The Proverbs 31 woman looms so large over the biblical womanhood ethos that I knew I had to work her into my project somehow. So I decided to take a page from the literalists and turn the whole chapter into a to-do list, based on various Bible translations, divided into daily tasks and tasks to be accomplished by the end of the month. I combed through every line of the poem and went through several drafts before generating the final list, which I stuck on the refrigerator:
EVERY DAY
□ Get up before dawn—“She gets up while it is still dark” (V. 15).
□ Practice contemplative prayer—“A woman who fears the Lord should be praised” (V. 30)
□ Work out those arms—“She girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong” (V. 17)
□ Make every meal and keep the house clean—“She provides food for her family” (V. 15); “She watches over the affairs of the home” (V. 27)
□ Do something nice for Dan—“She does him good and not evil” (V. 12); “Her husband has full confidence in her” (V. 11)
□ Avoid TV, Facebook, and Twitter—“[She] does not eat the bread of idleness” (V. 27)
□ Keep working until 9 p.m.—“Her lamp does not go out at night” (V. 18)
TO DO THIS MONTH:
□ Learn to sew—In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers (V. 19); She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands (V. 13)
□ Make a purple dress to wear—She makes coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple (V. 22)
□ Knit a red scarf and/or hat for Dan—“When it snows, she has no fear for her household, for all of them are clothed in scarlet” (V. 21)
□ Make pillows for the bedroom—“She makes coverings for her bed” (V. 22)
□ Create a Proverbs 31 beauty queen sash to auction on eBay for charity—“She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes” (V. 24); “She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy” (V. 20)
□ Make Martha Stewart’s chicken curry—“She is like merchant ships, bringing her food from afar” (V. 14)
□ Invest in real estate or community-supported agriculture—“She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings, she plants a vineyard” (V. 16)
□ Praise Dan at the city gate—“Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land” (V. 23)
□ Work once a week at the health clinic—“She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy” (V. 20)
You will notice that sewing projects occupy a disproportionate space on the list. This was cause for considerable concern, seeing as I didn’t know how to sew . . . at all. I couldn’t attach a button to a blouse if my life depended on it, and I’d never hemmed a pair of pants with anything besides duct tape. I owned very few sewing supplies. I’d never read a pattern. I thought thimbles only existed in fairy tales.
My mother took one look at the list and declared matter-of-factly, “You can’t do this.”
Which I took as my cue to gird up my loins and give it a go.
She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands.
—PROVERBS 31:13
Page 14 of Sewing for Dummies warns that when it comes to selecting a machine, novice sewers have an unfortunate tendency to “drag out Aunt Millie’s 75 year old clunker from the garage or basement thinking it’s good enough for a beginner,” which according to Jan Saunders is a huge mistake, because “just like your car, you want your sewing machine to be dependable.”3
Well, I’ll have you know I did no such thing.
Instead we dragged out my sister-in-law Debbie’s twenty-five-year-old Simplicity 8130 from the attic, knowing perfectly well that it was good enough for a beginner, especially one who can’t afford a dependable car, much less a sewing machine that costs about as much. The instruction manual was nowhere to be found, but an orange pouch containing a tiny screwdriver, three spools of thread, and a pin cushion had been taped to the side. I heaved the machine onto the dining room table, consulted the diagram in my Dummies book, and plugged it in. The little lightbulb glowed brightly. When I stepped on the pedal, the machine issued a gentle humming noise, and the needle started hopping up and down like a jackhammer. It worked.
Well, now. That seems like enough sewing for one day, I thought.
My aversion to crafting goes way back to an incident in kindergarten during which, upon gluing something like the fortieth Cheerio to the inside of a giant O-shaped construction paper cutout, I was suddenly struck by the futility of human existence. I must have cried about it because I was sent home with a note saying that I’d misbehaved during craft time. Mom should not have been surprised. I think I inherited my resistance to all glue-related activities from her. She rarely crafted, except for a short period of time in the late ’80s when she earned extra money making giant hair bows that have rendered every photo taken of me between the years 1988 and 1992 too mortifying to frame. Mom had been forced to cut out patterns on many a Saturday afternoon as a kid, so she never pushed Amanda or me into sewing or knitting, and in fact spoke rather darkly about the old days of fabric and needles and seams, the way veterans speak of ’Nam.
