Nature, nurture, or both: what makes me a “real woman”?

Posted on by
Reply

I was born a girl. And except for some long ago summer days at the age of 11, when my too-short haircut and my play clothes of blue jean cut offs and a white t-shirt made me appear confusingly gender-ambiguous, I have always presented as female.

As a teenager and fledgling woman, I often felt inadequate. Even now, as a supposedly fully matured woman, I sometimes struggle. I’ve never been especially girly. I lack many of the talents, skills, and interests associated with femininity in our culture. According to what many teach regarding “Biblical womanhood”, I fail miserably. I’m not domestic enough. I’m not sweet enough, soft-spoken enough, gentle enough, or submissive enough. Instead of finding fulfillment among the pots and pans, I’d rather be teaching kids to hit and kick each other in the dojo. Instead of urging girls, “Stay sweet”, I’m more often heard urging them to “Be fierce!” Instead of going into raptures of delight over cleaning products, make-up, cute shoes, or whatever it is we women are supposed to get all giddy with excitement over, I’m far more likely to get excited about my favorite hike, a good cup of coffee, some techno-toy, or sensible shoes. (Although I do own a few cute pairs for when I want to clean up, put on a dress, and look semi-presentable.)

I didn’t fit in as a girl. I often don’t fit in now.

But I’m a real woman.

Only I’m not. Because, after all, “real women have curves”, and I’ve always been sorely lacking in the curves department…well, except for the more recent “curves” of added fat in all the wrong places.

Then again, there’s my trump card. The fact that I’ve had six kids should grant me entry without question into the ranks of “real women”.

Except that men can supposedly give birth. Or at least women who decide to have partial sex reassignment surgery so that they can live as men, claim they are men, but still get pregnant and have babies. So now, someone recently informed me rather heatedly, giving birth is not just a “woman thing”. Men can do it too. So there.

So what makes me a woman?

I think genetics and biology are not meaningless. Yes, I know that “Biology is not destiny!” was a rallying cry in the 1960’s. I don’t believe that our biology, as women, should be viewed as a limitation, prison or trap, any more than the same should be true for a man. I would never tell any man that he is good for little else besides sex and fathering babies, and therefore he should not trouble his handsome little head over important things, nor should he do anything dangerous, given how delicate and vulnerable his reproductive organs are. The truth is that, as both men and women, humans are far more than our reproductive systems. But those very systems are an important part of us, whether they function properly or not, whether we delight in them or not, whether they cause us grief or pleasure.

I was born a girl. My parents raised me as a girl who would grow up to be a woman. I went to school and took part in communities where I was treated as were girls in my day and time — for good and for bad. My experiences shaped me.

Even the common, shared experiences of childhood were not exactly the same for me as for my brothers. For instance, when teachers would say, “Boys will be boys!” to a classroom full of children, it meant something entirely different for us girls than it did for the boys. We were being told we were being overly-sensitive tattle-tales and needed to stop; the boys were being given permission to go right on doing whatever it was that had upset us so much. Sometimes it felt like we were being raised in parallel universes.

Puberty was, to vastly understate the obvious, very different for me than for my brothers.

I could go on and on… Nature and nurture, my biology and my life experiences, have molded me, shaped me, formed me, given me identity. I am a woman. I am more than a collection of body parts, more than a shape, more than my appearance, more than my sexuality, more than my talents or lack thereof, more than a social construct.

It cost me to become a woman. I have literally bled. The transition from girlhood to womanhood was not easy for me, not physically, not emotionally, not spiritually, not mentally. There were times when I feared I would not arrive, whole and happy, on the other side. Not every girl’s adolescence is so tortured or troubled, nor do boys sail into manhood without a worry or problem. However, the worst pains of my teen years were suffered because I was a girl.

There was not one experience that made me a woman. It was not my first menses, nor did a sex act “turn me into a woman”. It wasn’t even when I had my first baby. Being a woman is the sum total of my mind, body, memories, and experiences. I’ve spent my entire life being female, and it’s the only life I know.

At the same time that I love being a woman — it has been the source of some of my deepest joys — I can also enjoy, perhaps a little too much, ignoring or overturning what I regard as silly cultural stereotypes and expectations. I may not measure up to your idea of a “real woman”, but I’ve put in the time and I’ve definitely earned the stripes, even if I don’t look as decorative or act as demurely/sexily as you think I should.

