Untamed

When Tish was nine, she and I went to our favorite bookstore together. As we walked inside, Tish stopped and stared at a magazine rack—a wall of cover models, each blonder, thinner, and more vacant than the last. All ghosts and dolls. Tish stared.

As usual, I was tempted to distract her, hurry her along, put it all behind us. But these messages cannot be put behind us, because they are everywhere. Either we leave our kids alone to make sense of them, or we wade in with them.

I put my arm around Tish, and we quietly looked at the covers together for a moment.

ME: Interesting, isn’t it? What story are they telling you about what it means to be a woman?

TISH: I guess that women are very skinny. And blond. And have white pale skin. And wear a lot of makeup and tall shoes and barely any clothes.

ME: What do you think about that story? Look around this store. Do the women in this store match the idea about women these magazines are selling?

Tish looked around. A gray-haired employee was straightening books near us. A Latina woman was flipping through a paperback on the memoir table. A very pregnant woman with blue punky hair was wrangling with a cookie-eating toddler.

TISH: No. Not at all.

We drove home, and Tish disappeared into her room. Fifteen minutes later, she opened her door and yelled down the stairs, “MOM! HOW DO YOU SPELL PETITION?”

I googled it. Hard word.

A little while later, she came downstairs to the kitchen holding a handmade poster. She cleared her throat and began to read: HELP SAVE HUMANITY

Dear world, this is a petition to show that I, Tish Melton, strongly feel that magazines should not show beauty is most important on the outside. It is not. I think magazines should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful, unique, and show women of all different types of hair and bodies. ALL women should be treated EQUALLY.

I liked her idea so much. It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.

I cannot rid my children’s air of all the lies they’ll be told about what it means to become a real woman or man. But I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ME: That’s the truth about women. I will match it.

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: That’s a lie about women. I will challenge it.

TISH: Chase wants me to join the same club he joined in middle school. I don’t want to.

ME: So don’t.

TISH: But I don’t want to disappoint him.

ME: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.

TISH: Even you?

ME: Especially me.

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TISH: Keri doesn’t like me.

THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ME: Why not? What happened? What can we do to make it better?

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Sara doesn’t like me.

FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD ME: Okay. Just a fact, not a problem.

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Totally.