Bekah McNeel

Tag: feminism

March to May, Part 3: Grief Cake

June 8, 2022 No Comments

I.

Last April I was swatting at a mosquito, and my hand went through the single-pane glass window. The glass cut a jagged “v” into the flesh below my right thumb, deep enough for me to see the bone. 

My stitches were a work of art. The scar is tidy, perfectly contoured to the laceration, with just the tiniest suture marks. It finally stopped being unbearably sensitive after about six months. But I still can’t feel the top of my thumb. It’s numb, all the way to the nail bed. 

My spring pattern has three parts: restlessness, anxiety, grief. It’s time to write about the last one, and it is the toughest one of all. 

Restlessness can be calmed with gratitude and curiosity. Reminding myself of the goodness here, and finding little ways to bring new life, everyday adventures. 

Anxiety can be quieted by abiding in the love around me, rooting deeper into the places where I do belong, where things are right, and working toward more alignment from there. 

Grief, though. Grief is a permanent mark. A scar. A digit that, while fully functional, is half-numb. Or weirdly tingly. And sometimes, for some reason deep in the dermal layering, blindingly, electrically painful.

II.

Essentially, grief is the soul’s response to loss, but calling something “grief” almost seems like you’re entering it into a competition, applying for a designation. Of course events like Uvalde and 9/11 qualify? But does grief apply to lesser losses? Can we grieve the loss of a pet? A celebrity? Time? Is it grief if I can still get out of bed? If I never cry? 

Well, I’m not the administrator of the grief designation. I’m not a psychologist. I’m just going to tell you what my therapist told me: whatever you’ve lost, whether it’s a parent or a dream, you will likely need to grieve. You don’t have to say your grief is deeper or more important than anyone else’s. You don’t have to put your life on hold. You don’t have to interrogate it, or shame your soul for needing it. 

But you do need to admit there’s been a loss, a possibly permanent gap between wanting and having. There’s a hole. You have to humble yourself to not being able to fix this one. Grief is admitting we don’t control everything, because if we could, we certainly would control this. 

Obviously I have to reference Wanda Maximoff. Obviously I have to point out that her desire to control the hole of grief in her heart led her to create and destroy in marvelous, cinematic, universal proportions. But to go into detail would spoil five movies and television series, so I won’t go any further. If you know, you know.

Hopefully we keep our losses in perspective.  Hopefully we know the difference between an elementary school massacre and a lost job.

What I’m about to talk about does not rise to the level of injustice or death. It’s not rooted in trauma. It’s rooted in choices. 

III.

A few weeks ago on this very blog, I wrote about purity culture—the sex-obsessed anti-sex teachings, jargon, traditions, and accoutrements originating from a culture war era need to keep the kids from defiling their marriage beds.

In that post, I alluded to a 9,000-word document detailing my ridiculous and hurtful encounters with several college idiots during the 2003-2004 school year. I had not been abused or assaulted, and I had not had sex, so my obsession with this season of my life, and with the role of purity culture in it, was something of a mystery, even to me. 

I shared that purity culture didn’t just want to control our bodies, but our narratives. “Waiting until marriage,” for me was not so much about sex as it was about conformity. Conforming to a narrative defined first by waiting, and then by marriage. 

A woman’s life before marriage was supposed to be like a perfectly iced cake. Smoothed, decorated, and untasted. Marriage was the entire cake. The meaning, the reward, the source, the delight, the culmination of life. The cake was a wedding cake.

It wasn’t that I needed to lick the icing off the cake before I married (i.e. have sex). I just wanted cake to be more than marriage. I wanted the cake to be inquiry and achievement and exploration and purpose and adventure. And yes, love and marriage too—not just because the patriarchy told me so, and not just because I needed the validation, but also I had a real, deep, understandable desire to love and be loved. Those were essential ingredients in my cake, but not the cake itself. 

I don’t fully understand what was so threatening, why wanting to cook with my own recipe was such a red flag. But it wasn’t just my fondness for making out and drinking beer. It was my different view of eschatology (the college’s doctrine was premillennial, mine was amillennial at the time for the nerds out there). It was sarcasm and arguing and innuendo and thoughts about something other than wedding cake. I was enamored of the beauty and the appeal of dangerous things outside the evangelical bubble. I was, at age 20, curious, confident, and creative…none of those things fair well in rigid systems. 

