Lavender Haze Cookies
and a bad pair of pants
I looked at myself in the wall of mirrors. My legs were squeezed and creased like sausages. I stood completely still for a moment, afraid the pants would split at my hips if I bent. I turned slowly and pulled at the gap at the waist.
“Mom,” I started.
This was probably the thirtieth pair of pants I’d tried on that day. I was fourteen, and felt ready to grow up and out of my sweatpants phase. But the only other pants I had in my closet at the moment were a couple pairs of riding breeches and one battered atrocity that was the threadbare cutoffs I’d made out of an old pair of jeans.
It was the end of the heroin chic era. Straight up and down bodies with no curves whatsoever were required, like a passport, for entry at any of the fashionable stores. Like they’d hung signs in the windows that said, “No admittance unless your waist is the same circumference as your ankle.”
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that body type if you’re eating well and enough and feel good in your skin. But that’s not my body. It never would be. And the clothes in these stores were not made for me.
“Let me see.” My mom came up behind me in the mirror and tugged down gently at the ankles of the pants. An ominous creaking sound came from the fabric around my hips.
I could feel tears in my eyes as my face started to crumple.
“Hey,” she put her hands on my shoulders. “Look at me.”
Our eyes met in the changing room mirror.
“These are bad pants.”
“But they’re all like this.” I ran my hands across the buckling fabric at my waist.
“Well, that’s because this is a bad store,” she replied. “So, here’s what we’re gonna do, kid. We’re gonna walk out that door and go find a good store that sells good pants. Ok?”
I reached up to wipe at my eyes.
“Ok?” she asked again.
I took a deep breath. “Ok.”
I don’t remember the exact date that my hips came in. But it was one day. One singular morning. Not gradually like I’d expected, but all at once with an almost audible “pop.”
I sat at the top of the slide I’d been down a thousand times before. My friends were scattered around the yard, and one climbed up the ladder to give me a playful shove. I started to slide down, putting my hands up in the air with a laugh. A squeaking sound and a pinch of clothes around my hips ground me to a halt halfway down.
My friends laughed, and I did too, as I struggled to unstick myself from the slide. That was the last time I went down it. I was only nine or ten, and I couldn’t feel weight gathering on the rest of my body, but it stuck and swung to my lower half.
Shortly after that, as my mom and I walked through the parking lot of the grocery store, I felt my mom’s gaze on me.
“What?” I asked.
“Why are you walking so funny?”
I took my steps deliberately, experimenting with different stride lengths and speeds, trying to stand up tall and keep my shoulders back and take normal steps. But with every step, it felt like I was walking across a swaying ship.
“I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to walk with these things,” I pointed accusatorially at my hips. And my mom devolved into laughter.
That was when I entered my Champion phase. I dressed exclusively in an old, navy blue, Champion sweatshirt of my dads and a pair of TJ Maxx sweatpants. My mom never discouraged me, and I was thankful for it because it was the only way I felt comfortable. My body was betraying me — speeding up my approach toward adulthood faster than any of my friends. My body was older than I was. Less concealing clothes seemed to bring on cat calls from the boys my age. And any time I wore a swimsuit, kids and adults alike commented on my figure while I squirmed uncomfortably under their gazes and my mom glared at them from across the pool, steam coming almost visibly from her ears as she rushed over to save me.
If I got a weird look, or a kid said something mean, she defended me, and taught me the words to defend myself. She understood my sweatpants phase. She sympathized with it. And she was perfectly content, waiting patiently for me to grow up in my own time. To become comfortable with myself.
That day, I’d decided I had outgrown looking like a bruise-colored blob. I was older and “wiser” and felt ready to take on the world in clothes with more slimming dimensions than the potato-sack uniform I’d worn for so long.
We went to store after store trying on nothing but “bad pants” until we finally ended up at Gap. I walked in defeated, while my mom had maintained an undying spring in her step. She would find pants that fit me, ones that were comfortable, fit my hips and my waist and made me feel good.
“Let’s try in here.”
I dragged my feet behind her, seeing only the mannequins in the front window — all of which looked crafted from popsicle sticks.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “You know, I used to get some of my pants from here.”
That made me perk up. “Really?”
In the back of the store, buried high in the wall to wall cubbies of jeans, we found styles that weren’t on the mannequins. Gap set their sizes by numerical waist measurement, not the arbitrary, hard-to-decipher, and ever-changing “6” and “8” the other stores had used. My mom kindly (but with a gentle firmness I still aspire to bring into my own voice) asked the sales person to show us some “retro” styles.
It was the first time I’d smiled at myself in a mirror in what felt like a long time in my up-to-then short life.
Over the next few years, whenever my mom and I curled up on the couch on snowy days to watch the old movies we’d already loved and quoted from for years, she’d point at the women in their tailored suits and dresses.
“See?” she’d say. “They all have hips.”
I remember kneeling beside her in her desk chair next to our desktop computer while she read aloud an article about how actresses in the 1950s got everything, including their jeans, tailored. She read me one about how Marilyn Monroe went to the beach and jumped in the ocean in every new pair of jeans, which she bought at an army surplus store, and then she’d lay out on the beach in the sun and let them dry to her skin.
When we’d watch “I Love Lucy,” we’d talk enviously about all the dress shop scenes — how a sales woman was always there to pin the dress up for you while you looked in the mirror and take your measurements once you’d made your decision, all before whisking the dress away into the back where it would be tailored and delivered to your house in two to three business days.
I learned from these women (and from my mother) how to accept welcome attention with confidence and poise and how to fend off anything else with dignity and strength.
