This isn't the life I was supposed to have.
My life was mapped out in pretty clear lines from the moment of my birth: a very simple and straightforward template that fell instantly into place because I was born a girl into an evangelical Christian family. My upbringing trained me to meekness, compliance, modesty and submission to male authority. I was expected to go to college, find a nice Christian man to be my spiritual leader, marry young and produce children (the number was up to me but it was understood that I was supposed to have more than one) that I would raise as evangelical Christians to be warriors in God's army against the gathering darkness of liberalism and secularism. I would stay at home with my kids and devote my life to wifely submission, motherhood, and the church family. That was my life's purpose: to be a woman in all the ways that white Christianity defines womanhood.
None of this was ever explicitly stated, that I can recall. My parents never told me that I had to get married and have lots of babies, or that I shouldn't have a career. It was all indirect, cultural, and constant -- particularly the emphasis on gender roles, packaged up as God's Will. Men are leaders. Men are providers. Men are protectors. Women are followers. Women are nurturers. Women are not aggressive. Women need to be protected and guided.
And I embraced these roles wholeheartedly. I never wanted a career. I wanted a husband who would lead our family, I wanted to stay home with my children and maybe even homeschool them, I wanted all the security that came with upholding the godly status quo.
The trouble is, I'm smart. It wasn't that being smart itself was frowned upon; quite the contrary. In the evangelical church a smart woman is seen as a tremendous asset as long as she directs her intellect along prescripted lines and uses it to support the church's agenda and her husband's opinions. And for awhile I did what I was supposed to do with my intellect, memorizing Scripture and skillfully twisting logic to argue against evolution in biology class and against feminism in social studies. (Blessed is the evangelical woman who declaims feminism, for she enforces her own subjugation.) But I'm also a thinker. I ask questions. I follow the truth wherever it leads. And my questions became dangerous.
The other trouble is, I'm imaginative and strong-willed and have a mind of my own. I grew tired of men far less intelligent than I insisting that they held authority over me because they had a dick. (In college one douche informed me that I had to submit to his authority in some time-wasting "ministry group" because he was a man, and I retorted, "I'm smarter than you." His mouth fell open speechlessly, reinforcing my point. I quit the group on the spot.) I grew tired of others telling me what I should think and do and be and want. I could not continue in meekness and live with myself, so I shed it like old skin and started scaring people with my intensity and my questions and my vehemence and my opinions.
I'm trying to pinpoint where exactly I went wrong in terms of the destiny I was born to. (When did I start disappointing my parents?) These kinds of deviations from cultural expectation never boil down to one moment, however; rather, thousands of little moments gradually coalesce into a sea change.
So here I am approaching the middle way (twenty years not even a little bit wasted, thank god), and my life couldn't be more opposite from my youthful expectations. I have never been married. I have never given birth. I am decidedly unvirginal. I have built a rising career. I possess not even the tiniest spark of religious faith. I am not meek. I am not compliant. I lead, protect, and provide for myself.
Even by secular standards I am terrifyingly independent. If I was expecting greater empowerment outside the church, I was sharply disappointed. Sure, no one bitches about me having *a job* but my ambitions to increase my own power and leadership aren't exactly lauded by the general public. And I'm still supposed to get married and have children (or at least be really really sad if I don't). I'm still supposed to be "nice." I'm still assumed to be an object of men's pleasure, and an object of men's will. Turns out that systemic misogyny is all-pervasive. Evangelical Christianity is a bastion of some of the Western tradition's worst and oldest traits, but those traits have not yet faded from the more progressive culture that evolved from it.
It sucks when you realize that even if you get out of the maximum security prison, your only option is the minimum security one.
Fortunately (?) I was a transgressive woman in the far more restrictive subculture for long enough, and, thanks to knowing my own mind, I've been single for long enough, that I can transgress against mainstream expectations with fewer cataclysms. But it's taxing. It took awhile to realize what was happening, because it IS less restrictive out here, and because the misogyny in mainstream culture is much more subtle and therefore exponentially harder to combat. Everything is a power struggle as a woman. Everything. The clothes you put on. The state of your body under your clothes. The food you eat. Walking down the fucking street. Your interactions with literally everyone you encounter. Being powerful is exhausting when you're up against the entire social infrastructure. (And I'm white, and cisgender, and mostly heterosexual; I have it comparatively easy. And it's still fucking exhausting.) At the end of every day I feel so drained I can barely drag my ass into my apartment and make myself a meal. Especially now, in the Age of Trump, being a woman is hard.
And it's got me thinking. In a society where all women labor under strict expectations regarding their role and their worth, irrespective of worldview, how does a woman determine herself? How does she live and move and have her being without reference to anyone else?