What I lacked was security. If I didn’t conform, I believed, I would never be loved. I would have to choose. I could not conceive of a love outside the wedding cakes around me, and I certainly didn’t believe I was compelling and magnetic enough to attract such an iconoclastic love if it existed. 

So as my mind was awakening in the halls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the pages of Zora Neale Hurston and Leo Tolstoy, my fear was pulling it back, telling it not to risk the tried and true recipe for happiness. 

And then, in spring of 2004, I met a young man, in the middle of his own intellectual awakening. We talked about a future full of books and writing and watching the world go by. Parallel dreams and stimulating discussion. Over time we started to imagine a shared future. He was attracted to my unconventionalism, and I was attracted to his curiosity, and for the first time thought I might be able to bake this peculiar cake.

But we should not have been talking about a future at all, because he was engaged to someone else when we met, because that’s what you do in your last semester at evangelical college as you transition into the real world on the legs of a newborn deer. You make lifetime commitments…and he was suddenly having second thoughts. 

He was having second thoughts and telling me about them. Twenty years later, I recognize this as an attempt to get me to make the decision for him, and that’s why it split my heart in two. Half of me, the rule follower, believing I would only find love within the lines, would tell him to go away and get himself sorted. “Talk to your pastor,” I would say. The other half was breathless as he kept coming back, scaling the walls of propriety for just one more late night phone call. One more lunch. One more conversation in my Jeep overlooking the lights of Los Angeles County, while my little sister, visiting from Texas, shivered in his Jeep and while Eddie Vedder sang the same 12 songs five times in a row.

The details of what happened from March to May of 2004 are between me and him, and always will be. Well, me, him, and the distressed professor who saw it unfolding in his essay writing class and tried to shake some sense into me. And the roommate who found the letter and had no idea what to do, because, dammit, these sorts of messes don’t happen when good boys and girls are following God’s plan. And the sweet, sweet, a/v guy who had to watch us flirt while we produced a promotional video for the spring banquet, and no doubt felt like he’d witnessed a crime. 

So yes, the five of us. Me, my roommate, my favorite professor, this hapless young man, and the a/v guy. 

In March, we both started to wonder if my version of the cake could be made. In May, he told me it couldn’t. He was going with wedding cake. 

The responsible half of my heart— which had never asked him to leave her, and had dutifully pushed away for months—won. The half that was in love, the one that answered the phone at 2 am and lingered at lunch, the unruly half, lost. 

That’s when I decided messing with the recipe wasn’t adventurous, it was dangerous. If I didn’t figure out how to conform, how to make a wedding cake, I was going to end up alone. 

IV. 

I’ve seen that 22-year-old boy as a villain for 18 years, and yes, he did some asinine things. Yes, he put all the pressure on me to keep real trouble at bay, which is boorish and cliche (and the foundation of so much else wrong with purity culture). But my more compassionate 38 year old self knows he was just a dude in a system, and I wish him all the best. According to social media he’s blissfully happy, and I think that is truly, truly wonderful. 

Of course, dear reader, you know I am blissfully happy as well. You know I married a man who put all the other men to shame. I found a sophisticated, creative, brilliant man with fascinating dreams I could happily inhabit. I found ways to work and play and explore within his boundaries, and then within the boundaries of our hilarious, dazzling children. I found a way to sneak some extra ingredients—work, travel, egalitarianism— into my own multi-tiered wedding cake, more delicious than I have any right for it to be. 

It all sounds so good, right? So mature. Mature is the word we use as we let the stability-seeking half of your heart takes over, and wrestles the novelty-seeking half into submission. 

Mature is the word we use for someone who has learned how to sacrifice. 

I do not regret the sacrifices I made for my amazing people one bit. Some sacrifices are so necessary they are barely even choices. We have forsaken all others in order to be faithful. The children were incubated and birthed in the same body-ransacking way other mammals are.  I’m also thankful for the sacrifices I did not have to make, because of who they are and how we have built our life, and the privileges we have. 

But there is a difference between the sacrifices we make in order to give love and the sacrifices we make in order to be loved. 

I spent the rest of 2004 and a couple years longer grieving the boy who got married to not-me. But I have not yet grieved the things I threw away because I thought if he wouldn’t love them, no one would. 

V.

I have struggled as a mother. I have struggled as a wife. I have struggled with my wedding cake because everything I did, I did to earn love and keep it safe. Anything endangering the wedding cake had to go: Curiosity about what potentialities are left, expansion in who and how to love, adventures with unknown outcomes, the half of my heart that refuses to conform. 

