Morning is my favorite time, always has been. I can’t remember not being an early bird. It’s the calm stillness I love the most, and my dark drives to the park every day allow my mind a chance to wander and ruminate before the obligations du jour crowd out everything else. The radio keeps me company and the noise helps clear the brain fog. I like listening to lyrics of songs I’ve not heard in ages, and laugh at how corny they are from my adult perspective. There are times, though, that a song actually hits much different, and lyrics I previously assumed were fluff are, in fact, packed with truths. In particular, “The Middle,” by Jimmy Eat World, played last week and I listened closely for maybe the first time ever. Lines such as “Just try your best/ Try everything you can/And don’t you worry what they tell themselves/When you’re away,” and “So don’t buy in/Live right now/Just be yourself/It doesn’t matter if it’s good enough/For someone else” felt like exactly the encouragement we all need to hear.
I think of girls a lot. An odd statement, I know, but please hear me out. I’ve spent my whole life as a female, spent most of my life as a teacher of middle and high school students (many of whom were girls), and have friends with daughters I’ve watched grow from infancy. Considering the amount of emotional energy I expend monitoring my ego, beliefs about myself, and value system, I’m curious about how my life experiences have shaped all of that as well as how girls now are being influenced. I’ve never once thought that being a boy is “easier,” and I know that individuals who fall outside the parameters of how “boy” and “girl” have been historically defined certainly don’t cruise through life either. But because those experiences are not the ones I’ve lived, I’ll never fully understand them as I do my own.
So as I listened to “The Middle” last week on my way to walk Best, garbed in dirty boots and threadbare sweatpants, hair frizzy and stuffed under a cap, I wondered if younger versions of me could have internalized the advice to “just be (my)self” and that “it doesn’t matter if it’s good enough for someone else.” Probably not, I quickly decided. Because current-day me still struggles more than I’d like with that message.
It never fails to hurt my heart when I see photos of girls, even as young as kindergarten-aged, where they are standing at an angle, hand on hip, one leg crossed in front of the other—a classic minimizing pose I see adult women strike in an effort to appear smaller. Sure, I imagine we all want to look our best in photos, but why does looking good, for women in particular, seem to require awkward poses and smallness? And when, for heaven’s sake, did little girls start caring about looking “good” for pictures? On the other hand, I have a friend with two daughters younger than six; the younger refuses to be coaxed into smiling for the camera if she’s not feeling it, and the older sports toothy grins and squinted eyes in many of her photos. Better still, their parents don’t appear to be coaching these sisters on how they need to present themselves for the camera (or the world); they’re letting their children be exactly who they are.
In middle school I can remember a classmate who had the audacity to hit a growth spurt in the summer before seventh grade. From a distance she could have passed as a teacher. More shockingly, she walked with her shoulders back and wore confidence easily. Several months into the new school year, my twelve-year-old classmate was plagued by rumors of being “fast” and “conceited.” She stopped smiling, her shoulders rounded, and after the Christmas break she did not return to our school. Her downfall came from being “too much.” I can recall being targeted in sixth grade for being “not enough,” with a couple of classmates flanking me as I navigated the busy hall so they could mock the way I walked, hands clasped in front of me and chin tilted downward. This went on for a few months until they lost interest in their joke. It seems that a lot of times, in life and especially in school, we can try our best and it still doesn’t earn us acceptance (or even freedom from ridicule).
I love that there are so many more accepted ways of being in this world than there used to be. I feel like if third-grade me had lived in the 21st century and wanted to wear her butterfly wings and rubber work boots to school, she’d have done so without a second thought. Knowing that sincere, authentic displays of one’s identity are embraced now more than ever eases the sting of seeing how many girls are learning from my generation that value comes only from looking like the flat-stomached, narrow-hipped, bikini-wearing images crowding magazines and Instagram pages with thousands of followers. Thank goodness for the little girls and young women (and those of us older women, too!) who can spread the word that “It just takes some time/little girl you’re in the middle of the ride/everything’ll be just fine.”
PartWolf 