Putting on a dress and high heels doesn’t make me more of a woman. Neither does cooking a delicious meal, or keeping silent in a church meeting, or crying at sappy movies. I don’t become less of a woman when I’m in my sweat-soaked gi, pounding the heavy bag with all I’ve got. Adding or subtracting body parts would not make me any more or less a woman than I already am. Womanhood is not something you wear, something you put on and off, some set of actions you do or don’t do. Womanhood is who you are, all of it.

I was born a girl, with female chromosomes and body parts. I grew up as a girl. I was taught how to be a girl…and how not to be a girl. I’ve lived as a woman all my adult life. It is the sum total of my existence and the very essence — inside and out — of who I am. You don’t get much more real than that.

I refuse to trivialize womanhood, refuse to reduce it down to outward appearance, refuse to suggest that it is a commodity than can be bought or sold, refuse to believe that surgery can make or undo it. I’ve had friends and loved ones who have lost breasts, uterus, and ovaries to cancer — but they were still very much women, no matter what our culture might say.

Womanhood is worth celebrating. Worth honoring. Worth valuing. Worth respecting.

Even if I just started laughing over my sudden urge to start belting out, “I am woman, hear me roar!”

The unwanted daughter…and others

Posted on by
6

Her mother wanted a son…desperately. She already had two daughters close together in age, and was feeling overwhelmed enough without the prospect of another child.

Both girls were still in diapers, the oldest only at night. But in those days it meant cloth diapers that had to be lugged down multiple flights of stairs, boiled over an open flame, and then washed in nothing remotely as labor-saving a fashion as we now enjoy in America. 

It was a difficult time. The economy was in trouble. Her husband worked hard — and she often worked alongside him — but the best they could afford was sharing an apartment.

Pregnancy and childbirth were not easy for her, and especially not under those conditions.

If the baby was a son, it might be worth it.

After a long, tiring labor, her daughter was born. Exhausted, she turned her head and refused to even look at the baby, telling the midwife she had wanted a son, not another daughter.

Years later, I would hear the story, about how the midwife insisted, practically forced her to look at her newborn — and how the very sight of my mother’s little face captured my grandmother’s heart. My mother went from unwanted daughter to dearly beloved, cherished daughter. My grandmother told me years later, “Your mother was our sunshine and, when she married and left home, it was as if the sun had stopped shining.”

Although my grandmother, on moral grounds, would have never done such a thing, today women have sex-selective abortions. It is girl babies who are most often aborted.

A teenage girl I had the privilege of meeting was raped at 14, and became pregnant. I was raped at the age of 23, and went through a time that I can only describe as excruciating agony when I feared I might be pregnant by one of my rapists. I cannot imagine going through that at such a young age. I held her beautiful son when he was still a baby — an adorable, much loved little guy. She says he saved her life.

A woman I knew was in a marriage that was disintegrating to the point of ugliness. She already had two young children and then discovered she was pregnant. The timing was, needless to say, terrible. Her husband left her to raise her three little ones in less than ideal circumstances. When the baby was tiny, he was diagnosed as failure to thrive. No medical reason could be found. One of her best friends finally sat her down and told her gently, “Your baby knows he is not wanted. You have to start wanting him or he will die.” I was there. I will never forget seeing her look her baby in the eyes, weeping, asking his forgiveness, kissing his little face, promising to change her mind, to want him.

He thrived.

Another mother told me, “I’m so glad we didn’t undergo genetic testing,” as she showed me pictures of her adorable, happy toddler with Down syndrome. “I didn’t want a handicapped child. Can you imagine? I would have aborted her and she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Yet another woman told me of her crisis pregnancy, how it seemed as if her world had been shattered, turned upside down, torn apart, all her hopes and dreams demolished. “I felt like my life was ruined…forever.” Her pro-life friends somehow helped her through the difficult ordeal. “Now I wouldn’t trade any of that for the world. My child was so worth it.”