I belong to a group of secular women who supported Hillary Clinton from the start of the 2016 campaign, and who still support her now. On a "self-care thread" the other day most of these strong, amazing, powerful, wonderful women were expressing exhaustion and despair. They're barely keeping their heads above water. And I felt both deeply grateful and profoundly guilty because in spite of the exhaustion and anger in which I live daily, I am quietly thriving in a time when thriving is extremely difficult. (Again. I am white, and cis, and mostly heterosexual, and am by these traits, for which I can take no credit, shielded from the worst of what is happening in our country. I am lucky that thriving is remotely possible for me.) The main difference between me and most of the depleted, despondent women in the group? They have families to tend.
The title of this post is, of course, a reference to Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own," wherein she asserts that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a space, an actual room, that she can call her own, on which no obligation can encroach. Being female, she said, one hundred goddamn years ago, eats up all a woman's time and attention by virtue of her duties to marriage and childrearing. In order to make something more of yourself, you have to seize a physical space in which to do it. Now that women are expected to be fully engaged in the workforce in addition to continuing to perform all the physical, mental and emotional labor of maintaining the home, we have less time and space than ever. And it's astronomically difficult to correct the inherent power imbalances in nearly all heterosexual relationships because even if you're living with a good "woke" man, he still operates under the blindness and naivete of his own privilege, and it's so much goddamn work to shift it.
For most of my adult life I have grieved my single status. I want love, I want companionship, I want a partner in this crazy thing called life. (That grief, in combination with the horrible model I grew up with in which the woman does ALL OF THE WORK and celebrates as a victory every minor reduction in the man's narcissistic behavior, led me to try really hard to make it work with some really unsuitable men.) But lately, realizing the kind of relationship that I want, and watching the struggles of my good friends and acquaintances to empower themselves as women in their committed long-term relationships, I have begun to realize how much more self-determined I am able to be, simply because I have no one to care for but myself.
Naturally the instinctive reaction to even saying that is to feel that celebrating my freedom amounts to selfishness. Women are supposed to sacrifice their ambitions and their needs for their mates and children. Women are supposed to find time to be themselves on top of that sacrifice. That is a woman's job. That is noble.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I call bullshit.
Not that kids aren't worth it. If I'd gotten married and had kids in the evangelical church when I was supposed to, I'd probably have worked my way to this point eventually (I've always known my own mind), and I would, like the other amazing women I know, find ways to empower myself even with family responsibilities. But it's no accident that I didn't get married or have kids. I've had opportunities. I rejected them all (with varying degrees of sorrow and disappointment -- and, lately, sheer glee) because they didn't fit what I wanted. (Also, in the interest of technical clarity, one opportunity rejected me, and at this point I have to feel grateful that at least I didn't come to liberal secularism while ensconced in a Christian marriage and family, which would in all likelihood have devastated both.) Part of why I don't have to make any difficult choices between family and freedom, or between family and fulfillment, or between fulfillment in social roles and fulfillment in myself, is because I already made them.
It's kind of weird, considering myself lucky that I have not yet gotten what I always dreamed of. But my liberation and agency have become my highest priorities, and I am profoundly grateful that they currently have no obstacle at home. Also that, going forward, any relationship on which I embark will start off where I am now, empowered, self-valuing, self-determining, aware, and with non-negotiable expectations for a fully equal partnership in which I am fully my own person (in short, what everyone should have, regardless of gender).
I have a life of my own. I would never have considered this in political terms before, but when you're a woman, every aspect of your life is political, not because you choose it to be, but because the entire culture has politicized it before you were born. There are laws about what I can and can't do with my body. There are laws that protect, and/or do not prosecute, those who do things to my body and my psyche without my consent. I still do not have equal protection under the law in any state in this nation. I am told what is acceptable for my appearance, for my personality, for my career choices. I am told how I am permitted to behave in relationships. It's all political. Every last part of my life. So yes, having a life of my own is an inherently political position. It's transgressive. It's not what I thought I was choosing, but it's the culmination of my choices. It's caused me a lot of heartache over the years -- but far less heartache than participating in my own powerlessness. And now it's bringing me unexpected joy and strength right alongside its unexpected freedom and power, in a time when it's nearly impossible for women to find any of those things.
Liberation. Agency. Independence. The ability to choose exactly how I spend all of my time and where I invest all of my mental, physical and emotional resources. That's a motherfucking gift. And I unwittingly gave it to myself, when I extricated myself from unsatisfactory relationships and learned how to navigate the world on my own terms.
A life of my own. I found it by accident, and I'm keeping it on purpose. I hope more women do too.
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