Too Busy Being A Woman

Women talk about losing themselves after having children. Like the slender crescent of their life before grew wings, their purpose injected now to plump and glowing, but funny enough, they don’t paint anymore. Anyway, the painting was silly. All the routine of rearing and raising -- I guess this is what I do now, they’ll say, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. And I believe them when they say it.

I felt something similar after getting married. You do, by the joining definition, leave one thing to cleave to another. And if, by nature, you’re firm in fending for yourself, then fending for two overnight is as disorienting as it sounds. I struggled the most at dinnertime meals. Growing up, I watched my angel mom -- she always had ingredients on hand, throwing a little bit of this and a little bit of that into her magic, little pot. And she’d feed five happy bellies and she’d do it twirling in an apron every damn day. Evidently, this is what I do now, I’d say in a panicky, helpless rage.

The planning and prepping and cooking and concocting does not come naturally for me, nor does it come joyfully. I cried about it every place my husband and I ever lived, until eventually, he sat me seriously down and wondered, “I have not expected this of you, I am not disappointed in what you have to offer, and I will not one day up and resent the things you’re not. So tell me now, who then?”

I thought of God’s question to a bare-skinned Eve in her essence, mother of the living. “I fashioned you freely from bone, called you Woman, and left you here without shame. So tell me now, who then let you know you were naked? Who told you to hide?”

By grace, I’ll have a girl in a few weeks and being her mother won’t make me a woman any more than being a wife does and any more than having a hot meal ready on the table does and any more than getting a period does and any more than having hair does. Imagine a garden hose slinking around thinking someday it might be the Atlantic, or the faucet in apartment 211 that waits around jealously for its upgrade to a river. “No,” they all say, “we’re too busy being water.”

I hope we’ll untie our femininity from the labeled vessels that hold us. Sister, pastor, widow, writer, homemaker, grandmother, student, single. And when we inevitably hide under the guise of where we’re most comfortable, I hope we’ll have ears to hear, “Where are you?” I hope we’ll remember the creativity from which we came lest we forget that before all this running, we were far too busy just being women.