'Why Is That Girl Wearing No Pants?'

By Joy Pullmann

Yesterday I was at the grocery store with my two toddlers. Before us walked a young lady in brightly bolored volleyball shorts, which is to say, underwear people call pants. My three-year-old son gaped at her and said, entirely innocently, "Mom! Why isn't that girl wearing any pants?"

I fumbled about trying to think of a thing to say that would be true but not close off future conversations on the subject. I came up with, "Because her mother did not teach her to wear pants." My son accepted this but was still quite confused as to why anyone would walk around in public with no pants. (And this little boy is no prude—for one, he whips down his pants in the front yard when he needs to urinate. We stopped that one, though.)

Usually when we see a young lady wearing really scandalous clothing, her mother is not too far behind, and the mother's dress makes it obvious that neither of them has any clothing propriety. In this case, the mother looked normal. But I know that mothers nowadays have lost the ethos and habit of training their children in what is right and wrong, in dress and in everything else. This is probably both because it's a lot of work to enforce morality on young barbarians, and because nowadays people falsely believe that there is no right and wrong—in appearance, or anything else. As a consequence, people really never become true adults.

Paper Bags and Lipstick

By Rebekah Randolph
A Mad Tea Party

Are human bodies good or bad? Glorious or shameful? Nobody knows anymore, and our culture's confusion leaks into Christian attitudes towards modesty, including how it relates (or doesn't) to a woman's beauty.

Modesty is a thorny topic and believe me, I don't intend to define it; for some useful opinions, you might want to read Simcha and Challies. I am more concerned with the extremes to which we go as we pursue virtue.

On one end you have the prevailing message we know so well. A body is meant to display, to manipulate others with. Work it, girl. One the other end you have paper bags; if we assume that godly people should aspire to the world's exact opposite, we all end up in shapeless sacks. Yet that is not godly either! The Lord loves beauty. I wrote something on that way back when, but you don't have to take my word for it. Just read the dang Bible. Beauty's goodness—even feminine physical beauty, forsooth—pops up everywhere.

I am pretty passionate about this because when I was younger, I somehow came up with the idea that beauty equaled blatant sexuality, so to glorify God with your appearance, you probably shouldn't try to make your body beautiful. That might be an exaggeration (it is) but more or less, that summed up my attitude towards physical attractiveness. Though nobody actually told me that I should look askance at beauty, I inferred it from what I did hear about modesty.

A Good Reason to Wear White

By Marissa Farrell
Guest Contributor 

The last few days have been difficult for my family as we celebrated the life of our “Uncle” Steve, who passed away on September 8. The events that immediately precede and follow the end of life are emotionally taxing. Steve experienced intense physical suffering as cancer ravaged his body. Family and friends said their goodbyes and attempted to spiritually smother him with prayer. Our parish priest helped to prepare Steve’s soul through the reception of the sacraments, especially Anointing of the Sick. The grieving process began over a year ago for most of us, when Uncle Steve was given his terminal diagnosis, but having time to prepare does not dull the grief.

My sister and I play the harp and flute and are often asked to play for special occasions at church. Uncle Steve’s near-obsession with all things Three Stooges and Harpo Marx had always been one of his favorite ways of relating to our love for music and unusual instrument choice. It only made sense for us to give his family in their suffering and him in his eternal life the gift of our music. So, we undertook the difficult, but worthwhile, task of playing for his wake and funeral services.

From our seats in the choir section of the church, I could see the hundreds of people who gathered to celebrate Uncle Steve’s life. The church was packed with family and friends – a sea of dark blue and black. In the front row sat his wife, son, mother, father, brothers and sisters. As I looked at that front row I was struck. The entire row was a solid line of black dresses and suits, except for one woman dressed in white linen from head to toe. She looked as if she stood in defiance of the tradition to wear black while mourning the loss of a loved one. It was Uncle Steve’s mother.

The Need for Self-Care

By Julie Baldwin

Last Sunday, I drove two and a half hours to a beach in Alabama with my husband and a friend, chatting and laughing and singing along to the radio and our CD collection. A couple hours later, we were driving back to New Orleans, with white sand stuck to all the crevices and skin (and in our hair), sunburns, and conversations that would dwindle off as a favorite song came into play.