Curiosity, expansion, adventures, and openness invigorate and magnetize relationships. They animate me. I miss half my heart. And without it I am so very tired.  

I love my family and our life so incredibly deeply, the exhaustion seems like sacrilege. It seems profane to let the delight and desire go dim on so much beauty. But the desire to win and keep love by sticking to the recipe handicapped my ability to love them in a way only I can. At times I have been hesitant or even unwilling to sacrifice for the people I love— to be still, say “no” and let little adventures pass in favor of abiding presence— because I have not really grieved the sacrifices I thought I had to make to be loved.  So I’m going to take a while to properly grieve the recipe I crumpled up and threw away in May 2004. 

I’m incredibly lucky, because Lewis, in his endless patience and generosity, is ready to dream up new recipes with me. He’s ready to get out the bowls and spoons and see what’s possible. 

We can’t make my 2004 cake with the ingredients we have now. Ingredients like mortgages and children and deadlines. But we can take this lovely, sturdy, perfectly executed wedding cake recipe and tinker with it. When the grieving is done, the world will still be full of ingredients—bitters and sours and salts and herbs—and we will feast. 

Pro-Boob Propaganda

February 10, 2021 No Comments

 Though he died when I was only 18, Billy Wilder seemed to have a knack for imprinting things on my brain.

It was he who said that Audrey Hepburn “might single-handedly make bosoms a thing of the past.” 

He was also the one who directed Marilyn Monroe, in Some Like It Hot, to lament that, because of her boobs, “nothing ever hangs right.”

I know exactly why Billy Wilder’s boobisms stick in my brain: I’m wildly insecure about my breasts. By age 14, I wore the same bra size I would wear until I was nursing children, and basically felt like a walking D-cup with no other features. 

The Audrey assessment confirmed everything I had suspected. The hype around boobs was a sham. They were a thing of the past. 

When I heard the Marilyn line, I thought it was nice to have camaraderie, especially with someone who was, I think we can all agree, more attractive than me. “See! Even Marilyn Monroe gets it.” Boobs were nothing but trouble, and the reason all my shirts hung like circus tents.

A girl with less on her chest might have glossed over Billy Wilder’s anti-boob statement. When watching Some Like It Hot, my more streamlined friends might focus on the reaction of the male characters who heard Marilyn’s complaint. The movie makes it obvious that the men see no problem with the way her shirt hangs. 

Whatever you’ve got, it’s going to be the wrong thing. You can be Audrey or you can be Marilyn, but you can’t be happy.

A therapist told me recently that psychologists are starting to believe that it’s not possible for the majority of Americans to have a positive body image. That neutral is the best most of us can hope for. Hating our bodies is as American as the apple pie we ate after everyone went to bed and then purged into the toilet.

As a teen it felt like the only pro-boob propaganda out there existed in the trashy cartoon, plastic surgery, and porn worlds—neither where I was, nor where I wanted to be. Boobs could be objects, but they could not be assets; not for a woman like me.  I was more of an arts, culture, and academy kind of girl. Later, when I discovered feminism and leftist politics, I felt like my genetics had sold me out to the patriarchy.

Are there any other body parts that take over so much of your identity?

It wasn’t all in my head. People noticed. 

At a slumber party for my cheerleading squad, my far less developed friends begged me to let them see what kind of fruit would fill out my bra. Cantaloupe is the correct answer. 

Contrary to stereotype, cheerleading was boon to my body image. I am sturdy and strong, and so was able to throw the little pixie-like squad members into the air. I could finally see the purpose of my body being built the way that it was. Most of the time, I was hounded by the arbitrariness of my entire body, especially my breasts. I wanted to point to some evolutionary advantage of my big boobs, but there isn’t one. There isn’t really a purpose to them being this big at all, they just are. Like an appendix or vestigial tail.

In cheerleading, at least they were attached to a powerful, purposeful body. All the jumping and tumbling, however, was an endless source of angst for my mother. 

My mom didn’t know about the specialty market that exists for big-breasted athletes. Later in life I would spend $90 on a bra so tight that came with instructions on how to slowly acclimate your lungs over several days before actually wearing it to work out.

However, the neon pink $30 sports bras of high school were not up to the task of my ample bosom. Even when I layered two of them, there was significant bouncing as we cascaded onto the basketball court to get the crowd going at halftime. My mom’s solution was to buy me a full corset with three-inch-wide straps and about 30 eye-hook fasteners, and cups made of inflexible material that gave my breasts a distinctly Happy Days shape. 

