The Last Word, Part I: The Girl, The Church, and The Wardrobe

and she tipped forward, falling right through the back of her closet and into the middle of someone else's lust

“I just thought we should all sit down and agree on what’s too long and what’s acceptable for the length of our apron ties. Across all of the women here, there’s really no standard for how long they should be.”

“Why are we all sitting around the table like this is a board meeting?” I wondered to myself silently, getting ever more tired of talking about the handmade clothing that the women in my church wore and obsessed about endlessly. I kept asking myself: “Wasn’t this the reason we transitioned to wearing only Plain clothing anyway? To not be worried constantly about our apparel?”

The church that had begun to form around my family when I was 10 years old had bloomed into a full Christian fundamentalist agrarian community by the time I turned 16. And there we sat in a woman’s meeting, all decked out in handmade Plain clothing that was starting to feel more and more like cosplay every day. We had no Amish or Mennonite backgrounds. We had no Dutch roots, but were writing our own rulebook, calling it Ordnung and fine tuning it every time someone felt a twinge of jealousy or judgment.

Our solid dresses were pinned with straight pins or safety pins, as were our aprons. No buttons or zippers allowed. Our hair was tied back always into a white kapp, which in Central Texas heat and dust was usually impractical at best. When I ventured to ask why we weren’t allowed to wear any other color of head covering, the answer given by male leadership was that “white reminded them of purity”. So white it always was. There were heavier black bonnets that could sometimes be worn to town or to church, the only exception. Stockings, hose or tights were worn to cover any exposed leg. Long sleeves were the only option. Eventually we haggled “to the elbow”, but in Texas that’s long sleeved to me. Any outerwear must also be absent flash or individuality of any sort. We had two options for aprons, the classic cape and waist apron, a two piece nightmare that never quite fastened or sat right, especially on my developing body. The second option was a pinafore-style canning apron, only to be worn at home or perhaps visiting.

That’s what this meeting was about. The undetermined length that the strings on a canning apron would be, so that we could ultimately stop a pointed few from making them so they fluttered in the wind when she walked. Surely we could be worrying about anything else on earth.

Changes like what had happened to me and to these women usually come about gradually, but honestly looking back we had taken a few jolting jumps to get to that meeting around that table.

This church had started as an enthusiastic and well-meaning circle of young Christian adults on an internet forum, which I am told was popular in those days. The decision to take the relationships off of the clunky 2000s computer monitors and into real life started with them purchasing over a hundred acres in the Central Texas Hill Country. And then, over the course of maybe one year, maybe one and a half, 4-5 families had moved to their own section of that land and started to homestead. Families would come and go over the next decade, so that at our greatest number there were over 50 people attending our weekly church gatherings, and at the fewest there were maybe 15. It was never a big operation, but to a child growing up in the middle of it? This was the most powerful force in my life.

And when, pretty early on, the decision was made to mandate standardized dress for all members of the community, there was little to no resistance to the idea. It made sense to outwardly identify ourselves as a group in some way. At the time, it was also marketed as a way to legitimize claiming religious exemptions on things like the emerging Obamacare, vaccines, and even military and jury duty. As you can imagine there were not just a few preppers in the group, so we stayed up-to-date on what new world order tactics would be threatening our liberty next, and as you can see we planned accordingly.

The dress code enforcement was originally set up with a grace period. As these were handmade clothes we were requiring, obviously it would take time to make and get used to the new normal. I was one of the first to purchase a pattern and sew up an apron. I am good at sewing, thanks to some lessons I had as a very little girl. I was proud that I was going to be able to make all of my own clothing. I was also young, so in my mind this was going to be the Little House on the Prairie costume of my dreams, and I could wear it every day. I was generally enthusiastic, but also relieved to have a standard that would perhaps leave me under less scrutiny.

