Am I Feminine Enough?

I have a small confession to make. My Twin cousin and my Best Friend will both probably laugh out loud when they hear this, but it needs to be said anyway. There are some times when I don’t feel very feminine, when, in fact, I feel like I’ve failed at being a good woman. Those are times when I think of the following:

I don’t like to sew and I don’t like to cook.

Oh, I can do both enough to get by just fine on my own, but really, there are other things I’d rather be doing with my time. Like knitting, crocheting, writing letters, making lace, spinning yarn, reading, singing, playing my instruments, and other similar pursuits. Those are interesting. And I do like the kind of sewing that can be done with a needle and thread; it’s just the sewing machine that really bothers me.

But the image of the ideal woman I have before my mind (an image formed, I suppose, through reading books mostly a century old or older), is one who sews and cooks and cleans. And while spinning and lacemaking might be traditionally feminine pursuits, there is very little need for them nowadays, and thus I am wont to consider them unimportant.

I can darn a sock, knit a cable stitch or pick a G lick with ease and tranquility, but ask me to sew a collar or make a meal for a family of seven, half of whom can’t eat gluten, and I will instantly get all stressed out.

So if I’m not good at cooking or sewing, the question is, does that make me a failure as a woman?

Answer 1: Yes. You have definitely failed. You need to immediately get your act together and practice these essential feminine arts. Otherwise how are you going to take care of the family you are going to have someday? If you can’t cook, how will you please your husband? If you can’t sew, how are your daughters going to be able to find anything modest to wear? You need to leave off doing the things you like, because those aren’t important, and get very good at the things you don’t like, because those are the important ones.

Answer 2: No, you haven’t failed. Cooking and sewing are good things to know, but your femininity does not depend on those skills. Besides, it’s not like you can’t do those things at all, but you just don’t like doing them. Look at all those other very feminine things you can do. Most of all, look at who you are—a daughter of God. He doesn’t fault you for not having certain talents or skills. He just cares what you do with the ones you do have. Consider the lilies of the field…

Will you believe it, when I ask myself this question, I answer myself the first answer most of the time, even though I’m fairly sure answer 2 is much closer to the truth.

But then, once upon a time, my mother handed me a sport coat of my dad’s, and two leather elbow patches, and asked if I could sew them on. “It drives me nuts doing that,” she said. “I always poke myself, and it goes so slow—you have to do it by hand, and I can’t even see the holes.”

I was going to tell her I’d do it, when she added,

“I’m dreading it so much that I’d even be willing to trade you some other sewing if you’ll do it.”

Great bonus feature, I thought. My mother agreed to finish two shirts for me (which had already been cut out and partially assembled, minus the hard parts), and in return I would put the patches on Dad’s coat.

And then I thought to myself, “Gee. There are things even Mother doesn’t like to do. I guess you don’t have to be good at everything in order to be a good wife and mother, or even a good woman.”

Advice to Self: God gives everybody a different set of strengths and weaknesses. The trick is to use your strengths well, and for the glory of God. Work on your weaknesses, but don’t fault yourself for them.

The Little White Violet

Springtime (I think it is springtime now. All the signs point to it), is a lovely time for looking at flowers. Of course, most of the flowers around this time of year look like this:

One becomes very familiar with Taraxacum officinale subsp. vulgare when one has a little brother who thinks they are pretty flowers and consequently gathers huge bouquets of them, beaming proudly as he presents them to you. From a very early age, mine made the connection that flowers are things that you pick and give to girls you like, most notably (in his case) your mother and sisters. It's very sweet of him. I must admit, however, that in the last two years he has put together some very lovely bouquets with several different types of flowers carefully chosen to go together...usually with a dandelion thrown in there somewhere. But I digress.

Though dandelions are by far the most plentiful, I was convinced that they were not the only kind of flower to be found, so I went looking.

"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."
--J. R. R. Tolkein, The Hobbit 
 

In my mother's garden I found some very picturesque bleeding hearts:

 They were not the something I was after. I wanted something smaller, rarer, more secret.

Then I found this:

It's a wild strawberry. They grow on the north side of the house and are very diminutive, but every year put forth their perennial effort boldly, even producing tiny fruit in June. The fruits are mostly seeds, but one must applaud the attempt. The wild strawberries also, cute in their miniature bravado (how many synonyms can I find for "small"?), were not the something I was looking for.

 

These were.

The white violets had hidden for years under a huge hydrangea bush, very secret, until once upon a time Dad decided that the bush was getting too big for its britches and cut it down. Several times. Only then did the white violets come out into general notice.

They never asked to be recognized. They were quite content to bloom completely hidden by the hydrangeas for a very long time, doing what they were made to do, being what they were made to be, whether anyone noticed or not. And that is what they still do. The only difference is that now their surroundings have changed so that we can fully see and appreciate their beauty.

I know a few very holy women like that. Do you?

 

 

Beginning the Journey

Once upon a time (for thus begins all journeys), as I was driving down the winding, wooded roads to Mankato for another week of college classes, a song began forming itself in the back of my mind. I don't remember how it went, for I had no way of writing it down or recording it, but I remember that it somehow wove into words the strange thing that was happening to me; that somehow, when I was at home, I felt (and acted, I am afraid) like a little girl, but as soon as I went back to my apartment at college, I was a woman again.

College is reputed to be, beyond a place of learning, a place where teens grow up into respectable citizens, and I think to some extent this is true. When you live out on your own, you are forced to pay your own bills, buy your own groceries, form and maintain your own friendships and fulfill your own commitments, and all these things foster the sense of responsibility that distinguishes the stereotypical teenagers from the grownups.

But what happens after college? Most of us nowadays move back home, at least for a while. Not, as the culture assumes, because we are lazy, but because it is the most financially responsible thing to do while we are paying off the debt we accumulated in college. However, the feeling of being a little girl when I went home for a weekend didn't go away when I moved home for good, and it became very easy to let the responsible woman that had developed in college give way to the immature girl.

The question was this: If I couldn't be a woman around my family, had I really become a woman at all? Or was it just an illusion? Or was it that I had set out on my journey of becoming a woman, and climbed the foothills easily, but was now being faced with the high and daunting mountain?

Having decided upon the latter answer, I decided that no matter how high the mountain looked, I was going to tackle it.

"Be who you are meant to be, and you will set the world on fire."
--Saint Catherine of Siena
 

This blog is the story of my journey. In it I will talk a lot about family, quite a bit about friends, somewhat about vocations, relationships as the subject proves relevant, a bit about music, work, general happenings and probably a multitude of other stuff that I can't foresee, all with a general undercurrent of the good old Catholic faith. For the goal of this journey, ultimately, is heaven.

I am writing for myself, for I cannot claim to be an expert of any kind, but I am also writing for anyone else who might want to come with me. Perhaps we can help each other.

For the title of this blog, a subject over which I have deliberated long without success, I have to thank two philosophy majors from NDSU; the first (who also happens to be my cousin) for suggesting the title, and the second for kindly translating it into Latin for me. Benigne dicis.

Once upon a time there was a girl...