Once we crossed back over the border into Louisiana, I asked my husband to drive because I was so tired. The waves had been strong and full, white-capping and carrying our bodies forward and onward. It takes strength to stand up against the tide, even when you dig your feet into the sand and swear you shan't move. But moving isn't the problem - it's where you end up. Let yourself get swayed, and you'll end up 20 feet down the beach. But maybe that's where the adventure starts? As I sat on the sand in the late afternoon and watched the sand crabs dive into their holes, I thought: this is self-care.

Self-care "refers to actions and attitudes which contribute to the maintenance of well-being and personal health and promote human development." Self-care starts with self-awareness.

What are you able to do? What do you want to do? Why are you feeling this way?

I Like Babies, But Not Pregnancy

When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt horrifically guilty for being so upset I was pregnant. And there was room for repentance there, as Christians believe children are a great blessing, and that God has the right to give you one when He wants (since he's the only one who can put a soul in a being anyway). I did not want a child then, and I really wished I could end his life. That was wrong, and evil.

But there's another aspect to not liking pregnancy that I think is not so much evil as human. Pregnancy is difficult, and annoying. It just is. And no one gains by lying about that. Right now I'm near month seven for baby three, and I do not look attractive in just about anything I wear. I look rotund because I am rotund. It's frustrating to be a 26-year-old young woman who is used to being skinny but really can't possibly look decent no matter how much makeup I apply, especially when my job involves lots of public presentations and interviews in which it is quite helpful to look at least not-hideous. As I have grown older and shared pregnancies with friends and been able to talk to more women about it, I have learned something that has made me feel a lot better: Lots of women don't like being pregnant, and lots of women are annoyed when we get pregnant, and we typically just get over it (right about when the baby stops being a bloodsucker and becomes a milksucker, and you can kiss his squashy little face and ditch the fat pants).

You're Doing It Wrong And Someone Can't Believe You're Wearing That

By Mary C. Tillotson

Some days, it’s tiring to be a woman. No matter what you do, you’re doing it wrong, and someone can’t believe you’re wearing that.

Jessica Alba

We judge each other for our career and family choices (you’re either a terrible mother or wasting your talent, or both). We judge each other for our weight on both ends of the spectrum (did you really need that second piece of cheesecake? Why aren’t you eating anything?). We judge each other for our emotions. We judge each other for the number and spacing of kids. We judge each other for our clothing – too conservative, too revealing, too businesslike, too manly, too ugly, too clashing, too good to be authentic.

Like you’re a slob who doesn’t care what she looks like and a ditz who cares too much about looks. If you’re ugly, no one should take you seriously; if you’re pretty, you probably don’t have any brains.

Like somewhere out there there’s an ideal balance of physical beauty, poise, diet, emotional finesse, and fashion sense. If we’re going to be worth anything, we need a perfect body, impeccable fashion sense, and the impossible skill of being sensitive to others’ emotions but not to our own. Anything short of that and judge! judge! judge! Even for the select few women who seem to have accomplished this, judge for making it too much of a priority, and judge if any minor thing goes wrong in your life. Because you thought you had it all together, didn’t you? Judge!

Oh Shut Me Up! On Mummy Tummies

By Stacy Trasancos
StacyTrasancos.com

beautiful.

When I first saw Kate’s post-partum baby bump, I barely gave it a passing thought. Yep, that’s how it looks. Yep, best not to try to hide it. Yep, she’s got one. I was actually shocked to see the media talking about it. You can read some of it here:

Is Kate Middleton’s ‘mummy tummy’ coverage disrespectful to women?

At least not everyone’s criticizing her, but some fashionistas went too far wondering about how long it will take for her to get that “bod” back. Young mothers hear this and it cements a false idea of beauty. Those early days of new motherhood are difficult enough, for any woman, royalty or not. Muscles stretched for 38-40 weeks do not just snap back into place in a few days.