April 30, 2005

• Pretty in Pink

  There was a time when I was uncomfortable wearing pink. My tastes have always run to black & other dark colors. When I was four I asked my mother for a black dress. And though she complied, she often chose lighter, prettier colors for me to wear. I dutifully wore these outfits, but secretly felt that I just was not a “pink person.”

  Now however, my closet is full of pink. I have skirts, shirts, sweaters, tee-shirts and even two pairs of pink pajamas. Furthermore, there are no more t-shirts with writing on them, no shorts and no jeans. So what caused the revolution?

  Well, it wasn’t a conviction that wearing trousers is wrong. I still have a pair that I occasionally wear. Partly it has to do with concerns about modesty, but mostly it has to do with femininity.

  I am not sure how the whole thing started. I used to go out with my mother & grandparents every week. My grandmother was always a lady, beautifully dressed, and I only remember her wearing trousers once. It was snowing at the time. My mother also always wore a skirt or dress when we went out. And there I was, dressing like I was still in high school in jeans and tee shirts. Bleah. I decided it was time for me to grow up and started dressing up when we went out.

  Now, I had always liked wearing dresses. I used to wear a dress at least once a week in high school, sometimes more often. But after I started staying home with my children, with nobody to see me, I had reverted to junky casual clothes. Then along came an Elisabeth Elliot article about feminine dressing. I don’t remember most of it, but I think it was about the fact that God had made men and women different and we should express that femininity. Then it made the point that it was no more difficult to do most tasks in a skirt than it is in jeans. In fact, women have been doing things in skirts for millennia with no trouble.

  Oh, yeah. A light bulb went on in my head. Wearing dresses doesn’t have to be only for dress up. So I started wearing skirts more often. This, my husband noticed, and he’s not exactly the kind of guy who notices things. Whenever I wore a skirt he said, “I like it when you wear skirts.” So I started wearing them more often. Then, on the days I was not wearing a skirt he started saying “I like it when you wear skirts.” Well, that settled that. I wanted to be attractive to my husband, so wearing a dress became the default.

  But I still wasn’t wearing pink. I wore just about any other color, but not pink, unless my mother bought it for me.

  I read a lot on the internet about modest, feminine dressing. There are a lot of opinions out there. There are people who think Christians should imitate Mohammedans and wear burkhas. There are those who take one word, which appears nowhere else in the Bible and translate it such that women are supposed to only wear “long, flowing garments.” A lot of these are interesting, but not clear enough for me to become “dresses only” in my theology.

  However, other articles pointed out that God, having made men and women different, expects their dress to reflect those differences. Since we are warned in Leviticus that a man should not wear that which pertains unto a woman, it follows that there should be some difference in women’s and men’s clothing. Furthermore, our femininity is a gift from God and is something to be, not only embraced, but in this day on androgyny, proclaimed. One of the ways we can tell the world that we are happy the way God made us is by being overtly feminine in our dress.

  These ideas resonated with me, so the next time I went shopping I was looking for overtly feminine things. I found a tee-shirt that I would never have picked before. It was pink with large cabbage roses all over it. I bought it and I felt so pretty whenever I wore it that it soon became the favorite item in my wardrobe.

  I guess my reserve about wearing pink was related to a sense of discomfort about being too overtly feminine. Once I started really being thankful for being a girl, and started wanting to show that conviction openly, I found out that I really am a “pink person” after all.

  • 8:18 pm
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