My mom would come home every so often with a dress she’d found somewhere (they seemed to flock only to her, calling out of the racks of our favorite consignment shops) that she thought looked like “that one Lucille Ball dress, you know with that floral pattern?” or “the one Lauren Bacall wears in ‘How to Marry a Millionaire.’”
She found a tailor at a fancy dress shop in our town, and we took every dress she bought me there to have it fitted. And every time we went, she’d pick out a couple wedding dresses or formal gowns for me to try on. I’d stand on the block in front of the mirror while the tailor pinned the dress to fit my form. Then I’d turn and sway in front of the mirror, spinning the fabric or striking a pose.
For my first formal dance, my mom pulled out the dress my great-grandmother wore to my Granny’s wedding back in [exact year redacted]. It had sat perfectly preserved in a garment bag at the back of my Granny’s closet since that day. I pulled it out with trembling hands, the fabric heavy and somehow more real in my hands than so many of the flimsy fabrics I’d run my hands over in stores.
“Remember, if it doesn’t fit, that’s ok. We can have it tailored.”
I stepped into that dress from another time. It looked so much like all the outfits in all the movies we loved. I pulled it up over my hips without a hitch, and my mom carefully dragged the zipper up, hooking the eye-catch closed at the top.
We stared at each other in disbelief. The dress fit like a glove.
Another mother might’ve let their daughter go on hiding away in sweats forever, or forcing her into the fashionable styles. Another mother might just not have noticed that her daughter was hiding at all.
My mom taught me how to defend myself both against others and against my own critical eye. She threw away the bad pants and made sure I had moments every now and then where I got to feel like royalty. She got a pair of shoes dyed to match my great-grandmother’s dress (a sunny yellow that made me feel like my feet were dancing on their own).
The critical voice in my head can still be loud and growling. I struggle with self-image. I struggle with having grace for my soul and for my body and with finding peace with the flaws therein. And I still have times where I feel tears prick my eyes as a pair of pants gets stuck around my hips.
But whenever my throat starts to tighten and my eyes get weepy, I take a deep breath and say “These are bad pants.”
Positive self-speech is something that so many people, particularly so many women, struggle with. I think it’s important to encourage each other and build each other up.
As many of my readers know, I’ve recently become a Taylor Swift fan. So many of her songs are centered around this idea of building ourselves and other women up. I was thrilled to be invited to a “Taylor Swift: the Eras Tour” watch party in January, and I wanted to bring a special Taylor Swift inspired snack with me. So here is what I’ll be bringing to the Eras Tour party — pillowy, lemon-lavender cookies inspired by “Lavender Haze” off of the album “Midnights.” I hope you make these and enjoy their balance of zest and sweetness, and find yourself feeling more balanced, too, as we enter this new (and I hope wonderful) year.
Lavender Haze Cookies
You will need:
For the cookies
1 cup salted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon dried lavender flowers (to grind with sugar) + 1/2 teaspoon dried lavender flowers (to mix in generally), plus more for decoration
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
For the lemon glaze
1 cup powdered sugar
The juice from 1 large lemon (reserve the peel)
What to do:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. Then, line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
With a mortar and pestle, grind down 1/2 teaspoon of the lavender with one Tablespoon (out of the 1 cup) of sugar until the lavender is as fine as the sugar.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the butter and sugar (including that lavender/sugar mixture). Beat on high for a few minutes until the mixture is light and fluffy.
Scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula, then turn the mixer down to low and beat in the eggs, vanilla extract, baking powder, and salt.
Scrape the sides of the bowl again, then mix in the flour a 1/2 cup at a time, mixing continuously. Add in the rest of the lavender when you add the last portion of flour. Don’t overmix — if you notice a bunch of unmixed dry ingredients at the bottom of the bowl, pause to scrape it into the rest of the mixture before you keep going. As soon as all the flour is combined, stop mixing.
Form the dough into small balls by rolling just over a Tablespoon’s worth between your palms. Place the dough balls on the cookie sheet about two inches apart.
Bake the cookies for about 15 minutes, or until they are fluffy in the center and just barely starting to get golden around the edges.
Whisk together the powdered sugar and lemon juice until it becomes a smooth glaze. Dip the top of each cookie in the glaze, then quickly before the glaze cools zest a lemon over the cookies and top each one with a few dried lavender flowers.
That’s it for this week. I hope that, wherever you are, you’re surrounded by family, Christmas lights, and treats that warm you to your core. There will be more story-recipes coming your way in the new year.
If you’re looking for Christmas gifts for your foodie or bookish friends, follow the link below to find my gifting list on Bookshop!
Until then, Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year,
Juliana
PS —
Have you guys heard about Bookshop?
If you love supporting smaller, brick-and-mortar bookstores but love shopping from the comfort of your home (or, like me, you live in a teeny tiny town with a lovely but sometimes limited book selection) you’ve got to check them out. 10% of their sales go to local book stores, and 10% goes to their affiliates (like me!) every time you buy a book. They’ve got all the selection of a big online bookstore, and they’ve donated $20 million and counting to bookstores!
I now have a little “storefront” on their site, so if you’re wanting to see or buy some of my favorite books, head on over to my Bookshop site! Right now, my Bookshop lists include my Cookbook Collection, My Work, My Top 10 (always changing), and My New Foray into Scary Books.
You can find a favorite cookbook of mine, Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” there!
Lovely sweet story. I bet a lot of
F your readers identify with these moments you share with us. Perhaps it’s a female thing, begins bout year 11-about 16. Youir mum did a great job.
I love lavender so these yummy cookies have to be special.
Keep writing.