This was fine by me. Precision has never been my strong suit, and the skills required for sewing just happen to include four things I habitually stink at—patience, cutting a straight line, working with machinery, and fractions.
I’m especially insecure about fractions. Fractions make me feel scattered and panicked, like I’m about to forget something important. Add a couple of fractions together incorrectly and you’ll end up with an 800 on your SAT or too much onion powder in your casserole. Either way, you’re just a few decimal points away from disaster.
Sure enough, taunting me from the inscrutable pattern for my Simplicity Misses Lounge Dress was a call for 3 1/8 yards of fabric, 2 5/8 yards of 3/8-inch-wide flat lace, and 5/8 yards of fusible interfacing. I chose the pattern because it promised to be easy, “sew easy,” according to the package, that I could make it in a few hours. The fact that the dress made the wisp of a model in the photo on the front look like an overstuffed piñata in floral didn’t bother me. At the time I was more concerned about making the dress than wearing it.
I purchased the dress pattern and a pillow-making kit at Wal-Mart, but the rest of my materials required a trip to Chattanooga and the nearest Hobby Lobby. If ever one should wish to see a modern incarnation of the Proverbs 31 woman in her natural habitat, Hobby Lobby would be the place to start. Jazzy worship music played over the PA, while petite, white-haired ladies carrying homemade totes glided through the fabric rolls, humming along and smiling politely at the raccoon-eyed crafting hipsters who darted across their paths.
When Dan first came to Tennessee, he’d never heard of Hobby Lobby and was in for an epic letdown when he saw for himself that the big-box store contained seven aisles of scrapbooking materials but not an RC plane in sight. I left him behind for this trip, on account of the sheer magnitude of my shopping list: dressmaker’s shears, needles, thread, a tape measure, double-sided fabric tape, size 17 knitting needles, bulky red yarn, two 6 x 26-inch pieces of bridal satin, iron-on letters, 72-inch trim ribbon, a decorative pin, an 18-inch square pillow form, 3 1/8 yards of purple fabric, 2 5/8 yards of 3/8-inch-wide flat lace, and 5/8 yard of fusible interfacing, whatever the heck that was.
I drove out to Hobby Lobby on a cold January morning, one of those days when the sky is low and gray, and you feel like the whole world’s stuck in a Tupperware container. I asked Jesus to give me a sweet, grandmotherly clerk at the fabric counter, but apparently Jesus had more important things to do because when I approached the table with a crumpled list in my hands and a jaunty grin on my face, a stern woman in her sixties looked back at me with a frown and asked, “How can I help you?”
Now, my mother may have skipped the sewing lessons, but she passed along to Amanda and me an uncanny ability to schm
ooze our way through customer service encounters until we get exactly what we want, with no hurt feelings on either side. Mom’s exploits in this arena are legendary. She recently convinced Lowe’s to replace all the blinds in her house for free, with an upgrade, because she was concerned that the cords on her old blinds could be a choking hazard for grandkids. (She doesn’t even have any grandkids yet . . . and she told them so!)
So I took a deep breath, glanced at the lady’s name tag, and turned on the Held charm.
“Hi . . . Maude . . . How’s it going?”
No response.
“Well, you are not going to believe this,” I said, leaning in closer, as if I had a secret, “but I have never sewed a thing in my life. Never even picked up a needle and thread.”
Nothing.
“So anyway, I have three significant sewing projects to finish by the end of the month for a book I’m working on—I’m an author, by the way—and a list of supplies that I don’t even understand, so I’m really glad you’re here, because I desperately need an expert—”
“Did you have a question?” she interrupted.
