At fourteen, perhaps even at 35, we don’t necessarily make these calculations consciously. We somehow just know that we need to have our USP: that spark of something that sets us apart from the rest so that we are seen and loved. In a culture of consumerism and celebrity worship, the niche carved out for women to inhabit is physical perfection. And it’s in the youthful bloom of teenage years that girls possess this power more than any others, at least commercially.
But of course commercial truth isn’t the whole truth, because at fourteen it’s a little early to expect you to embody the beauty that comes through loving or being loved, or through gathering up your creative instincts and shaping something prophetic and adding your voice to the world. Or by birthing your baby and incessantly pouring yourself out in love for this child, until your spirit is expanded more than you knew imaginable by the sacrifices you would make for this little person. At fourteen your beauty isn’t dappled and worn by the failures you’ve overcome to make your contribution, and by the risks you’ve taken to try again. So at fourteen you do what you can to inhabit a worthy place in the world. You listen to the celebrity parroting “because you’re worth it” and you buy the product that promises to deliver thick, glossy hair. Which is really problematic if your hair still feels like loft insulation, even after investing in that shampoo.
But even with the shampoo I was not going to be worth it … not in a commercial way. I tried to imagine that I had the face of a tanned, blue-eyed brunette from the Next catalogue, but still boys laughed in my face, my tormentors assailed me in the loos and two more poison-pen letters came my way. I needed to find a different USP, an alternative dressing-up box from which to manufacture some brand appeal. And so the exiled part of me began to calculate that as long as I had Some Thing, some useable currency, I wouldn’t be left out and abandoned.
So, setting aside my longing for the armour of glossy hair and pretty make-up, I dutifully picked up my Bible and got on with trumping all that with the unfading beauty of eternal salvation. My USP was the Good News, the priceless possession that I would peddle to gain friends whilst assuaging the wrath of God and securing my place in heaven.
Naturally, I didn’t know that this was the heavy mantle I was pulling onto myself. Perhaps we rarely know, until we learn one day to overhear ourselves. Until then we embrace the game of dressing up; we pick things out and, finding what is within our reach, we wrap them around ourselves, adjusting them until we have covered our vulnerable, embarrassing bits and feel sufficiently clothed. At fourteen years old you’re beginning to try on roles and see if they fit; you’re figuring out how believable you can be and how far your powers of influence actually go. But I had the voice of God on my side and surely that would boom louder than the lampooning of my persecutors. And so, with all the self-righteousness I could muster, I set out to fish souls for Jesus.
I began with Louise, one of the girls in my class with whom I’d been friends since we were six. At least our familiarity would mean I could skip any clumsy attempts to bring up out of the blue the subject of Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour. Louise already knew, from first-hand experience at a Saturday night sleepover at my house, that church was the main feature of Sunday mornings in the Jepson household. She also knew that the most striking thing about our church was the worship leader: a man with cream sandals and a rainbow-coloured guitar strap who led the congregation in song whilst doing the holy hop, a dance move reminiscent of 1970s charismatic Christians. Which all basically meant, when I asked her if she fancied coming to church with me on Sunday, I knew the answer would probably be No.
It was No, but at least she cushioned it with a polite excuse. Under my breath I prayed for the right words to say something that would make church seem more attractive than spending the morning with her friends recovering from a late night at Smokey Joe’s. But she anticipated my extension of the invitation to the evening church service instead.
“I’m going to St Mary’s with Kitty on Sunday evening.”
Darn. This was a sideways move. St Mary’s was a traditional church.
“Oh OK, that’s cool.”
It wasn’t cool. St Mary’s was way too dull to spark a revival.
“So do you go with Kitty every week?”
“No, but the youth group are going to Cornwall on holiday this summer and I’m going too. We’re all getting together after the service to do some planning.”
“So … it’s not that you’ve become a Christian then?”
“Well. I am … a Christian”, Louise hesitated, wondering which criteria she should use to qualify her answer. “I’ve been baptised and we do go to church sometimes.”
They had prepared us for this at camp, this way that people replace a personal relationship with God with a church attendance claim, and they had given me the words to say in response.
“But Lou, just because I go to McDonald’s, it doesn’t make me a hamburger.”
“I don’t get what you mean.” Furrowing her eyebrows Louise screwed her mouth to one side and waited for my theological explanation.
This was it. At last. Lord please help me to explain this right.
“It’s just that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian. Following Jesus is about your whole life, not just Sundays. It’s about knowing that Jesus loves you and has a good plan for your life, if you will only accept Him as Lord and be born again.”
“I do believe in God though”, she said slowly, with puzzled concern.
The words of Peter Cabot retorted in my mind, “The Devil believes in God too.” But I softened the tone as I delivered his neat one-liner to Louise.
“So what are you saying? That I’m no better than the Devil?”
A fine mist of nausea was creeping across the depths of my stomach. In my trawl for Louise’s soul the tangles of truth and doctrine began to twist, clenching me in their grip. The ungovernable waters of evangelism threatened to pull me overboard and drown me.
