How To Be A Woman

By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.

—Proverbs 24:3–4

My professor Heather was and is one of the clearest real-life pictures of the kind of person I want to be. When I was eighteen, I took her class in my first semester of college at Westmont. She was beautiful, strong, and tall with blonde hair. She was impossibly articulate and intelligent. She pushed us and made us want to impress her and please her, so we studied hard, wrote voraciously, and read carefully, hoping to bring her something of value to each class meeting, like small children cupping fireflies and salamanders in their hands. She became my advisor, and then my friend. We talked about books and about telling the truth in your writing.

When I moved out of my mother’s home, Heather gave me another image of how to be a woman. I needed my mother’s image, but I also needed a few more images with which to piece together a future self. Heather is one of the most significant of those images. She pushed me, as a writer, as a person of faith, and as a woman. There were times when I failed her, and when I did, her disappointment crushed me, and then her grace healed me.