Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens: On Modesty, Ambition, and Shame

The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

When my mother was a girl, she wanted a sewing machine so she could make her own clothes. Each day for a year, she packed a single apple in her lunch bag and saved the coins her mother gave her until she had enough for the Singer Touch & Sew she’d wanted, with its push-up bobbin and decorative stitches. And that year, on her prim single-apple diet, she’d grown so slim that all the clothes she sewed herself were tiny. I can almost see her now, in the breakfast nook of her childhood home, pinning patterns to fabric and selecting with great satisfaction the dashed-line contours of the smallest size.

How many women’s childhoods are full of stories like those, tiny fragments where the moral is both unsaid and startlingly clear? A girl wants something, and to get it, she must make herself so small she almost falls off the page. 

When I got the email saying my first book of poetry was a finalist for a big national prize, my first thought was: oh, that’s a nice boost. I’ll never win, but it’s a good first step. The story I’d learned about the first book was a kind of hero’s journey: it took years and along the way you had to conquer the many dragons of near-misses, the finalist and semi-finalist lists, you revised and rewrote, and the heartbreak of it worked an alchemy, until finally, just as you were about to give up entirely, your manuscript became a book. I was just starting. I’d sent the manuscript out just a few places, and this was the first round in its revised form, perhaps two years out from my MFA.   

So when I won, the first thing I felt was a thick sludge of shame. I’d cut the line. I knew so many poets who hadn’t gotten their book yet, and I’d skipped ahead of them. But more than that: winning revealed the scale of my ambition. I’d wanted a big thing. I’d entered the contest and sent off my work, knowing the odds were overwhelmingly against me, but also believing I might win, believing I might deserve to win. So once I won, everyone would know that about me, that I’d dared to want something that big.  

Being a poet is, in many ways, ridiculous. The things so many of us want–a book, more books, an academic job at a living wage in a livable place–are both nearly impossible to get and also, sometimes, change little about the material circumstances of our lives if we achieve them. One of the first things I did, after my book won, was to look up previous winners–not just the big name ones who get prime spots on the prize website, who’ve gone on to win all the other big prizes, but also the ones I’d never heard of, who maybe never wrote another book after that. I don’t know quite what to say about this instant self-defeating impulse except to wonder who else shares it and where it comes from.  

One of the keywords of my childhood was ladylike. To be ladylike meant to follow the rules, speak politely, cross one’s ankles beneath the dinner table, pass the salt and pepper together, say thank you, thank you whenever anything was offered. To be ladylike was to be modest, to not call attention to one’s self or one’s accomplishments. To be ladylike was to be small. I think my mother – who raised me mostly by herself for most of my childhood, who described herself in those years as a “flaming feminist” – would be appalled to hear me say that. But the lesson – be small, be still, don’t brag – was, I’m sure, embedded in her childhood as well, her upbringing by a German Catholic mother whose view of the world and the correct ways to be a woman in it was fixed and unrelenting. Go to mass, go to confession, be pretty but not exceptional. Be smart but not audacious. 

What is the lesson of these small stories? I was a girl who was taught to be small and grew up to want very big things. When I got some of them I didn’t believe my luck. But more than that, I didn’t believe I deserved it, that my work had earned the space.

This is all, obviously, a really excellent way to get and stay profoundly stuck. 

In the last column in this series I wrote about all the end-of-decade counting up writers were doing on twitter. My favorite thing on twitter so far in this shiny new year has been, on New Year’s Day, Rachel Syme’s “shoot your shot” thread:

The thread’s full of people – largely women, by a quick scan of profile pics – naming their big and small dreams and cheering each other on. 

When I learned to whistle, my grandmother told me that “whistling girls and crowing hens always come to no good end.” It’s probably true that she genuinely disliked whistling and believed it to be unladylike. But there’s also a broader caution in that little rhyme about calling attention to yourself–being too bold, going beyond what the feminine allows. So all those women out there, declaring their ambitions on the internet for anyone to see: they’re all whistling, loudly and unapologetically. 

I believe there’s power in this whistling, this act of naming our big dreams. Though “manifest” calls up an automatic eye-roll from me, Leigh Stein’s recent newsletter, Manifest yr dreams in 2020, managed to convince me in just a few paragraphs. In the newsletter, Stein describes the “vision boards” she’s created at various points in her career, and right up top is the one she made shortly before selling her memoir, Land of Enchantment. It’s simple and bold: it’s got a big picture of Reese Witherspoon from Wild in it, along with the words “More Money” and “Power.” When I first read it, I shuddered a little at the woo-woo of it, but even more than that, at the audacity of claiming MONEY and POWER. It scared me a little. I love it. What scary big dreams do you have this year?

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