I used to give talks about breastfeeding at a high school extension program for pregnant teens and young moms. Some of them weren’t even in high school yet. It made my heart lurch to see little 13 year olds, their child bellies swollen with their own child. “Everyone wanted me to kill the kid,” one girl told me fiercely. “They even dragged me into an abortion clinic and would have forced me to have an abortion if I hadn’t threatened to start screaming. They made me leave. It’s a baby, you know? Just because no one asked for it doesn’t mean we should get rid of it.”

Years ago, I asked some older women about unwanted pregnancies. They seemed baffled. Most of them had pregnancies that they didn’t want — at first. They viewed that as part of womanhood. “We grow into love,” one told me. Another laughed, “We’re women. We change our minds!” After a pause, she said more seriously, “Our babies changed our minds.”

When pregnant with my daughter, I was screamed at by a complete stranger who found out I’d foregone prenatal testing. He informed me that it was my duty not to bring an abnormal child into the world — my duty to him, to society, and to the baby. I wrote him off as a deranged crackpot until I started hearing people say, “How could anyone bring a child like that into the world?” — referring to a child with deformed hands as if he was some sort of monster needing eradicating.

There is a fantasy that we would love to have. In that perfect dream world, all babies are planned and timed perfectly, and wanted even before conception. They are all perfect, and they grow up to be perfectly delightful little beings who bring us unmitigated joy and cause us great pride. There are neither too many nor too few of them, and they fit perfectly into our perfect lives — and provide us with beautiful pictures and lovely anecdotes to post on Facebook.

If we must have a handicapped child, at least he or she should be inspiring, the sort of child featured in heartwarming videos that go viral.

Real life is way more complicated and messy.

There is a sad story that I’ve heard over and over again all my adult life. The women and their circumstances change, but the basics remain the same. “I would have kept the baby if just one person would have advocated for it instead of for me,” is the way one woman told me. The saddest version I heard was from a woman who told me that, while waiting for her abortion, a TV in the clinic was showing live footage of a protest going on outside of another clinic. She told me that she thought, “Why couldn’t they have come here instead? They could have stopped me. They could have changed my mind.”

Her name was Tina

Posted on by
2

She was 7 years old, skinny, often unkempt, a wild little thing who screamed like a banshee, knew cuss words no little girl should know, and was quite the disruptive influence at the church school her grandparents paid for her to attend.

Somehow she stole my heart. I was 19 or 20, still young and idealistic, and I had not yet outgrown my childhood notion that love was enough to heal and fix anything. She was as drawn to me, a childcare worker at the school, as I was to her. At first she called me “Teacher”. Then she broke my heart by calling me “Mommy”.

Her mother, a single mom and an alcoholic, bought her a Raggedy Andy doll so that Tina could, as she claimed her mother told her, “also have a man in her bed at night”. She told me of what sounded like a steady stream of men in her mother’s bed, about fixing her own suppers, and about getting herself ready for school in the morning.

No matter how early I arrived to open up the church before morning day care started at 7:00am, it seemed that Tina would be waiting for me alone on the playground, underdressed for the weather, blonde hair all a mess, her thin little arms wrapped around herself, shivering. I would bundle her in my sweatshirt and hold her in my lap until she warmed up. It was one of those times that she started calling me “Mommy”.

She was impossible. She defied rules, tested boundaries, threw temper fits, fought with other children, and cussed like a little sailor. But she also sang the cutest rendition of both parts of Donnie and Marie’s signature duet that I’ve ever heard. And she craved affection and attention so desperately that it was painful to watch.

One day she flipped out when one of the school dads got playful with her. She shrieked, “Don’t molest me!!” and it scared him so much that he avoided her like the plague after that. I tried not to think about possible reasons for her reaction.

She was a bad influence on my little brother, and on a number of the other children. If she wasn’t clinging to me, I had to watch her like a hawk. She was a troubled little soul, desperately screaming for help.

One day she asked me if she could live with me, if I could be her mommy for real. I presented my case to my parents. In my naïveté, I actually thought I could ask her mother — who obviously didn’t want her — to give Tina to me, and I could raise her and love her to wholeness. Surely, despite my flaws and my youth, I would be a far better mother. We would live together in the “little house” behind the parsonage, and I would make sure she would not impose a burden on anyone else.