One day before practice I went into our cheerleading squad’s dressing room to find my corset hanging on the wall, with two fully inflated balloons filling it out. My mischievous squad mates again claimed to be jealous, which I didn’t believe. They all bought their prom dresses in the trendy junior section, while I was trying to find a bridesmaid gown that didn’t make me look like someone’s spinster aunt.  

When dealing with insecure teenage girls— who all exist discontentedly along the Audrey-to-Marilyn spectrum— it’s impossible to tell when they knew how mean they were being. 

One friend, from church, also had big boobs, but she was six inches shorter than me, and wore size two jeans. Her boobs were more problematic, she insisted, because they were out of scale with her “tiny body.” I should be glad, she said, that mine were at least proportional. 

A giant body to go with my giant boobs. 

Trying on clothes once during my ultra marathon-running years, another friend said, sounding genuinely surprised, “Wow. You actually have a small waist.” Then she trailed off, as if to herself, but fully audible: “It’s just those boobs…”

Most of the time my breasts made me feel either matronly or raunchy. When I tried to put on a tighter shirt that made me feel less like the evil headmistress of a nineteenth century school for unwed mothers, I would get called out by youth group leaders and Christian school teachers for immodesty. 

Ironically though, as much as my parents, pastor, and Christian school teacher were griping about the loose morals and gay agendas of Hollywood, they found themselves in agreement on women’s responsibility to be thin. 

When I was in middle school, my pastor’s daughter—a stunning, lanky college student—led a girls’ summer Bible study about being the kind of woman that pleases God. I remember nothing except that there was an entire lesson devoted to keeping a trim figure and dressing in a flattering, feminine way. 

My jiggly D-cups, in contrast to all the training bras and countable ribs around me, were anything but trim. When I dressed in a feminine way, my mom told me to go upstairs and change.

Pleasing God, the workbook made clear, was synonymous with pleasing one’s future husband. So having a body that boys liked was really important, like Ten Commandments important. But we were also responsible for their purity—those youthful penises weren’t going to keep themselves flaccid.

Which made the Audrey Hepburn ideal very, very desirable for girls who were trying to be the right kind of desirable. Audrey was a fashion icon. Marilyn was a sex icon. Men go gaga over both women, but stills from Breakfast At Tiffany’s seem less likely to be taped to the underside of a 15-year-old boy’s bunk bed. 

That’s how boobs, and the women who have them, are framed in American culture—masturbation fodder. Or as the evangelicals call it: temptation.  We can openly admire eyes, shoulders, legs, and arms, even lips, in an aesthetic, non-sexual way. But breasts are private parts, like the sex organs. Except they’re not. They are visible all the time, at least in silhouette. Imagine if men had to wear thin, stretchy pants all the time… and were always fully erect. Not so private. 

My own disdain for my breasts, and the weird religious messaging surrounding them, somehow twisted around in my brain until I believed that they—as the primary feature of my general appearance—were the reason boys didn’t like me. 

For all the jokes about boobs, and boys who “tripped” in front of me in the hall, I figured, what they really wanted must have been a gamine fashion icon who could wear a Givenchy coat with nary a wrinkle. Boobs were just too brazen, too obvious, too much. A thing of the past.

I was bemoaning my breasts to one of the two culprits who gave them to me: my maternal grandmother, Jo Nell. 

Jo Nell, cigarette in hand, gave a reassuring chuckle and said, with all of the certainty of a gorgeous woman born in 1930, “One day those boobs are going to make somebody real happy.” 

I left her house thinking, wistfully, if not glumly, “Maybe one day I’ll find a guy who likes big boobs.”

(Cue hilarious faces from Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis.)

Boys not liking me occupied a lot of my coming of age mental space. I have a high IQ and a lot of energy, and probably could have applied that to making the world significantly better.  Curing cancer, that sort of thing. Instead, I spent it on relentless self-improvement, or what I thought was improvement. What I was really doing was trying to figure out the science of attraction, solving, of course, for the liability of my oversized breasts.

To help boys overlook my glaring bra size, I reasoned, I would have to cultivate a winning personality.  I was constantly taking notes about how to not be the kind of girl that irritated men. This led to the least feminist season of my life, sandwiched between my evangelical Christian upbringing and my first grad school course in Gender Studies.