The truth was, I was beginning to be anxious every time I was where people could see me. For years, I had been at what felt like the center of attention as the only person in the community going through puberty and adapting to the woman’s body that was forming around me. Lately, at 17, I really felt like the criticisms would never end. I was constantly yelled at about what was appropriate and what was not, I was turned sideways in front of my mother, and the outline of my breast pointed out in an effort to make her help me get rid of any clothing that was “cut to fit a woman’s body”.

“I’ll cut a hole in a feed sack and make you wear that if you can’t figure out what we are wanting from you.”

I was experiencing a constant and angry volley of comments about my body and my appearance in the period of my life when my body was changing faster than my little girl’s mind could keep up. This feeling of eyes on me would start to burn holes as the years went on.

It’s been a while so I cannot remember the exact grace period that we were allowed before going full Plain, but it was a maybe one month. Some women had never sewn before in their lives. A few of these women were college-educated and had worked corporate jobs before moving to pursue their agrarian off-grid dreams. They were eager to learn, but things take time. In those weeks of the grace period, I was pulled out of church twice because my collarbones were showing over my white t-shirt. I could feel collective patience wearing thin, but I honestly could not keep up with who was looking where, and when.

And then, one day, with two weeks left to go in the grace period, I was in the garden, quietly working. I had made two full new Plain outfits, pressed and ready for church. Again - I really was excited. But that day in the garden, I looked up to see my father angrily stomping up to me and he immediately asked me what I was wearing. I explained that I was wearing a denim jumper (that went to my ankles) with a boxy t-shirt underneath as I was working in the garden and ….. he interrupted me. “I am so tired of having the same conversation with you. You know the rules have changed. You know that you are supposed to be wearing the new standard. This is outright rebellion.” I tried to explain that with time still in the grace period, I thought I might keep the precious few clothing items I had made with my own hands from getting torn or dirty working on the homestead. It only enraged him further. “I am going to make an example of you tonight.” he said, and stormed off.

That night at our church function, the one where we sat in a circle every Saturday night and asked questions that my father would answer (dubbed Q&A), I felt like I was visibly shaking. I did not know what I had done to upset him so much, but I was praying he was bluffing about making an example of me. My new fiancé was sitting at my side and a family had moved to the property from out of state just that day, and this was the first meeting they were attending. I was already riddled with anxiety as any teenager is, and this added stressor had me bubbling with fear. Nearing the end of our meeting, my father somewhat casually began to announce that the grace period for the clothing transition was over. He pointed out that more than enough time had passed to make clothing (not the case) and that this was it. Starting now, it was Ordnung to be in Plain dress at all times.

He turned to me. I could have flown away on the waves of anxiety. “You hear that, Tracy? Done. You know what’s expected now? Is that what was needed?”

There was a quiet question from one of the women - “Didn’t we have two weeks left in our grace period? I don’t have enough clothes made.”

“Nope. This is it. It’s happening now.”

And it did.

Here’s an interesting fact about my community’s situation specifically: the men’s grace period lasted months. I am not lying, I am not exaggerating. Almost a year passed before the first pair of broadfall pants was introduced or someone made the first traditional Amish vest. Sure, some of the women started removing the collars of the button-downs they bought from the local thrift stores pretty quickly. From what I could gather the male rules were essentially solid colors, suspenders and a straw hat. Can we really hold that up to the fundamental change the woman’s apparel underwent? Sure, before now the women were wearing ankle-length dresses and short sleeves, at some point skirts were banned as they showed waists, at some point all bandanas worn as head coverings had to be white, at some point all hair had to be tied up. Those are gradual changes, and ones you can see in more normal fundamentalist settings. The shift from denim jumpers to Old Order Amish dresses and aprons, with their pleats and pins and long sleeves and complicated dressing times? That was jarring, I can’t put it any other way. Add to that my own personal emotional yank into the whole thing, and it started resentment in me from day one.

