brown hair. She’s growing up. She’s a mini-you, sort of; you can see all the likenesses and all the differences and you think about yourself at this age. Her image, under these fluorescent dressing room lights, is for you at once nostalgic and prophetic, conjuring what was and proclaiming the possibility of all that is to come.

Here in this same space, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror as you sit on the bench in the long hallway outside her changing room. These glimpses prove you’re different than that sundrenched younger woman you once were. Also, those five pounds you keep trying to lose for good just keep creeping back. And weird, spidery webs are whispering into the veins on your legs, something you never in a million years imagined could happen because you were young and you were going to stay young forever. Hormonal changes have turned your hair, once glossy, into a frizzy nest that you work so very hard to keep straight, and your eyes show the tiredness of three babies, ministry, a marriage, life.

These observations run in your head as you wait, and you remember the women who mothered you, standing in front of mirrors, placing critical hands on stomachs and sucking them in; you remember the frenetic attention to the shapes and sizes of various body parts (the ThighMasters, the Buns of Steel videotapes?). But you determined long ago that you would not be that kind of mother. You knew in your guts even before you were able to articulate it aloud: What your daughter needs more than mesh running shorts and a sports bra is for you and all the other mamas to gag the reel of our internal commentary and criticism.

You know that the gift you can give her right now--that will last the rest of her life--is that you Lock It Down and Honor Yourself in her presence. You’ve probably done a great job up ‘til now, Mama, setting a new trend in your generations. You’ve barely heard a single self-critical comment from your tween’s mouth because she hasn’t learned this kind of criticism from you. You’re doing great. But she needs you and me to do great longer. To continue to resist joining the endless and predictable moaning and woeing over our changing mama bodies that are beautiful and wonderfully made and transformed by all of the glories and trials we’ve borne. Her future, 35-year-old self needs your help right now, because when she stands in the mirror juxtaposed with the bursting youth of her own children, you want her to embrace herself whole-heartedly; you want her to love not just her hair but her beautiful wisdom and her hospitable way of being in the world.

 

Also, your daughter’s right-now security and confidence hinges very much on what you say and how you carry yourself in the world. Even though she’s not asking out loud, Am I Okay?, I’m sure she’s she’s wondered silently at times. Mama, if she can just stand in the aura of your own self-acceptance—along with your spidery veins and squishy tummy from all those babies—she will be able to do the same for herself. If you can love yourself so generously, then of course (as her logic will flow) you can love her, too. If you can gaze back at yourself in that dressing room mirror without flinching and without reproach, well by God, she could expect you to do the same for her, beholding adoringly not just her glorious physical being, but her thoughts and her heart, when she Fails and when she Falls Short (and she knows as well as you do that she will and she has).

Do you remember your own grandparents, all mole-speckled and wrinkle-creased? If you had the right kind of grandparents, then you know that you and they weren't all tripped up over their age. They offered something infinitely more significant than sun-bursting youth: It was Acceptance that began with their very own selves and oozed out into a wide chocolatey puddle that clung to your glorious tween ankles. We can do the same, Mama. If we feel we have no script of our own to speak from at this moment in the lives of our daughters and in our own maturing womanhood, we can at least channel Grandma. Our scripts may be in production, but we'll have them in hand soon. Some of them, right now, are just being workshopped.

Here’s to you, Mama. And to our girls.

Perfectionism, Self-Worth, and Why We Write

Is it okay to take a moment to say that perfectionism is killing me? There are a lot of checks a writer must make before a book is finalized, and in my case--because us Ovenbird authors retain more control than usual over the interior--there are a lot of checks. But honestly, everything's looking pretty good right now. It's just that the anxiety of there being some sort of unseen problem with the book is almost overwhelming--it's almost enough to keep me from ever stamping my approval. Sometimes, I have to tell my OCD-self that my editor-self made an editorial decision that is just, simply, out of my hands. Tough luck. Deal with it. This is a collaborative effort, after all, between editor-, artist-, and OCD-me.

That aside, I've had a few readers purchase the Kindle version (thank you!) and I've already heard back from some of you (mostly friends and extended family). You are reminding me that I opened wide a window to my life that doesn't normally get cracked in the day to day. Obvious, yes. But when you spend so much time objectively and robotically proofreading a manuscript, you might forget that it's about something; you might forget that what it's about has to do with things that move people, things that make people feel connected with you in a way you weren't even thinking about when you wrote those things.

Now, in truth, there is a corner in my mind rooting for this book to make some sort of impact, some kind of (splash is entirely. the wrong. word.)...maybe what I mean is that I am hoping it will color the world in some way, if only by hue or tint--some shade (nuanced is fine) that reveals its having been here. I'm rooting for a plop into the pond that will send ripples (minute ripples are fine!) to the farthest reaches of the water. And, let me be perfectly and shamefully honest, if those ripples did happen to shimmy all the way over to Oprah's living room, I'd be ecstatic.

But forget about books and writing for a moment: don't we all feel that we want our very existence to make ripples that reach the far side of the pond? To find out, at the end of the day, that we made a difference, that we made some contribution that shifted the landscape of a soul or altered the dialogue of a community or a world? That Oprah would find us interesting and meaningful enough to sit us down in her living room and ask, ask, comment, ask, offer her two cents, mention Nate Berkus, and, when it's all said and done, give us a car? 

I remember Anne Lamott describing the faulty expectations of insecure writers that, once they were published, self esteem would arrive by phone, fax, and mail. Thank God I didn't publish in my twenties because I'd be an absolute basket case after having found out that a book in print wouldn't do anything to soothe my raging need to BE OKAY. So, if it's not self-esteem we slightly less neurotic versions of ourselves are after--what drives us? What do we want? Conversation? Dialogue? The catharsis that comes by storytelling? Or, to be so dramatic: the healing of the world?

I don't know. I really don't. But, like any author, I hope this book is widely read. I hope it matters to strangers.