So maybe I wasn’t as good at this as my mom. I probably should have stuck with basic self-deprecation without veering into desperation.
“Yeah. What the heck is fusible interfacing?”
Turns out Maude is more of a get-down-to-business kind of girl. I handed her my list, and she helped me select and measure my fabric and thread (both plum purple to fulfill Proverbs 31, and both 100 percent cotton to fulfill Leviticus 19:19), pick out the right-sized knitting needles and yarn, find a package of iron-on letters for my Proverbs 31 sash, choose better material for the aforementioned sash, stock up on supplies, and gather 5/8 of a yard of fusible interfacing, which according to Maude would give my “lounge dress” a little more body and shape. We weren’t exactly best friends at the end of it, and I didn’t get anything for free, but I think I saw a smile creep across the corner of Maude’s mouth when I asked where they kept the duct tape, just in case.
She gets up while it is still dark . . . She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night.
—PROVERBS 31:15, 18
By the second week of January, the Proverbs 31 woman and I were not on the best of terms.
Our friendship was doomed from the start, really, because the two of us have nothing in common. The Proverbs 31 woman has children; I don’t. She is rich; I drive a ’94 Plymouth Acclaim. She loves to work with her hands; I can’t make a row of stitches without dropping one. And worst of all, the Proverbs 31 woman is a morning person, and I am most assuredly not.
As a writer, my body’s been conditioned to mimic the sleep cycle of artists, evening news anchors, and potheads. I may be on Eastern Standard Time, but my muse is on Pacific. Dan, on the other hand, leaps out of bed every morning with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, a habit that would probably destroy our marriage if I didn’t normally sleep through it. On the rare occasions that I join him, it takes four rounds of screeches from the alarm clock, three cups of coffee, and one hour of wandering the house in my bathrobe to get my bearings . . . which is why, in hindsight, my resolution to combine my early mornings with twenty minutes of contemplative prayer was ill-advised. If I can’t have a civil conversation with my husband before 8 a.m., why should I expect to have a civil conversation with God?
There seems to be a universal consensus among people of faith that God is a morning person. The Dalai Lama rises at 3:30 a.m. to meditate. Pope Benedict begins his day around 5. I don’t know what time Oprah gets up, but I bet it’s before 7. Even as a kid, I remember hearing stories about our pastor’s “morning quiet time,” that magical space between dawn and breakfast when God told him exactly what the Bible meant and what to say about it on Sunday morning. But I didn’t experience any magic or inspiration when I rose with the sun to meet God. Instead my Proverbs 31 morning routine went something like this: wake up, make coffee, choose a centering word for meditation, fall back asleep, wake up again, feel guilty, drink coffee, lift my five-pound weights for three minutes, practice knitting, give up, write. After just a few days, I ditched the centering prayer altogether to revert to the old standby—a hurried, half-awake Lord’s Prayer while I washed my hair.
The five-pound weights represented yet another difference between the valorous wife and me. While the Proverbs 31 woman “girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong” (V. 17 NASB), I’m more of a cardio girl. I run three miles a day, five days a week, but the generic Bowflex in our garage hasn’t seen any action since the third season of Lost. I tried doing just fifteen minutes of strength training three days a week, but soon enough my third resolution went the way of centered prayer . . . as did my resolution to stay off Facebook to avoid eating the “bread of idleness” (V. 27).
The big projects weren’t going much better. Before my friend Tiffany mercifully loaned me her copy of a helpful how-to book titled Stitch ’n Bitch (which supplied both a much-needed laugh and the useful suggestion that I start my first knitting project with extra-big needles and extra-bulky yarn so as to avoid tying my fingers in knots), I’d been fumbling around with my grandma’s old size 8 needles, super-thin yarn, and a YouTube instructional video that featured a creepy nursery rhyme about a guy named Jack peeking through a window. The tedium of this exercise nearly drove me mad. Let’s just say I dropped more than a stitch.
