This is for all the girls. The ones who thought they’d be married by now but are still single, who thought they’d be mothers by now but aren’t, who said they didn’t want children and have four. The ones whose marriages didn’t work, the ones who found love a second time. This is for the girls who are passionate, bold, assertive; those who are gentle, quiet, impossibly dear. It’s for the decorated career slayer, the creative artist, the mom raising littles, the student in a dorm, the grandmother beginning a new venture. This is for the girls absolutely living their passions and those who want to desperately but feel stuck. This one is for church girls, party girls, good girls, wild girls (I am all four). This is for all of us.
We are spread out across geography, generations, and experiences, but we have two important things in common: mess and moxie. First, on mess: this word has gone a bit off the rails, I fear. When my last book, For the Love, came out, an older gal wrote a scathing, church-lady-finger-wagging article on it, calling me and my fellow sisthren “messy transparents,” and she wasn’t having it. Make of our reaction what you will, but the launch team and I howled! We messy transparents are just out mucking around in the pigpen of life apparently.
Messy, hard, disappointing, painful, shocking, exhausting, aggravating, boring. However you want to say it, life is messy. For all of us. I’m not making this up; I’m just saying it out loud. Your mess is normal, and it is okay to admit it. Pain is not exceptional or rare. If you’ve lived longer than five minutes, you already know this. Not because your particular brand of life is exceptionally punishing or you are doing everything exceptionally wrong, but because, as it turns out, this is how it is for everyone. This is the price of being a human on this planet; we get the glorious and the grueling, and surprisingly, the second often leads to the first. Trust this messy transparent who loves you. We are in the same boat.
We will endure discouragement, heartbreak, failure, and suffering. All of us. And more than once. And in more than one category. And in more than one season. But we are the very same folks who can experience triumph, perseverance, joy, and rebirth. More than once. And in more than one category. And in more than one season.
And that? That is moxie. Isn’t that a delicious, dreamy word? Moxie. It is a throwback to women with pluck, with chutzpah, with a bit of razzle dazzle. It says: I got this . . . we got this together. It evokes a twinkle in the eye, a smidge of daring and stubbornness in the face of actual, hard, real, beautiful life. Moxie reaches for laughter, for courage, for the deep and important truth that women are capable of weathering the storm. We are not victims, we are not weak, we are not a sad, defeated group of sob sisters.
Yes, life is hard, but we are incredibly resilient. It is how God created us: He said, “Let there be moxie!” and it was good (paraphrased). We already have what we need. It is all inside, so waiting around for our circumstances to deliver our expected life is a waste of energy.
I’m convinced there is no such thing as Someday. You know the Someday I mean? The one where our dreams finally come true and life gets miraculously easier and we get off high center and all the things we imagined or envisioned or hoped for materialize? When that one critical piece is added or subtracted, when we are finally less busy, when a bunch of vague things come together and present us with the life we expected? I’ve learned that we don’t outrun our circumstances, nor do we simply outlast them; we just trade them for new issues, new struggles, new challenges.
Let’s not mourn the mess and forget our moxie.
Rather than waiting for the Someday life or, conversely, imagining our Someday life is in the rearview mirror and we’ll never reclaim it, what if we embraced it all right now: all the hope, all the thrill, all the growth, all the possibility? What if everything is available to us right here in the middle of ordinary, regular life?
We have been warned that ordinary is less than, a sign of inferiority, an indicator that so much more awaits if we could just get the mix right. But the truth is, most of life is pretty ordinary, so it is precisely inside the ordinary elements, the same ones found the world over—career, parenting, change, marriage, community, suffering, the rhythms of faith, disappointment, being a good neighbor, being a good human—that an extraordinary life exists.
Someday is right now, in the life you already have.
Which contains plenty of mess but even more moxie.
May you find courage and God in these pages. I sincerely hope you throw your head back and guffaw out loud in public at least a few times; I love to make you laugh and I don’t think humor is unimportant. I’ve tried to treat our tender spaces with great care, but if I barrel through or misspeak or leave out an important part of the story, the fault is mine and I beg your grace. Life is crazy gorgeous and crazy hard, and we don’t mean to fail each other but we do, which is why Anne Lamott calls earth Forgiveness School.
You belong here; that is the short version of the story. God has given me a deep, almost painful love for this tribe. I think about you, I dream about you, I care about you, and my aim is to serve you until I die. If that feels dramatic, well, no one ever accused me of subtlety. Welcome. You are very loved here.
FOR THE GIRLS,
Jen
Many people between the ages of thirty and sixty—whatever their stature in the community and whatever their personal achievements—undergo what can truly be called a second journey. The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program.1
— BRENNAN MANNING
CHAPTER 1
UNBRANDED
Close your eyes, please, and imagine this graphic: Hot pink sunglasses with rhinestones at the corners, bright “sunbursts” popping off in dramatic fashion, and white swirled stars on a baby-blue background. It is colorful. It is bubbly. It is moderately-to-severely juvenile.
It was my first book cover.
I freaking loved it too. I remember thinking, This is so me. No stuffy book cover for this renegade! No woman standing in a meadow! No beach scene! No flowers! No, ma’am. This is 2005, and I will put a pair of sparkly retro sunglasses out into the literary world and state my arrival as a fresh new voice with style and, dare I say, panache.
Oh, my lordamercy.
Bless all my heart.
You guys, I cannot even muster the courage to read one paragraph of it now. I planned on combing through some of its content to cite as evidence, but I can’t bring myself to open it. I can tell you it was incredibly earnest. Like, earnest enough to make you cringe all the way to Antarctica (it was titled A Modern Girl’s Guide to Bible Study, you guys). I can tell you it wasn’t well researched, because I wrote it when I was twenty-nine with dial-up Internet and half of one clue. I can tell you the stories were overwrought, forced into application, and included three times the words necessary. I can tell you it absolutely abused Christianese. When women occasionally report how it recently served them, it confirms my suspicion that God is still in the business of speaking through jackasses.
But, nonetheless, it was true to me and of me at the time.