After You

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I became a feminist in the doorway of a Taco Bell.

I was 15 years old in Streetsboro, Ohio, and my boyfriend, a recent transplant from Georgia, had held the first of two doors for me on the way into the restaurant. So I returned the favor.

He wouldn’t go through.

To his 17-year-old Southern brain, this was the right thing to do. A girl shouldn’t be holding the door for him. His momma raised him better than that.

But I was that most stubborn of all creatures, an adolescent girl, and a Taurus at that.I had arms that were more than capable of being extended to their full length. I saw no reason why my breasts or ovaries should preclude me from being polite.

And so we stood there, for who knows how long, each of us absolutely certain that we were in the right.

At the time, I wouldn’t have called myself a feminist. That was a term I associated with the ‘70s, with bra burning and protest marches. I was total girly girl, a ballerina, a cheerleader. I spent each morning carefully applying eyeshadow and lipgloss and curling my bangs so as to look as much as possible like every other girl in my high school. A feminist wouldn’t do that. Feminists were people who wore no makeup and bad clothes and hated men. I was nothing like that.

But I was strong and smart and just beginning to understand the power I had over teenage boys. I knew that this was a boy I really liked, a boy who wasn’t like any other I’d ever met. He was sweet and soft-spoken and had brown floppy hair that dipped over his blue eyes. I was in love.

He wasn’t my first boyfriend. My freshman year in high school had been a tumultuous one, first with my parents’ divorce and then a series of bad relationships, mostly with boys who viewed me as an accessory. I made them feel good about themselves, but I knew that to them, I wasn’t anything special.

But now I was a sophomore, and I’d loved and learned. I’d seen the struggles my mom faced as a newly single woman in her 40s. I saw her determination to live the life she’d always wanted, without help from any man.

She bought a 100-plus year old house and transformed it into something magazine-worthy, scraping away the decades of paint with her strong hands. She refused alimony and started her own business and still managed to pay for new clothes and dance lessons and anything else I ever wanted. I knew, through her, that I deserved someone to whom I was more than just arm candy.