God Bless This Mess(14)

Whenever I was being mean to my brother, my mom would say, “Hannah, you’re being mean as a snake.” And I’ll admit there were times when I was. I still am sometimes! But I spent so much energy trying to be the perfect girl at school that I would come home exhausted. I just couldn’t take any more, and Patrick acting up or causing trouble was the last straw.

Why was I so exhausted? Because I was performing all day. Trying to be perfect, because I felt like I had to. In fact, my mom would come home from parent-teacher conferences saying, “Your teachers all said you were so sweet. They have no idea that you’re here at home beating up on your little brother.”

Then she’d take me to dance class, where I’d get even more exhausted, doing everything I could to try to please her.

All I wanted was for my mom to feel happy. To feel loved. And I convinced myself that if I was good and perfect, then she would be happy.

I’m grateful for my parents for giving my brother and me so much. I’m even grateful that they stayed together, because things have gotten a lot better between them over these last few years. But it sure wasn’t easy. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about any of it. And I blamed myself a whole lot. I would pray to God, begging, even screaming sometimes, for their fighting to stop. Then when God didn’t answer those prayers, I thought it was because I didn’t always go to church, or because my family didn’t go over my scriptures with me.

It was all just so confusing, and so hard to make sense of as a little girl.

*

Wishing I could be Oprah or Ellen, living out the single-mom storylines with my dolls, taking the constant lessons about “independence” I heard from my mom to heart, I had all the signs of turning into a budding young feminist as a kid. But feminist was like some sort of bad word in the South.

I remember going to church and learning from the Bible that a woman is supposed to be “submissive,” but no one really explained what submissive means. The message I wrote in my notes at the time was that if you’re “a good Christian woman,” that means you’re gentle, serving, and quiet. (Which y’all know isn’t exactly how I turned out.)

Even the tried-and-true marriage vows made the point that a woman is supposed to “cherish, honor, and obey” her husband. No one ever talked about another interpretation of those vows: that it’s important to respect your husband and “obey” your commitment to each other. I personally do not think it means that the woman is supposed to be ordered around by her man. But that kind of thing was hardly ever discussed in the South, and most people seemed to believe that “obeying” her husband’s every word was the upright Christian thing for a woman to do. I wouldn’t hear anything about the more human, more feminist, yet no less Christian interpretation of that vow until I was in college; that whole idea was just way too “liberal” for most southerners I encountered. And the southerners I knew were really good people! That’s the thing. There wasn’t any part of me that wanted to rebel against what I was seeing. I wanted to be the good girl for so many reasons at the time.

I didn’t want to be a feminist, especially after I saw a picture of a bunch of feminists gathered to protest the Miss America pageant in 1968. I was doing research for a history project on the pageant, which I loved, when I found this photo of a bunch of angry-looking women holding their bras clutched in their fists up over their heads, and most of ’em hadn’t shaved their armpits!

Given the perfect little good-girl image I was trying to make everyone see in me, and how much I dreamed about becoming Miss America myself one day, that picture made me think that a feminist was the last thing I ever wanted to be.

*

Now, I don’t want my childhood to seem all bad. It wasn’t. Not at all. I think that’s one thing that’s so hard about looking back and trying to figure out why we are the way we are, and why we do the things we do: nothing in our histories is ever clearly black-and-white. It’s just that the fights and trouble, the traumatic events, loom a little larger in our memories for some reason. (Just like negative comments tend to loom way larger than all the good comments when they show up in our social-media accounts, am I right?)

One of the real blessings I had is that I was always surrounded by wonderful older kids and young women. The girls who worked the front desks at my parents’ businesses, the older children of my parents’ friends, even my parents’ friends themselves were all so loving and kind and supportive of everything I did. Being around girls who were going to college and making their own money and pursuing their own careers was inspiring to me. Some of them served as real mentors, others would take me shopping, and I just appreciated them so much. I looked up to them and wanted to learn from them, and I always knew I had a cheering section, which would help give me confidence in the future when I stepped into the pageant world and when I applied to college. Because of my parents, I had this amazing community in my life, outside of school. And that mattered.

I also had the best babysitter in the world. Casey Rae started out working at my parents’ tanning salon and babysat Patrick and me only occasionally, but the busier my parents got, the more and more she started staying with us from 7:00 a.m. till 7:00 p.m.

Casey went to the University of Alabama, where she joined a sorority and was a cheerleader, and she taught me all kinds of cheers and dances just for fun. I remember learning routines from Bring It On with her, and she put my hair up in a high ponytail. We watched Dawson’s Creek together. But it was more than just the fun stuff I loved. Casey grew up in a very small home, her parents had split up, and then she lost her dad at a young age. Life wasn’t easy on her, and yet she made the best of everything and kept moving forward. She was going to school to become a nurse, to take care of other people. I found that so inspiring, and I loved the way she took care of me. She would pick me up for school, and we would talk about my boy troubles (as I got a little older, I mean). She went on family trips with us, and took me and Patrick to the water park. It was like having a bonus older sister.