When I was a child I joined Brownies. My father, having been forced into Hitler Youth, abhorred the concept of putting children in uniforms.
“This is what little girls do, Hans,” my mother told him.
He adopted a stoic mien, but he never like it.
So for a couple of years I endured the after-school meetings and the sniping mothers of my peers as we glued popsicle sticks together and performed tasks dictated by a book. At one point, searching for a higher meaning, I chose to attend the annual city-wide Girl Scout Tea. Though none of the other girls from my troop were going, and though I was only nine, I donned the uniform and had my mother drive me and drop me off. She was concerned about my not knowing anyone, but I was insistent. I can’t remember anything about the location. There were cookies. There came a time when girls gathered with their troops and filed into an auditorium. As my troop wasn’t present, I sat by myself at the back. The flag was presented, the pledge was said. Also, a prayer. Then a chubby loud woman talked for a long time about what a good organization Girls Scouts of America was. During the whole four hours I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. I quit scouts soon after, not because of the isolation I felt at the tea, a situation of my own making, but because I came away from the experience thinking that the goal of GSA was to strengthen the organization, not to care for its members, or anyone else, really.
A few years later, I was invited to join Rainbow Girls. Poor Daddy. While there was no uniform to wound his sensibilities, he and my mother were required to undergo an in-home interview to see if we were the “right” kind of people. He was a reserved person. Answering personal questions about religion and political leanings, and having people come into our house to assess his provision for his family must have been so difficult for him. Also, it hit him in the wallet. There was a relatively large fee for joining and we were expected to wear formals for every monthly meeting. Here, as with scouts, I thought I would find a comfortable place with like-minded young women. We would talk about issues and where we thought we belonged in the world, but that didn’t happen. There was, however, an intriguing clandestine element—a password known only to Rainbow Girls, and a secret gesture that would allow us to identify each other when we crossed paths in foreign lands. How absurd. Also, appallingly and pointlessly snooty. For God’s sake, it was a bunch of overweight teenaged girls from the panhandle wearing frilly dresses and saying mean things about one another. That lasted less than a year. Daddy never said a word about the wasted money.
In college I pledged a sorority. The pledge semester was grounded in inexplicable hostility. The members bossed and berated us at every opportunity, exposing surprisingly sour personalities. On one particular night we were blind-folded and driven to a building in an unknown location. We could hear conversations, but we weren’t allowed to participate. We could smell food and hear the happy gulp of drinking, but nothing was offered to us. Six hours later we were returned to where we’d been picked up, still blind-folded, with no clue where we’d been taken or why. For this, I’d missed an evening out with friends and several hours of sleep. The eventual initiation occurred in near darkness in a parlor on campus. A loyalty statement was recited in unison; vows were made while candles flickered beneath our noses; and secret words were imparted—a phrase I assumed would help us recognize one another when touring Italy, a notion which inevitably led me to imagine Texas women rushing up to hug strangers while hissing code words into their ears. I went inactive the next semester.
It was obviously not my thing, so why did I join in the first place? Because it’s wrong to judge if you don’t know what you’re judging.
As an adult, thanks to my inability to say no, I have joined and quit so many organizations that I lost track years ago. Thankfully, the unjoining has been made easier by our transient lifestyle. If I felt trapped by a club or organization all I had to do was wait a while and we’d move to another country.
An example: while living in Houston, before we moved to Singapore, I was invited to join a women’s group called PEO. I was reluctant; but honestly, I was so fond of the sweet church women who asked me, and I felt helplessly unable to deny the great grandmothers who’d belonged to PEO for fifty years and were understandably desperate in their efforts to recruit a younger generation. With this organization, also, there was a secret word. Don’t get me started. The group met monthly for a lunch and a presentation, which always pertained to a women’s college that PEO supported—and in this, I’m happy to say, there was at least a worthy cause. But then I came to understand that I was expected to step up: I had been given the responsibility of assigning and overseeing the presentations for the upcoming year.
“I feel caged by this thing,” I told David. “How do I get out of it?”
“Sounds like it’s time for a move,” David said. And off we went.
Here in Marble Falls I know many women who are in PEO. They become quite animated when they talk about hosting the gatherings, the meals, the socializing, and the programs. They’re dedicated in a way I never was and cannot comprehend. I keep my head down.
I know someone who has recently been admitted to the DAR. She’s quite excited about it.
“We have meetings,” she tells me with enthusiasm.
“And what do you do at these meeting?”
“Oh, this and that,” she says, pressing her lips together and slanting her eyes away; her way of letting me know that these are private meetings concerned with private business. A joiner from way back, she’s comfortable with secrecy and exclusivity.
As to the DAR, my familiar curiosity stirs. What do they do when they gather? What’s their purpose? Are meaningful issues discussed? Are problems solved? My aunt, deceased, went through the effort and expense of proving her ancestry so that she might be inducted into the DAR; so I suppose that I, too, could pursue it. Is there a hierarchy based on pedigrees? Do they have cloak-and-dagger code words and signals? I bet they do!
Most importantly, though, is that if I were to join another women’s organization, I’d eventually be forced to disentangle myself. And I’m rather fond of this part of Texas.
This beauty, right in our backyard.
