At a women's group luncheon at church, we were doing some visioning because we have a female pastor on staff for the first time in years. The women's group has fallen apart a bit, by and by, and so we were discussing what we wanted out of it. This naturally lead to a discussion of the importance of not making it something available only to one generation, but to get women, especially younger women, to participate. Then, someone posed the question of what we were defining a younger woman to be. Then came the answer that I least wanted to hear: Someone who has young children.
What does that mean for me? Am I not a woman? Does my childless status somehow disqualify me as being a real woman?
I am sure that the woman didn't mean offense, but there is this sense that a woman is not really fulfilled until she has a child. That her life somehow lacks purpose or meaning. That she is not a woman. She's still just a girl in a grown-up body.
Well, I'm fucking sorry that my grown-up body rejected the only baby that my husband and I have managed to make in our five years of marriage. I'm sorry that despite shelling out $16, 000 for invitro fertilization, all I have to show for it is a fridge full of meds, a box full of needles, and a picture of two blastocysts that were washed out of me by a river of blood nine days after they went in. Oh, yes, I forgot that I've also got a heart that's been broken three times over.
I wanted to scream and shout about it at church, but that wouldn't have been very proper, so I am doing it here.
I am a real woman.
I am not defined by my womb.
I am not childish.
I am devestated.
I am surviving.
I am childless.
I am tired.
I am.
Amen. We are women too! We are more 'woman' than most people will ever know. We know heartache yet we carry on. We cry in the shower then put on makeup and high heels and put on our happy face. WE are the real women.
ReplyDeleteWell said my darling daughter. No woman should ever be defined by the children she has or lack there of. I too was annoyed today by the attitude that we are all pre-child, child rearing, or post child as if this should make some difference in our faith or interests.
ReplyDeleteThat particular comment struck a chord with me as well. I cringed when I heard it and looked your way thinking, "She's more of a woman than many other "women" I've ever met." I remember when I went through infertility feeling like my body wasn't womanly enough, that my self-worth was defined by my ability to produce a child. Furthermore, I couldn't breasfeed after I successfully had a child. Am I less of a woman because I don't have the hormones needed to sustain my child's life? I haven't fully come to grips with what it means to be a "woman" still, even after having had children and now that I'm in my third decade of life. I look at myself as a "girl" sometimes, and actually made the mistake of calling myself "just a girl" to my husband who proceeded to hold me in his lap and tell me over and over, "You haven't been a girl for a long time; you're a woman because of everything you do each and every day for your friends and family". What he was really trying to make clear to me was that being a woman was not about hormones despite society's continued pressure to make it so, but about being me and doing the things I was already doing. I love him for that, but there are still days I struggle with what being a "woman" means and whether I'm holding up my end of the bargain. It's other women that need to realize that they're lucky they haven't struggled with the same emotional issues others have and that should take note of how other women who are struggling pick themselves up every day and are women in the face of adversity. Every biological mother could learn something about being from a woman from a woman who has struggled with infertility.
ReplyDeleteThanks Tammy!
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