I grew up in a small Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation, where my father was the pastor. My mother took her roles as mother and pastor’s wife seriously and demonstrated sincere faithfulness to God and family. One of the ways this care manifested was in the attention she gave to grooming and dressing her three young children.
While this effort went without a hitch for my older sister and brother, it was a continual battle with me. My mother, who had been raised with a clear sense of what was proper, wanted me to wear a dress to church. This wasn’t a shallow fashion preference: she believed there was deep meaning in how you dress and comport yourself in public, and she wanted me to receive the love and respect I deserved. Despite wanting to respect my mother and demonstrate my love for her, I could not stomach wearing a dress.
I still struggle to articulate the feeling I had as a child in wearing a dress. I suppose it was something akin to shame: this was not who I was. On Sunday mornings, I would often put a dress on hoping to appease my mother, but inevitably the sensation of “not right” overwhelmed me, and I would tear it off. I felt conflicted, and my mother was confounded. Why such an explosive reaction to something as simple as wearing a dress?