“It’s just that God doesn’t want you to end up on the side of the Devil. He loves you so much and wants to have a relationship with you … not just in this life but in heaven too.” I hoped that the heaven bit might add some gravity to what was at stake here.
“So basically I’m going to go to hell if I don’t become a born-again Christian?”
I looked down at the grass and the hefty tufts my fingers were tugging out of the ground between us.
Louise’s face was down-turned too, which is why I didn’t immediately look up and see her crying. It was as she reached for her bag and began rummaging around for some tissues that I saw her crumpled dismay breaking into tears.
St Paul warned us that the Gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing, but I just made my friend cry. There wasn’t an immediately obvious passage of scripture to direct my response to this.
“Louise! Oh no … ! What is it?”
“What about Jess and Suzy? What if they don’t want to be born again? Are you really saying God’s going to send them to hell because … because … believing in God and going to church once a month isn’t enough?”
If the free gift of eternal life was the bait then it was certainly beginning to take on the stomach-retching appeal of a tubful of crawling maggots.
“Yes that’s right”, Peter Cabot was whispering in my head. “It doesn’t matter if they believe in God – at the end of the day it’s only Jesus who can save, only Jesus who took our sins to the cross, and only Jesus who rose from the dead, victorious.”
“Lou, please don’t cry … I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Fisherman overboard.
“It doesn’t matter that you’re sorry … it matters that what you said is true and my sisters might end up in hell.”
“I know it sounds hard but … but I know God doesn’t want them to go to hell either. He wants to save them.”
It didn’t matter. We were both sinking and right now I didn’t know how to save either of us.
“It’s OK for you, your
whole family are religious … they’re all going to heaven. You don’t have to choose.”
But I did have to choose. In my efforts to stop false doctrine bleeding into my carefully cradled judgements I was choosing all the time.
Right or wrong.
Friendship with God or friendship with the world.
Love of God or love of life.
So in that moment, with the nausea rising in my throat, I tried to cover my back and haul myself out of the deep.
“I suppose God may be calling you to be the one to share Jesus with your family. This might be His plan, Lou … maybe you are the one to give them the choice.”
It was a pitiful deflection and I was cringing with shame as the bell rang calling us to the safety of tutor group registration. I could, of course, have imagined that it was the Devil’s fault and blamed him for skewering my evangelistic efforts. But not even the Devil deserved to be scapegoated for this.
10
Not God’s: Mine
My USP had failed to sell Jesus and had failed to buy me friends, but most of all it troubled me that the Good News didn’t really seem like good news at all. I tried to push aside this potentially blasphemous conclusion with more prayer and quell the fear that my bad PR was setting back the cause of Christ. So when, in those weeks of half-hearted prayer times and Bible studies with Jane, some actual good news landed on my radar, I was ready to be distracted.
I had had braces for the past three years and now my orthodontist, Mr Cooke, was trying a new tactic to train my lower jaw into a more normal position. This time two pieces of thick clear plastic were set onto wire which fixed around my teeth and dovetailed together like a jigsaw puzzle to hold my lower jaw forward. If evangelism had felt hard it was going to be nothing compared to the challenge of forming words with what was effectively two bricks of Duplo in the way. Under the glare of the examination light, I lay with my eyes closed, day-dreaming, while Mr Cooke wrestled my teeth into the wire frames. Finally he managed to snap the last awkward stretch of wire over my back tooth and sat back thumping his palms on his lap in satisfaction. I was busy running my tongue around the edges of this new oral furniture when Mum made her enquiry. “How long are we looking at this being in place then?”
“Well, if she’s diligent and keeps it on every day then we could be looking at a year.”
He brushed his hand through the sweep of hair that had fallen across the frame of his glasses, and peered at me.
“That’s the thing though … You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to wear it.”
Mum eyed me, trying to work out if I’d taken the seriousness of this instruction on board or whether she was going to have to add her own encouragement.
“Guiii gouwm mmtttooo.”
I tried to insist I would, but the neat arrangement of the jigsaw collapsed as I opened my mouth and I immediately leant forward to spit out the apparatus.
Mr Cooke had seen it all before. Reaching firmly for my chin and pulling me upright he brought the mirror down so that it was in front of my face.
“Now look in here.” He deftly replaced the wayward lower brace.
“Take a look at that. Do you see what’s going on? You’ve got to stay upright so that this upper brace can get purchase on the lower one.”
I stared at my open mouth. The plastic might have been clear but there would be no hiding it from anyone. My lips framed a salivary jumble of teeth, wire and plastic and I began trying to reassemble it with my tongue.
“What happens after a year? Won’t the bones begin to move back again?” Mum probed, her face still watching the orchestrations reflected in the mirror.
“It is going to be a temporary solution”, Mr Cooke replied, his eyebrows raised in concession to Mum’s thoughts.
