Womanhood

A friend of mine recently asked a bunch of her women friends to answer this question for her – “What does it feel like to be a woman?”. It is a remarkable question and one that opens a dialogue that is rare and rife with difficult moments and acknowledgements. I am sharing with you my reply in my spirit of utter disclosure and search for the commonality and difference in being:

The first time I felt like a woman I was running around Green Lake in Seattle. At the time I was having a difficulty finishing the three miles, but persisted anyway, and was swept away entirely by my own actions – here I was, thousands of miles from where I grew up in Maryland, moving my legs forward, feeling pain, feeling the air blow by me. So many other people were doing the same, but in my own movements I was creating my own experience, I was becoming. Looking back, it is an interesting experience because of all that I was NOT aware of at the time – I was at the beginning of what my psychologist would later call a “Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Breakdown”, I was living off the generosity of two male friends in a tiny apartment with no privacy, I was about to lose my job because of said breakdown, and I had the beginnings of what would develop into the worst case of mononucleosis my school nurse had seen. I was a total and complete wreck, psychologically and physically, yet I felt a feeling that for the first I associated with womanhood, and it was powerful enough of a feeling that I remember it clearly and often.

In the proceeding years it has indeed been in these small moments of disaster that I have felt most like a woman. Let me explain – in my “fight or flight” moment, I fight. I manage chaos, I grow lucid at the minute of lost control. These experiences of “getting a handle on”, of “putting my ducks in a row”, of seeing my own power over my reactions to uncontainable life occurrences, THAT is when I feel like a woman. The second I decide to shape my own actions towards improving life’s disasters, is the only moment when I have true responsibility. It is that minute instant when I birth myself, when I contain within me all the lessons my parents taught me, all the intuition I have inherited, all the possibility of new life and growth. It is the abdication of life to the unseen chances, and the acknowledgement of accountability towards the future, a blend of utter control and modest resignation.

I cannot ever compare womanhood to manhood. Not only is the latter an experience I will never achieve, but it is pointless to try the comparison. One cannot be without the other, and therefore they are integral in the world experience of life. You cannot COMPARE one thing to something else when each is a part of each other and a part of a larger whole simultaneously. We as women have a gift of harboring growth and creation and feeling the expansion of a psyche. While this is utterly integral to the development of womanhood and individuals in their own growth INTO community, the only aspect of it that I feel in MY OWN womanhood is its potential. My future as a mother, my possible pregnancies have an influence more in my individual relationships than in my being as an individual, I think. I do not take care of children, or bandage a scraped knee, or cook food, or love plants, because I have the ability to carry a child in my future. In fact, my boyfriend does many of those much better than I do, and he loves doing it just as much.

My womanhood is neither burden nor strength, it is not a gift or a punishment, it is a fact. It is unchangeable, it is something I enjoy and delight in, and it is something I am grateful for in that I delight in and am grateful for life itself. I have had a cyst removed from a breast – a very frightening experience for a 20 year old – which was benign. I was told it was caused by an over-production of estrogen, and in fact I have been told that this over-production has caused several other health situations I have experienced. I find this thoroughly amusing, as I can make jokes like “I am too much woman for my own body”, etc. But is it just estrogen that creates a woman? That can’t be, as the list of traits that have defined womanhood over the course of society’s development trades places with those supposedly caused by the male testosterone more frequently than nail polish colors. One decade a woman is supposed to be mild and a homebody, and the next women claim that it is our independence and ability to dominate that make us true women. The argument of pre-historic roles as the delineator for “supposed” archetypes is invalid, as we have no clue as to what that would have been, just guesses by anthropologists.

I have no statement in here about feeling beautiful, or looking a certain way. Appearance does not make me feel like a woman. Appearance makes me feel accepted by others, or desired, sure, but not like a woman. When I run really fast or bend in yoga or throw around a five year old, I feel like a woman. Womanhood is my relationship to life, to humanity. When I love my boyfriend, when I hug my mother, when I speak to my girlfriends, when I laugh with my brother, I feel like a woman. When I feel alive, I feel like a woman.