Trying to be “not like the other girls,” ironically, was supposed to make me more appealing, romantically. The heroines in most books and movies I liked were plucky tomboy types who stand out from the demure crowds in an appealing way. Laura Ingalls. Jo March. Calamity Jane. And until Elsa of Arendelle changed the paradigm for a new generation, the disinterested heroine always got her man. 

In one useless way, it worked. By the end of college, I had heard the following: 

“Why can’t every girl be like you?” 

“You’ve got me really spoiled thinking all girls are like this.”

“You should, like, teach a class on how girls should act around guys.”

“I wish you could convince my fiancé to read more ‘serious’ literature. Like you.”

None of the boys who said those things wanted to date me. All compliments were given solidly inside the friend-zone by boys who had no idea that I had a massive crush on them. I had kept that fact hidden because girls who like boys, according to the movies, are not the girls boys like. This is a strange mixture of the unattainable babe archetype and the evangelical culture of male pursuit. Again, Hollywood and Evangelicalism have more in common than they like to think when it comes to flattening women (pun intended) into two-dimensional objects.

Be austere Audrey hidden behind your iconic overcoat until he decides it’s time for you to be breathless Marilyn in a negligee. 

You’re too much until you’re not enough. 

It’s all bologna.  

In a world where men had all the power I was trying to impress them into liking me, which, it turns out, is not a recipe for true love, even in patriarchal evangeliland. If serious-literature-lover had left his fiancé and run away with me because I was reading Camus in college, I would be stuck in a lifetime of pretentious drivel. Camus’s and the boy’s. 

Being a woman is a war zone, so grab your friends and hop in the foxhole. Audrey and Marilyn are icons, but they were also real people, and they probably could have used some more girlfriends. Sisterhood isn’t perfect, but it’s necessary. Girls have hurt me, I have hurt other girls, but we’ve done so less when we aren’t letting the boys decide.

Healthy people like people who like them back. People like people who do irritating things. They don’t love the irritating things, but they love the person doing them. People like clean lines and curves, esoteric and funny, brainy and brassy. There are no unlovable people. You are not unlovable, so you might as well be you. 

It’s so tempting to make this all about loving yourself, accepting your body. But I don’t have that shit worked out. I don’t always love me, but I have figured out how to be me. 

When I met Lewis, I did not chill out, I did not try to be the “cool girl.” I texted with too many exclamation marks, I invited him to things after he’d made it painfully obvious he wasn’t as into this as I was. I introduced him to my parents the first time I had the opportunity.  I saw what I wanted, and I went for it. Which is pretty damn plucky.

Turns out he’s also that boob-loving unicorn I never thought I’d meet. What are the odds?

To no one’s surprise, least of all my therapist, marriage would not be the end of my body issues. Making someone else happy, which my husband is,  is not the same as making yourself happy.  The boobs survived two children without, as so many mothers complain, flattening to pancakes. Oh they ballooned while I was nursing, sure, but then they went right back to their melon-sized fullness, albeit hanging a little lower on the tree. 

The rest of me is softer and more jiggly as well. And now I have two kids to offer their opinions about all of this.

On the way to a Christmas party one year, my five-year-old daughter said, “Mom has a round belly like Santa.” 

“No she doesn’t,” said my three-year-old son, ever in defense of his beloved mother, “Those are just her breasts.” 

Something New and Good: A Son for Such a Time

June 9, 2016 No Comments

Every parent of a daughter reads the headlines and cringes. Or cries out for justice. So much violence against women. So much inequity still, even in a world that claims to be past it. That’s just here in my own country. I sometimes can’t even think about the world as a whole.

Since I had my girl, I’ve been passionately praying for her to be brave and strong. I’ve been clothing her with dignity, so that she will stand on the necks of would-be abusers, and cherish the gifts of those who love her truly. So that she will know when to forgive the fumblings of an ordinary “dude,” and when to wash her hands of blood-sucking bastard.

But now…I am about to have a boy. I’m (hopefully soon) giving birth to the headlines that make me so angry. He will be born into privilege. He will be white, male, and the child of professional parents.

We, as parents of the privileged, have to fight against our children’s immature impulses to turn that privilege into entitlement. We cannot feed the beast that says athletes are somehow more deserving than lawn care workers. That their success is proof of their virtue. As much as I want my kids to take pride in their accomplishments, I want them to be even more grateful for generations of investors, workers, and taxpayers who made it possible for them to take the last tiny step across the finish line. …

Something New and Good: A Son for Such a TimeRead More »