To me, she was worth turning my life upside down and backwards, worth giving up any hope of a “normal” future. How could I not do everything in my power to help her, to give her a better life, to rescue her, to save her?

I hated it when my mother would respond to my idealistic ideas with, “It’s not that simple.” This time I really hated it, because she was right.

And then Tina was kicked out of school. I marched into the principal’s office and demanded, pleaded, advocated, begged, guilted, quoted Scripture…you name it, I did it. How could we abandon Tina? Wasn’t she the sort of child who needed this school the most? The grandparents had sacrificed, skimping together money they didn’t have, in a desperate attempt to provide help for their little, troubled granddaughter — and we were tossing her out on her ear? I was eloquent and convincing…well, to my ears anyway. Everyone else seemed relieved to be free of the numerous ongoing and escalating behavior problems that were disrupting the other students. “We can’t sacrifice all the other students for one child,” the principal told me. “Why not?” I had the audacity to reply. “She needs us much more than they do.”

Just like that, Tina was out of my life. I never got to say goodbye, never saw or heard from her again. We had failed her. I was both angry and grieved.

The girl in this heartbreaking video reminded me of Tina…something about parts of her story, the way she looks and her outbursts of anger.

Tina impacted me more than she will ever know. I have no idea what became of her…if she’s still alive…if she even remembers me…I hope that she remembers that someone once loved her and believed in her, and thought she was worth rescuing. More than that, I hope that someone did in fact rescue her.

I hope her story had a happy, hopeful ending, her own version of this one:

Full circle | Fashionless Friday

Posted on by
1

“There’s nothing wrong with work-worn hands,” I insisted. But what did I know? I was young, naive, idealistic, and inexperienced. I wasn’t thinking that someday a man might hold my hands, and might want them to feel soft and tenderly smooth, rather than roughly calloused, aged, and battered from hard work. “There’s nothing wrong with work-worn hands,” I kept on insisting, a few years later, when the harsh cleaning solution I used to clean a commercial kitchen made my hands bleed and crack. “There’s nothing wrong with work-worn hands,” I laughed when I was a newly-wed, and an older, wiser woman urged me to don white cotton gloves under kitchen gloves before plunging my hands in hot, soapy dishwater day after day after day.

I was no longer quite so young nor naive — but I was still oh so idealistic.

My idea of beauty was, I realize now, rather other-worldly, based far less on physical reality than on love, admiration, and relationship. A few years ago, a group of women told me that I described every single one of my female friends, and every other woman I liked, as “beautiful”. Really? I had no idea.

They mimicked me, with affection. “When I got here and said I wanted to meet Laura,” one of them told me, “you said, ‘Oh, Laura? You’ll love her! She’s encouraging and funny and smart — and she’s really beautiful! She has the most amazing eyes!'”

One of the other women imitated my voice, “‘And Carmen — she has this quiet strength. Nothing throws her. She’s like a super-hero. And she gives the best hugs in the world. She is so beautiful!'”

“‘Wait ’til you meet Amy!'” another woman pretended to be me. “‘She’s a math genius, but not at all intimidating. She can be so funny, and she has helped me so much. And she’s really beautiful!'”

The women laughed. “You think everyone is beautiful!”

“No, I don’t,” I insisted. “It’s just that all of you…you really are beautiful. You are some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met! Go look in the mirror!”

Recently I was reading some articles online and I made the shocking discovery that the rest of the world doesn’t all think that way. Yes, for most of us, the objects of our affection do become more beautiful in our eyes. We even have the saying that “love makes blind,” and we’ve probably all encountered that odd-looking elderly couple that seems ridiculously smitten with each other, with the husband foolishly insisting that his wife grows more beautiful with each passing year.

But it’s more than that for me. I remember back in my college days, when a friend of mine showed me a picture from a magazine of some guy she proclaimed to be very sexy. She asked me my opinion. I scrutinized the picture carefully and had to admit that his body was aesthetically appealing, but how could I know whether or not he was sexy? In fact, I became convinced that he was the antithesis of sexy — any guy who would pose in a magazine like that was no doubt arrogant and narcissistic, and there was nothing remotely sexy about that! Ugh! Come to think of it, the guy was downright ugly!

