Moms, When Did We Lose Our Glory?

It is the early 1990s and I am around five years old. On a hot, summer afternoon, my parents’ room always seemed deliciously cool, so I slipped in to play in my mom’s closet and try on her high heels…again. I can’t say how many times I did this, but in my faint memories of childhood, I seemed to always be drawn to the heels. How I wished I had my own! My sister and I would put on our “slips,” white under-dresses with stiff tulle, to make our Sunday dresses fuller, and parade around the house with those high heels on, our toes slipping through the peep-toed ones.

We felt we couldn’t wait to be old enough to dress like Mom. 

Fast-forward to the modern day, and I am in a classroom with half a dozen middle school girls. I am now a mother, but instead of high heels, I am wearing a pair of very comfortable Sketchers sandals with the two leather straps across my feet. I am not wearing any make up, because it’s a Wednesday evening and getting all three kids dressed and out the door in time for church was enough. Across from me glare name-brand shoes and glasses, long and shiny hair, teeny little bodies stuffed into tinier jeans.

“Wow. Are those Sketchers?” 

“Aw, they are cute. Are they supposed to be Birkenstocks?”

Titters of laughter; I am sure it’s not hate-filled, just the endless middle school obsessive nature to find someone else more awkward than themselves.

The feelings flooding up in my brain weren’t embarrassment (those are the best sandals I have owned since college), but more of an incredulous nature. When I was in middle school, I longed to be anything else. The older girls I knew had good hair and makeup, could dress without appearing frumpy and awkward, and carried themselves seemingly like they were quite comfortable with how they looked. My older sisters-in-law were especially this way. They would come to visit with all their toiletries, perfumes, creams and beautiful clothes, and all I could do was sigh and hope that someday I’d be able to learn all of that wisdom. 

And now, it seems, I have missed what I longed for as a child and teenager. Now, the new desirable is the teenage girl, with her unfinished curves and chemically modified hair. Now, if I am not wearing the teeny shorts and sailing logo-ed attire, I am frumpy still. If I am caught without a vest and boots in the fall, I may as well go back to the awkward middle years of my youth. If I am not dressing as someone 10 years younger than me, I am totally not cool. 

And we as young mothers are buying it. 

Uncomfortable in the new size that our babies have brought us, in addition to the added hormones and sleepless nights that have a great affect on our skin and hair, we have succumbed to the modern lie in magazines, social media, and even Target (how could you, Target??!) that we can never look better than the 16 year old serving us at Chick-fil-A, so we should just mimic her. Go back a few years in our closets and drag out what made us feel comfortable and try to squeeze it on. 

This should not be, moms. We have to hold the high ground and show young girls that they cannot believe the lie that those fleeting years are the only times in their lives that they will feel beautiful. We have to show them that their style might be okay for now, but it is not transferable to the adult world. Here, we are expected to dress appropriately, comfortably for our careers, and still with a beauty that comes with age, instead of by a credit card. Here, wholesome and beautifying choices must be made, and a woman cannot live on Netflix and cookie dough anymore…okay, not more than a few hours at least. 

I wish the gap between pre-teen and adulthood had not become so blurred as it is today. One could conjecture many different cultural reasons as to why, but how we get away from it is more important. I don’t have daughters of my own, but I believe that the girls of any young age are highly impressionable, which is why I am trying to be around them, teach them, be a friend to them, to help them see their lives don’t end after they are twenty-something and married with children.

Find a way to reach young girls and speak truth about life into their lives. Don’t make them think you want to be them (though I really want a 15 year old’s waist line most days); show them what they would like to be someday. No social media movement, no hash-tag-friendly campaign will be as impressionable as the honest and simple relationship between a young girl struggling with her image and a woman who is comfortable in what she has become. I know this because I had several of these relationships, and feel no shame in purchasing the most comfortable and unattractive sandals in the store. 

So moms, don’t give up the mysteriousness and glory that motherhood brings. You should not be shamed into wearing a teenager’s outfits and trying to push your body into a mold, which will never hold it anymore. Our beauty cannot be replaced by the younger generation, unless we decide to forfeit it to them.