I know what's in my purse (old receipts, a maxed out credit card and some stale crackers). But hearing what other women carry in their bags gives me inspiration. You carry a sewing kit, tweezers and a mini umbrella? Excellent! It sounds like you're ready for anything. Admittedly, I'm a little weird, but I'm not alone in my purse preoccupation. Women's magazines detail the exact contents of celebrities' purses (e.g. $30 tubes of lip balm, seaweed gummy bears and pictures of their dogs). Clearly, I'm not the only one interested in what other women are lugging around in their handbags.
But, as countless men have wondered, why do women carry so many things in their purses and do we really need all that stuff? Statistics suggest that if you're a female in the United States, you carry a purse loaded down with so many "essentials" you're giving yourself back problems. Still, we load up our purses because we like to be prepared. When we have the perfect solution for a problem right in our very own handbags, it makes us feel like we've accomplished something. Perhaps even staved off an impending disaster, armed only with our mini lint rollers, Kleenex and breath mints.
But for all our honorable intentions, the content of our purses is teetering on the brink of insanity. The average American woman carries 67 items in her purse. That's a lot of eye liner, anti bacterial lotion and hair spray! Our handbags (weighing between 5 and 20 pounds) carry lots of useful notions, but they also exact a toll on our bodies and minds.
Doctors link our heavy purses to an epidemic of migraines, back pain and spinal misalignment in women. Sadly, many of us are fully aware that our over stuffed bags are wreaking havoc on our health and personal lives. Let's not even discuss the fact that some purses cost as much as a used car. Yet consumer trends indicate we're not giving up our super sized satchels anytime soon. Trend spotters suggest that every year, women are buying bigger and more expensive purses, and filling them with more and more stuff. So what's going on? Do we really need to haul around half the house in our purses, or is there something deeper going on?
Women didn't always carry duffel bags around on a daily basis. Our grandmother's handbags were barely large enough to contain some cash, perhaps few mints, a lipstick, comb and a compact and they were ready to go. But somewhere between our grandmother's diminutive bags and our super-sized Mary Poppins purses stocked with half of Walgreens, something has gone off the rails. Could our super sized purses symbolize a more serious emotional issue for today's hyper stressed, exhausted-to-the-core modern woman?
If we compare our purses (and lives) to our grandmother's, the size, cost and weight of our bags suggest that we're upsizing, stressing and maxing out our minds and bodies with our enormous purses. But our grandmothers didn't just have smaller purses. They drove smaller cars (if they drove at all), lived in smaller houses and had fewer kitchen appliances. They washed their faces with soap (gasp!), and were ready to leave the house in the morning with a little blush and lipstick.
Their lives were simpler in many ways, but they were certainly not easier. Our grandmothers struggled. They wondered how they would feed their families during the Great Depression and if their children would survive the polio epidemic. While we fret about whether or not to vaccinate our children or give them antibiotics, our grandmothers worried that a sore throat or fever could mean death.
It dishonors our grandmothers to equate their comparatively simple lives to a rosy vintage cliche. While it is true that their lives were simpler and less cluttered, it must also be said that they did not always choose simplicity- simplicity chose them, because of scarcity, economic and social hardships and the harsh realities of being a woman in a world that belonged to men.
Yet, despite the challenging times in which they lived, our grandmothers were generally quite happy. Happy with the simple gifts of a healthy baby, a Sunday table, clean clothes. They reveled in their freedom to attend school, and receiving a new dress was a true occasion.
Today, our grandmothers look at us, their granddaughters, with a mixture of awe, pride and concern. They know we face new and confusing challenges. They see that we're strong, vibrant, women who take ownership of our lives and they thank God for the freedoms and choices we enjoy that they never dreamed of having. Still, we aren't fooling them with our frantic juggling acts. They know our lives are no piece of cake. They understand our lives far better than we give them credit for.