Another friend confided in me around the same time that she had some major crush on a guy she only saw in passing and had never actually met. “What?” I was incredulous. “But you don’t even know him!”

I knew — because one cannot live for more than a day in our culture without being bombarded with this message — that most men are attracted primarily to a woman’s physical features, that men can be filled with a strong and overwhelming sexual desire for a woman who is a complete stranger to them, and that a woman’s “wonderful personality” will not make up for whatever off-putting physical flaws she might have in a man’s eyes. Men, I’ve been told over and over again, are primarily visual. You can’t see a woman’s inner beauty. You can only see her outward form.

But I’ve also realized that it’s not just men who are “shallow” in that way. Women too are guilty of looking mostly on the outside. After all, none of us can truly see inside the heart of another person.

I’ve had to live in the reality of that world, in a world in which I’ve never measured up to the culture’s standard of beauty, in a world where youthful flawlessness is idealized, in a world where whatever “cuteness” I may have possessed as a little girl has now long faded away in the experiences of living decades past my youth.

After my oldest son was born, my body was so radically changed that catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror was literally startling. It was the body of a stranger, and I was struggling to make peace with it. A dear family friend said to me, “What is our body but a tool to do God’s will? You are doing God’s will.”

I saw the beauty in that, and my eyes were opened to the new beauty in me…well, except when I would foolishly allow someone else’s opinion to matter more than God’s.

There’s more to this story, lots more, but I’ll save most of it for future blog posts. Fast forward to now. My body is aging. It’s been causing me some physical pain and discomfort lately. It’s in decline, functionally and aesthetically. That’s the way things are at my stage of life, and I can only expect this to accelerate in years to come. Eventually my body will fail, and I will die…unless death comes in a different, more sudden way. That’s our human condition.

I had a recent, mind-boggling epiphany as a result of some articles I’ve been reading. It seems I’m somewhat of an odd bird — what attracts me is relationship. I thought most people were like me, except for shallow, immature men. I honestly find it difficult to fathom that anyone — especially a woman — can be sexually attracted to someone without a strong emotional connection, without a friendship. I am mystified by the whole concept of the “friend zone”, because I’ve always elevated the idea of friendship and have seen it as a necessity for a truly rewarding romantic relationship, not the antithesis of it.

It’s like I said at the beginning of this rather rambling post that isn’t adequately expressing the entirety of what I’m trying to say: My idea of beauty is, I realize now, rather other-worldly, based far less on physical reality than on love, admiration, and relationship.

Friendship is attractive to me. True intimacy…a deep connection…mutual respect and understanding…a close bond…openness and vulnerability…without all that, I’m as lost as I was back in college, trying to explain to my friend why I didn’t find a supposedly hot hunk of a man in a magazine even remotely attractive. How could he be? He was a stranger.

Then, as I was mulling these things over, I read this:

As Paul writes, we are meant to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, beings that weaken and suffer and endlessly minister. Our bellies should swell with children and shared meals and laughter. Our eyes should smart with tears as we grieve with those who mourn. Our knees should ache as we kneel to serve, and our hands should twinge as they clasp the fingers of the dying. A preserved body is stagnant, atrophied; its value misunderstood, its substance misapplied. A sacrificed body is tired, rundown, redeemed, and truly beautiful. [from A Living Sacrifice: The Beauty of a Body Broken for Others]

That’s why Jesus’ resurrected body still bore His beautiful scars. It’s why pregnancy-ravaged bodies are beautiful and, yes, even holy. It’s why those who give of themselves in sacrificial and loving ways, who let me in to their hearts, become breathtakingly beautiful in my eyes.

It turns out that I was right after all. Yes, hopelessly idealistic — although I prefer to think of it as hopefully idealistic — and, as usual, marching to the beat of a drummer that is out of step with most of our culture, and even out of step with most people. But I will cling to my other-worldly notions of beauty, and of what makes someone attractive to me. It turns out that there is nothing wrong with work-worn hands. Maybe someday mine will become far more so than they are now…along with the rest of me…so that I can be “tired, rundown, redeemed, and truly beautiful” in the eyes of the Only One who truly matters.

After all, the thought of hearing the words “my good and faithful servant” means far more to me than even the most flattering words and opinions of mere mortals.