To Be a Woman

When I was very young I had an experience that caused me to feel unsafe as a girl so I became a very strong tomboy. I dressed like a boy, played sports like a boy, and wished my parents had given me a name that could have passed for either a girl or a boy. The only time I looked like a girl was at church because I knew I had to wear a dress there but within ten seconds of being home I was in pants again. My hair was often up in a hat so I could look more like a boy. I believed that if I was a boy then no one would hurt me, I would be safe.

As I got older, it became harder to hide the fact that I really was a girl. As I went through puberty I realized that I was going to have to come to grips with my gender because my bust size made it impossible to keep hiding what I was!

When I was fifteen, I had bad knee pain so I went to a woman that did a type of bodywork called Structural Integration, or Rolfing. During my sessions we talked a lot about life, how I felt about my body, and many, many more things. I don’t remember most of the words she said, but I still remember the concepts she taught. One day she asked me a question that took me by surprise. She asked, “Who are you?” I just stared at her but didn’t say anything. She stopped working and waited for me to answer. There was an uncomfortable silence before I finally replied with, “I am a child of God.”

She agreed with my statement but asked the question again, asking for more detail. I could tell that she wasn’t going to continue with my bodywork session until I gave her a satisfactory answer. My mind was racing as she waited for what seemed a very long time before I eventually blurted out, “I’m somebody who has to be doing something all the time.” She kind of chuckled at that and went back to working on me but continued the conversation while working. I don’t remember much else of that session, but her questioning stayed with me for a very long time.

I went home and asked myself over and over again, “Who are you?” Not only was I a child of God, but I was a daughter of God. I felt that if I was born female, then that’s what God intended for me to be. So I started on a quest to try to become okay with the fact I was a girl. It took years of searching and even professional help before I finally felt that I was okay being female.

By the time I got married I felt that I had embraced being female and looked forward to my role as wife and mother. Being a woman took on a whole new meaning when I thought about being married. I was excited for the chance to explore femininity when I didn’t have to play the role of the man as well.

At first it seemed to be a good challenge to be doing all the womanly things a wife should do. I had been working for five years so it was different to be home, trying to be a housewife. Within a couple weeks of being married I was pregnant. It didn’t take very long of severe morning sickness to make me question again what was good about being a girl. It quickly became a difficult task to clean the house, do the dishes, laundry, and cooking, and fulfill all of my husband’s desires.

Tension rose between us as our family grew and my ability to be there for my husband decreased. He commented to me one time that he just didn’t understand my lack of desire to be with him. He said that women in TV shows and movies always complained about their husbands not desiring them and he was showing me lots of affection that I was rejecting. His comments made me question greatly what was wrong with me. Media told me that I was supposed to feel and behave a certain way but it just wasn’t accurate with who I was. As our relationship steadily declined, my self-worth went down the drain, especially with my feelings about being a woman. I was told many times that I wasn’t behaving like a good woman, or a good wife, should. There was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I just be like other women?

What little self-respect and self-esteem I had learned before marriage suddenly disintegrated from the constant comparison of me to women in the media. I just wasn’t like them and because I wasn’t like them I was a failure at being a woman.

So what does it mean to be a woman and to be feminine? I am still trying to figure that out. As I have asked others for an answer, the most common response is to be sexy and attractive. I don’t like wearing makeup and fancy clothes so does that mean I’m not feminine? I don’t believe so. I think it is more of an internal thing.

As I have searched for what it means to be a woman, I was reminded of a talk that Margaret D. Nadauld made in October of the year 2000. She said, “Women of God can never be like women of the world. The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity.”

I don’t want to pattern my life after what media portrays women as; I want to be a woman of God. I think that is where true beauty and femininity is found.

Over the last couple of years as I have worked at healing from my marriage, I have been striving to understand how God views women. I believe He has great respect for women. I have felt His great love and compassion. I sense his awe of women with all they go through in this mortal existence. I believe that He weeps when He sees his daughters mistreated. I believe that He desires to take us in His arms and protect us from the pains and sorrows of this world. I also believe that His love for us is so great that He allows us to fully experience all the trials of life because He knows that is how we will learn and grow. Like a parent watching a child learn to walk, He knows that there are times that we must fall so we can learn to get back up and develop the strength to walk on our own. Because He knows we will fall, He always has a way prepared for us to heal, no matter what, as long as we ask Him for help.

Like that stumbling, learning child, I often sit there and cry, wondering why no one caught me before I fell, why no one moved that coffee table that I just ran into and bumped my head on, why I am not immediately picked up and saved from the pains and trials. But like the loving parent, God oversees all of my life, giving gentle direction, wishing I wasn’t so stubborn in wanting to do things my way, and always, always being there to pick me up, give me a hug, and tell me to try again.

One of my fears as I move forward in life is that by becoming more in tune with my womanhood and femininity I will make myself vulnerable to being hurt like I was in the past. As I have contemplated this fear, a calm assurance has filled my soul as if God himself is telling me, “It’s going to be okay! I have never left you in the past and I will never leave you in the future. You are beautiful! You are safe! You are mine!”

What does it mean to be a woman? Being a woman means being true to yourself, embracing all of who you are, being filled with the Holy Spirit, accepting your body for what it is, being filled with compassion and love, and worrying more about what God thinks than what the world thinks. Being a woman is more about just allowing your true self to shine forth than about looking a certain way or getting attention from certain people. I still have a long ways to go before I feel truly comfortable with being a woman, but I feel that I have made great progress in the last year. Now I can honestly say that I am grateful that I was born a girl. There is so much more to learn and I am grateful that I have this time on earth to be learning, growing, and becoming.

Have you ever struggled with how the world portrays your gender?