And now inevitably we sat, in dresses that didn’t have buttons so that no one would try to get nicer buttons than anyone else, in the correct amount and size of folds needed to completely cover our forms, we sat quibbling about apron strings. It felt like scrambling towards a goal that stayed on the horizon, never feeling closer.

Maybe, that was the point all along.

In the time I have been out of that fundamentalist wannabe cult, I have come to realize that what happened to me in that “church” happens everywhere, all over the world, every day. Look at social media. Almost every denomination has pseudo celebrity pastors regularly and publicly make the most vile attacks on women by constantly telling everyone what they find acceptable or attractive for a woman to wear or to do. No scripture in sight. They degrade women who are total strangers to them if the standard of modesty displayed by someone they saw in Costco is not one that they enforce in their own churches or families. Fans of therapy would probably use the word triggered.

Weak, lustful men constantly and openly increase their power over the Church by using shameful language to enforce some kind of modesty standard you will never find in the pages of your Bible. The most effective way they can do this is by 1. using the power of church government to make arbitrary and unbiblical rules and 2. by turning women against women. Comparing one to another. If women are busy enforcing, watching, measuring the garments of the women walking into fellowship, that’s one less woman asking provoking questions at a “Q&A”. One less woman spending time in her Bible. Because maybe she’s too busy altering her clothing so that she’s not responsible for sin committed merely by the existence of the beautiful shape that her Creator molded her into with His own Hands.

In reality, (if you know me, you know this is true about me), I honestly am an advocate for Christian modesty in dress. The majority of times that the Bible describes modesty, it is clearly describing the way we conduct ourselves and rarely is actually discussing apparel. I am personally not a fan of gaudy, loud clothing or clothing that, in my opinion, disrespects one’s body. But do I see a woman dressed in a way I wouldn’t dress myself and think “her blatant intent is to disrespect God and taunt Godly men”? No, because that is quite honestly a clinically insane take.

Mandated dress standards, in and of themselves, perhaps are not the villain I am trying to illuminate in telling you all of this. Maybe I need to hone my light down a little to get to the center of what I felt in those moments when it seemed I could not escape scrutiny, and what I felt in the days after I ran away from that community. What it felt like when I bought my first new articles of “normal” clothing at a consignment store in Arkansas. I felt sinful for existing. I felt silly for wanting to look pretty. I felt worldly for not wanting to have everyone stare at me in the grocery store. I felt dumb when someone raised their phone to snap a picture of me. And when I finally allowed myself to wear something other than Plain clothing, I felt like hell was licking at my heels. Surely this is not what a dress standard is meant to do to a person.

And let’s clear the air here - the dress is never modest enough to stop lust. There is no level of modesty that stops people who really want to look at you from doing so. The line does not exist. The very conservative clothing I was wearing as a young girl was often used to fetishize me, and not privately. I received social media comments and private messages from men who would brazenly tell me, in no uncertain terms, that the very fact that I dressed in a way to ward off men’s eyes made me all the more desirable to see. I still have proof of this behavior, if anyone is delusional enough to still think that these are boundaries we can effectively hold with our clothing.

I’ve learned now that the best way to hold that boundary is by inviting them to gouge their eyes out.

I think modesty can look a lot of different ways if you are referring to modesty as being the clothes a woman wears. And isn’t that what immediately pops to mind when someone mentions the word modesty, almost without fail? Women’s clothing or lack thereof? But the word modest, the action of modesty has no gender. It is a way in which we live our lives, how we present ourselves to the world. Humble. Unassuming. Would modest describe the gross social media posts we are seeing from these male and female influencers in religious culture? I certainly say no, but you can judge for yourself.

Looking back, here is the honest truth: when we are worried about how short our sleeves are allowed to be in 112 degree weather in Central Texas, maybe we failed to notice that our little daughters were silently wondering if their beautiful bodies are even worth having. If their perceived purity was always going to be the measure of their character. If men only think of them in terms of lust or anger.

If maybe someone saw her apron strings fluttering in the wind.