hey soul sistah

i've been doing a lot of thinking about femininity this semester. one thing we've discussed repeatedly in class is the importance of women's lived experience, particularly in the shaping of one's relationship with the divine, but also in relationship with one another. deep calls to deep. yesterday, i had three soul sisters speak to my deep from theirs in a glorious intermingling of experience and humanity and solidarity. one is famous, one is fictional, and one is the next closest thing i've got to a sister after my own blood. anne lamott, carrie bradshaw, and the wise mrs. betsey teater.

my friend susannah called me yesterday to invite me to hear anne lamott speak. i jumped at the chance, though i have not yet read any of her work. several friends have raved about her, though, and told me i would love her stuff, so she was already on my reading list for the summer. i arrived at the big baptist church in decatur about 20 minutes before she was scheduled to speak, and i walk into the foyer and there she sat herself, pen in hand and no real line of people before her. i made my way over to the book table, bought traveling mercies as an investment for the summer, and walked right up and had it signed! no waiting. i mumbled something stupid about how we had read excerpts from her essay "shitty first drafts" and that i really enjoyed it. then i think i said the word "revolutionize"--as in, "your essay revolutionized my writing." she smiled and nodded, vaguely appreciative, largely uninterested. dumb. i realized immediately that she hears that stuff all day long, every day. even as unfamiliar with her work as i am, it was an odd, writer-girl-crush moment where i aimed to impress with a statement that wasn't even true. her essay was fabulous, but it didn't revolutionize anything for me. i have been writing shitty first drafts for years--i resonated with it. i just had this image, though, of standing in line backstage at a hanson concert (insert your favorite teenage celebrity crush here-this merely was mine, and [un]fortunately the following sequence of events never actually took place) and finally approaching the table where these 3 musicians sat, wearing a crazed smile on my face and blurting out something about how their music changed my life. they nod, sign, take a picture, and move on. i've always been weird around celebrity--seeing newscasters and weather people in public makes me slightly giddy. i thought i was being so smooth with anne lamott. i guess we never grow out of some things.

anyway, my blundered one-on-one moment with anne lamott is not why i call her my soul sister. a lot of things she had to say were about raising children. obviously, that does not speak to my own experience, but it broke my heart and made me think about the youth i do know. for example, she talked about the incredible transition in little girls, who at twelve or so seem to have this flip switched and suddenly they care about boys and boobs and measuring themselves up by the popular girls. i think i ached because i remembered how true it was for me. when i was home for Easter, i gave a quick hug to one of the youth of our church, jessica. she had served communion during the service, and i marveled at how much she had grown up. she was in my class of 2nd and 3rd graders when i first started helping out with sunday school. and now she is 14 and gorgeous. and she has a good strong head on her shoulders, i can tell. but that's what lamott kept saying--even those good kids can find their way into the bad stuff. so i pray for
jessica, and all other 2nd and 3rd graders of the world who are growing into teendom and wrestling with this stuff.

susannah also said lamott's shared experiences made her nervous for parenthood. well said.

there was just one phrase, though, that really stuck with me from the talk. lamott kept describing herself as a "reading girl." at one point she said, "i am an embarrassingly devout christian, and it is books that 'saved' me." she chastised the kindle users of the world and flipped the crisp pages of her new book into the microphone. i am such a reading girl, too. i kept flashing back to my childhood and the books that were my world. i tore through them, and even that wasn't enough. my friends and i played boxcar children (using the hatch of my parents' boat as our boxcar) and american girls and little women. and then i came to know hester prynne and jane eyre, juliet and elizabeth bennett. beyond that, even, was harry potter and the midnight movie premiers with stef, complete with a lightning bolt scar drawn in eyeliner on my forehead. i read narnia as a college student, and loved it more than i think i would have as a child. and now i get to be a reading girl as my pseudo-profession for these 3 years. as much as we complain about our weekly page count, it's not a bad deal.

after the reading, i had to bail on susannah and the rest of our evening--a wine party at her boyfriend's place. i went for a long run yesterday afternoon and the inordinate amount of pollen i must have sucked down was starting to catch up with me. so i did what i haven't done in a long time: put on my pjs, climbed into bed, and had an early evening together with the ladies of sex and the city. (the lazy evening theme persisted--i also slept for a solid 11 hours last night, which has been a long time coming.) the episode i watched was from season six when carrie dates "the russian," and in this particular vignette, she had decided to take him as her "love-uh." charlotte kept calling the russian her boyfriend, but carrie insisted that she was in it for the casual trysts. he was an international man, after all, someone she would only see occasionally for romantic evenings and that would be that. of course, after she sleeps with him, she decides having a "love-uh" is not her thing after all. she sits at her computer and relays some scientific discovery about women's bodies releasing a chemical after an intimate encounter with a man that causes them to desire emotional attachment, commitment. her computer screen question for the episode was, "when it comes to men, even when we try to keep it light, why do we wind up in the dark?"

good question, carrie. though my experience is hardly so over-sexed, i am currently struggling with the anomaly that is casual dating. i think whatever pheromones that carrie was referring to may have been released in me over hand-holding and kissing. isn't casual intimacy an oxymoron??

fortunately, i have my final and most genuine soul sister, the nearly two years-married betsey teater. we were g-chatting yesterday morning and giving each other some brief life updates. when i brought up my struggle with definition in this relationship, and most specifically my own frustrations with my over-analysis of everything, she said that she and her husband, luke, actually had a conversation over that very issue. obviously, they've got a pretty well-defined relationship ;) (and one that i think the rest of us would be lucky to emulate half of what they've got), but still struggle with his under-analysis and her over-analysis of different actions and words said or unsaid. i told her that i hated to find solace in her hardship, but it is somewhat comforting to know that even a wise, solid married couple still struggles with these things.

thank goodness we have each other, or we'd never get this life thing figured out.