“Ultimately we will be looking at a surgical reconstruction in her late teens, once the bones have fully stopped growing.”
“Surgery?”
I spat the lower brace out again and swung round to face him.
He wasn’t immediately sure whether I was about to dissolve into tears, the way I had when he told me at the age of eleven that I had to wear a head-brace.
But I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to hug him.
All these braces were just salvaging the best from a bad situation. They were essentially rearranging the furniture inside a badly proportioned house. A house that I assumed I was stuck in. And here was Mr Cooke saying that one day they would be able to knock down that house and rebuild it properly. It didn’t matter that I was going to have to wait two years for preparatory surgery and another two years after that for the main series of operations.
I stared at my face in the mirror, replaying Mr Cooke’s words over and over; “surgical reconstruction”. This was hope. It was a tangible alteration; a date in the diary. A goal which Mr Cooke and I would begin working towards. It wasn’t like prayer, where I tried so hard to manufacture faith while all the time dreading the moment at which I would open my eyes and find that nothing had changed and God hadn’t shown up. These operations I really could believe in.
When I got back to school later that morning, I sat at my desk daydreaming about the new squarer jaw Mr Cooke had promised. At lunchtime I wanted to tell Julia and Louise but found the task of eating sandwiches whilst holding onto the plastic blocks demanded all my concentration. My diligence lasted all of two mouthfuls before I grabbed a napkin and, leaning forward to click the wire out with my tongue, I abandoned my lunch.
“I’ve got something else to tell you …”
Julia took a quick swig of juice and then set the bottle down on the desk in front of her expectantly.
“I’m going to have surgery! To put my teeth and jaw bones straight.”
This might have been the kind of moment when adolescent girlfriends disingenuously pretend that there’s nothing wrong with you, that you’re fine, that you don’t need surgery. But neither of them did.
“Seriously?” Louise said in quiet astonishment.
Before I could answer, Julia burst in, “What do you mean? What are they going to do?”
“Well, I have to wait a few years … but basically they’re going to cut a strip of bone out of my top jaw and then break all the way along my lower jaw and slide half of it forward, pin it together … and then build me a chin.”
It was the end of this sentence that caught nearby Victoria and Lizzie’s attention and produced a half-smiling incredulity from them both. “Build you a chin?” Victoria swung herself around from the chair she’d been sitting in and leant over the desk to await full details.
“I’ve just been to the orthodontist … it looks like they can sort out my jaw problem with surgery. When I’ve stopped growing.”
“So how long do you have to wait for that then?” Lizzie asked.
“I think it’s going to be when I’m nineteen or maybe even twenty.”
“Oh my god, Joanna, that’s years!”
“Won’t it be very painful? It sounds horrendous.”
“Are you going to have braces until then?”
The questions were raining down now.
“What about your religion?” Louise’s question caught me. “Are you allowed to do that sort of thing?”
It was funny how she had thought of it before me. Following God’s no-show at the National Exhibition Centre youth rally last year I had taken the matter out of God’s inbox and no longer saw it as His jurisdiction. Now that Mr Cooke had taken charge and was making some tangible progress, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to resubmit it for a divine veto.
Over supper that evening Mum and I relayed Mr Cooke’s prognosis to Dad, Ali and Rosalind.
“Goodness me, darling,” Dad exclaimed, turning from Mum to me, “we’re talking about major surgery here.”
I sat waiting, trying to second guess what my parents’ response was actually going to be.
“It is major, John. It’s going to mean a spell in intensive care, at least two weeks in hospital and seve
ral weeks with her jaws wired together.”
“Oh darling.” Dad winced and rubbed his hand across his jaw.
“Do you really want to go through all that?” Rosalind questioned matter-of-factly. “Why don’t you just stick with braces?”
“The braces aren’t going to straighten everything out really … not my bones anyway.”
She put down her knife as the potential implications of my situation began to dawn on her. “Am I going to have to have surgery too, Mum?”
“No, I think you’re going to be OK with just a brace for a little while.”
“I don’t want brace!” said Alastair, taking his place in the family discussion.
“I thought you wanted braces like me, Ali?” I protested, nudging him.
“No! I’m not. I don’t want it! Urgh!” He shuddered to underline his reluctance.
Rosalind looked across the table to me: “Why do you have to have an operation then?”
“Because I can’t close my mouth properly without it …”
“Have you really thought about whether it’s worth all that pain just to be able to close your mouth?” Dad was almost pleading with me now.
“Urgh! Urgh! I don’t want it! Urghhhhh!” Ali was now working his dislike of braces into a full drama of hammed-up distress. His outstretched hands, shaking in mock disgust, knocked my knife onto the floor, splattering food as it fell.
This kind of dinnertime fracas was typical, but that evening I was on edge; all the tabletop antics were encumbered with the weight of the bigger matter of surgery. The subject was allowed to drift for the remainder of the meal until Rosalind and Ali had left the table and there was peace enough to talk.
A Lot Like Eve Page 6