On Friday, I drove down to Boston to attend the Exponent Women's Retreat (more about that later). On the way, I found a mall. This might not be particularly exciting to those of our friends who live near malls, but for me it was very exciting. I don't think I've been to a real mall in more than a year! I had to stop. The kids needed jeans, I needed a new watch battery, and I was in desperate need of some casual pants that weren't jeans that I could wear at work when I didn't have to be in uniform.
It didn't take me long to discover that the mall wasn't quite the place I remember.
I wandered into familiar places like the Gap, Abercrombie, H&M, and American Eagle and quickly realized that I was in strange and foreign land. What are these awful clothes! I don't want to wear this stuff! I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Then I went into Banana Republic -- surely Banana Republic would be the same! -- and told an overly-helpful saleswoman what I was looking for. She gave me an appraising look. "How OLD are you, if you don't mind?" she wanted to know. Aha! The lightbulb came on. I am almost 35 years old. I am too old for the Gap, and Abercrombie, and H&M, and even, sigh, Banana Republic. I am a grown up. I have to find grown-up clothes.
This began a quest to find the grown-up store. I had no idea where it would be. I had a lot of scary and distressing experiences, going into this store and that and looking around for people shopping there who might look kind of like me. I went into one store that looked like a grown-up store but everything in the store was a size one, two, or three. The saleswoman explained that a one is really a six, and a two is really a twelve . . . and while she was doing so I realized that the place was full of old women with perms so I beat a hasty retreat.
I did eventually buy myself some clothes at something called J.Jill. I found a nice pair of pants on sale, wore them for a day or two, then ordered a pair in every available color off the internet. I think I won't go back to the mall for a while.
I've had a few "wow, I must be a grown-up" moments in the past few months. Picking my own berries and apples, and bottling jam and applesauce -- that's seemed weirdly grown up. Owning a beautiful grown-up home with fruit trees and a garden and perennials still seems unreal. Realizing that my students this year were born in 1990 and, worse, that they put me in the same age category as their parents totally freaks me out. Then, yesterday, I found my first two gray hairs. Gray hairs!!!
Going to the Exponent retreat made me feel a lot better. The was a wide age-range of women attending, from an 18-year-old high-schooler to an 80-year-old retired biologist. There were grad students and grandmas, and moms in their 30s like me. Everybody stayed up all night chatting like teenagers at girls' camp. Maybe grown up is a state of mind.
Spending the weekend with the Exponent ladies was delightful. I had some trepidation that hanging out with Mormon feminists and intellectuals and liberals might turn into a gripe-fest. Not at all. I left Exponent with a strong sense that the church is great and I have an important place in it. I also left with a renewed desire to love and serve the ladies in my ward, even though so many of them are so different from me. As one participant put it, it's amazing who you can love. If I have to be a grown up, I hope I can be one that turns maturity and experience into patience, compassion and wisdom. And I hope I can find a J.Jill store closer to home.