Our grandmothers watch as we leave the house at 5am, and worry about whether or not we're getting enough rest. They see our huge handbags and wonder what in the world we're carrying that's so God awfully important. They don't understand why their beautiful granddaughters spend so much time and money flat ironing, exercising and dashing all over hell's half acre when we could be resting, spending time with friends and family or simply dreaming. Just dreaming.
Our grandmothers know we're carrying heavy loads, because they carried them once upon a time as well. But while their generation banded together in simplicity, our generation is bent under the weight of all the things we choose to carry. Everything, from what's stuffed in our purses to what's crammed in our minds, seems ready to topple over at any moment. It often feels we have no firm bedrock on which to stand. We're weighed down, emotionally, physically and psychologically. And each and every time we leave the house with our gigantic rucksacks of stuff, the load grows heavier and harder to bear.
Gym clothes, textbooks, heels for drinks at the bar after work, make up, water bottles, self help books, journals, mace, anti depressants, rain coats, planners and power bars. Our bags could send a soldier to a foreign land, prepared for a minor skirmish. Yet grandma knows, no matter how ready we appear, that we're not at peace. We're not at home in our own skins. We still don't know how to find balance or find the cadence of life that feeds our souls.
So every time we visit, our grandmother smiles at us gently. She wishes we'd stay longer, but she knows we're busy. Before we dash out the door, another visit cut short in a flurry of rushing, she takes our face in her soft, loving hands and pauses. For a moment, we lock eyes with a woman who loves us so deeply that she'll journey back in time to bare her soul in order to save us from drowning ourselves.
Slowly, it begins to dawn on us that she's trying to tell us something very, very important. She desperately hopes we'll listen.
"Child", she says, "I worry about you. What do you have in this bag? You don't need to carry all this. It's too heavy. It's not good to load yourself down like this. You've got to slow down, sweetheart. I know you're out there burning up the world. I see that, and I'm proud of you. But what you don't realize is that you're burning yourself up in the process."
Year after year, time and age slows our grandmothers down. But age is a burden they carry with grace and gratitude. Being alive, even in their aging, aching bodies, is a gift beyond compare. But they would never choose to lug the 20 pound behemoths we call purses on their shoulders. They can hardly manage their own small pocketbooks as it is.
But make no mistake; what our grandmothers lack in physical strength, they make up for in mental and spiritual mettle. Many carry burdens in their hearts that would splinter ours into a million pieces; memories of battles they walked through armed with nothing more than their tiny pocketbooks and a rock solid faith in God's grace as their invisible shield.
Our grandmother's willingness to walk day after day through the fire, to get up no matter how many times life tried to knock her down, did not develop because she came prepared with bobby pins and a day planner in her purse. It didn't come because she rose at dawn to work out, then stayed late at the office to impress her boss.
Her strength came from simplicity, from knowing that you can try to have every base covered and an entire notions section in your purse, but you'll never manage to fill your life with grace and peace the way God can.
So whether it is from the doorway of her earthly home, or from the doorway of your memory, let your grandmother give you a sliver of her hard won wisdom. Give up worrying your way out of situations you can not control. Find yourself a smaller purse and carry the minimum load your body, mind and soul can bear.
You will never be able to fight off the demons of fear, lack and insecurity this world breeds like flies with a 20 pound security blanket heaved over your shoulder. Your over crammed schedule, thousand cups of coffee, extra workouts, trips to gurus, tanning salons and healthy cooking classes might teach you a trick or too. But nothing you do or try to do in this life will teach you what you truly need to know until you raise you eyes to the future armed with faith rather than fear. You must know, deep within your soul, that you can soldier through any fire that's sent your way with nothing more than a tiny pocketbook and a huge measure of God's grace in your heart. There's nothing else you need to carry. God has everything else covered.
* I hope you've enjoyed this essay. I very much thrive on connecting with readers through comments and messages, so please let me know what you think. Comment, vote and above all, please keep reading! It gives me hope and keeps me writing! :)