God Bless This Mess(25)

I think the word guard in the sermon could be taken wrong, as in, “Let no one in!” And when I interpreted it that way, I’d shame myself for letting people in.

I had to work through that. I had to realize that shaming myself doesn’t help anything. Mistakes are normal. I’m still learning.

There are moments now when I’ll say to myself over and over, “Guard your heart, guard your heart, guard your heart . . .”

I thought about it on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette all the time. The producers and every fan in Bachelor Nation would tell me, “You have to be open for this process to work!” But in my gut, it felt unsafe. I knew that I needed to guard my heart, but I didn’t trust myself to know who to let in, and who to keep out.

I suppose that brings me right back to the man at the front door of my aunt’s house. How can we know who to let in, when even those we know can hurt us?

When you have trust issues and you hear the words “guard your heart,” how can you possibly know who to let in and who not?

It’s a struggle I would carry for a very long time. A struggle I’ll likely carry going forward, I’m sure. But as I headed into high school and college, I think it was twice as hard—because I had to learn a lot more about myself before I could ever learn how to discern what I saw in others.





Chapter 8


Dreaming of Miss America


So much happened in my life over the course of the next few years, I can’t begin to try to explain it all at once. Over the next few chapters, I’m going to spread it out by topic, so I can try to make it all make sense to you—and hopefully make more sense to me! (Seriously, there was so much happening all at once, it was hard for me to keep track of it myself.)

But looking back, I see it more clearly now. And since so much of this period was marked by my participation in pageants, that’s where I’ll start . . .

*

I really thought I was going to be Miss America when I grew up.

We started watching the Miss America pageant on TV when I was really young, and as a little girl I would put on my mom’s high heels and practice my walk during commercials. I practiced saying my name and waving to the crowd like a princess, and putting my hands up over my mouth in shock when I pretended to win.

My mother started me in dance class when I was two. I loved being onstage, but my dance instructors always seemed to put me at the back of the group. My mom never put me in theater or pageants, where the spotlight really shone on me, and I wanted to be on a stage like that.

Thankfully, in Tuscaloosa I could participate in pageants at school—and at my school, they were a really big deal.

There were school pageants every year, starting in the sixth grade. The format was simple: You had to walk onstage in a dress while an announcer stated your name, said what grade you were in, and shared three facts about you. While the announcer spoke, you had to hit your marks to stop and pose for a bit—right side, middle, left side—and then come back to the middle for a final look. That was it. Usually somewhere between thirty and fifty girls participated in each grade, in front of a panel of three or four judges, which usually included a city council member, a former beauty queen, and a volunteer mom.

My first year I wore a poofy ball gown with a white skirt and a black-and-white top, my hair pulled back in curls. I still had braces, my mom did my makeup, and with hardly any practice I won third runner-up.

For my seventh-grade pageant, I practiced my poses a little more. I wore a light-blue Cinderella dress, and we did my hair up with a curling iron in doo-doo curls. (That’s what I call those long, swirly ringlet curls that you think look so pretty.) Looking back, my eyebrows were huge, and I still had braces, but somehow I still came in second runner-up.

In eighth grade I finally had my braces off and my first big-girl haircut, with layers. I wore my hair straight with a beautiful coral-colored dress—and I won!

I had always loved getting dressed up and making myself look pretty, and I really loved being up onstage. How cool was it that I could get recognized for doing things I already loved? This was clearly something I was good at, and because of my dance training, the walking, stopping, smiling, and posing was easy for me. But my mom didn’t want me to do pageants outside of school. She wanted me to stick with dance, and dance practice left no time for much of anything else besides school and church.

At least, that’s what she thought.

That summer, one of our family friends whose daughter loved doing pageants talked my mom into letting me do one, too. It was all last-minute, so in just a few days I came up with a talent, a dance I could do; they practiced an interview with me, so I would be ready to answer questions onstage, and they taught me “pretty feet.”

“Pretty feet” is the way you stand to present perfect pageant posture, with the heel of your leading foot placed back toward the arch of your standing foot. It’s slimming to stand like that, and it’s also really stable so you’re not wobbly onstage.

I didn’t realize this pageant was a big deal, relatively speaking. The International Cinderella Scholarship Pageant wasn’t all that big in Alabama at the time, but in places like Texas and California, it was huge. Demi Lovato and actress Tiffany Thiessen and other girls who’ve made it in Hollywood and modeling have gone through this pageant system. I barely had any time to prepare, but I went on that stage and did my best—and I won the local Alabama branch of the pageant!