“Hon, do you really think that kind of language reflects Proverbs 31?” Dan asked as gently as possible when he came upstairs to find me sitting upright on the edge of the couch, elbows out like a penguin attempting flight, wrestling a row of stitches from one needle to the other—and cussing.
“I can’t do this,” I said, throwing the mangled heap of yarn to the floor. “How am I supposed to make an entire scarf and hat if I can’t make three rows of stitches without it getting all . . . scrunched? I’m doing such a slap-bang job with this whole month.”
“Slap-bang” is a phrase long employed by my mother. Slap-bang is when you pull a comforter over a disheveled wad of blankets and sheets and call it making the bed. Slap-bang is when you stick a plate caked with mashed potatoes into the dishwasher, or write a book report based on the illustrations. Slap-bang is when you promise to knit your husband a scarf and hat and then ask if he’d be okay with a pot holder instead. I have no idea if any of us are using this expression correctly, but everyone in the Held family knows just how guilty to feel when we’re confronted with it.
Each time I let a writing project take priority over a sewing project or ordered pizza instead of making an exotic meal, the shame of my slap-bang tendencies overtook me. I hated that all my carefully chosen fabric sat in its Hobby Lobby bag untouched and that I’d already skipped a week at the local health clinic where our church volunteered. On days that I remembered to work out, I neglected to do something nice for Dan. Weeks in which I volunteered, I let the house get dirty. When my knitting improved, the sewing machine sat idle. When I got up early, I crashed at night. I wasn’t conquering Proverbs 31; I was piddling around with it.
On top of all that, I’d run into a little snafu regarding my Proverbs 31–inspired real estate venture: mainly that I couldn’t afford it. The downside to having the one job in America that lets you sleep late and work in your pajamas is that you don’t get paid a lot for it. And since Dan and I are both self-employed, we tend to get big checks spaced far apart. The next big check would come in late February, but we needed that to stretch through April, so my prospects for buying a field and planting a vineyard within the next thirty days dwindled with every visit to the mailbox that didn’t yield a sudden windfall. Even my alternate plan, to invest in community-supported agriculture, cost a whopping five hundred dollars. Apparently, locally grown radishes are worth as much as an iPad. I hated that the most liberated qualities of the valorous wife—her business savvy and financial prowess—proved as out of my reach as the domestic ones.
I had to hand it to her. In les
s than 14 days, the Proverbs 31 woman had made me feel guilty, inadequate, and poor.
The whole exercise had brought to the surface one of my most persistent insecurities—the fact that, despite having breasts and ovaries, I can’t multitask to save my life. I’ve always hated this about myself because the prevailing theory is that nature created all women everywhere to be accomplished multitaskers, so they can care for their young while simultaneously fighting off predators, searching for water, and talking on their cell phones. Well, somebody forgot to let me in on this one. When confronted with a long and varied to-do list, I react more like a squirrel in the path of a car, frantically darting one direction and then another without actually getting anywhere besides the backside of a tire.
I knew from my research that Proverbs 31 was never meant to be turned into a to-do list, but there was something about the spectacularity with which I was blowing this that beleaguered my confidence. Most women walk around with the sense that they are disappointing someone. This year, I imagined that Someone to be God. Though Proverbs 31 represented a poetic ideal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if these were indeed the accomplishments of a competent, capable, virtuous, valiant, and worthy wife, then I must be none of those things.
Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”
—PROVERBS 31:28–29
Seeing as how the Jews have several thousand years on us when it comes to interpreting Scripture, Christians might consider listening to them more often. I arrived at this conclusion shortly after I began corresponding regularly with Ahava, the rabbi’s wife from Israel, whom God sent to me through the Internet. Witty, candid, and surprisingly chatty, Ahava grew up in the U.S. and knew a lot more about Christianity than I knew about Judaism. When I asked her what salutations would be most appropriate in an e-mail, she suggested Kol Tuv, which means “all the best.”
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 10
