Be A Woman
I have spent most of my life wondering about this. I have also spent most of my life actively trying to figure it out. This is one of those times.
When I was a little girl, I remember the time that I knew in every fiber of my body and soul that I was made to be a mother. Strange, I know. What five-year-old dreams of childbirth? This one, apparently. I was walking back and forth in my room "feeding" my baby doll and singing her to sleep. I had been doing this for the better part of the afternoon and I had no intention of stopping anytime soon. I loved it too much. Everything about me was aligned and at peace with my existence and I knew what and who I was. A mother.
Flash forward almost ten years and you have a fourteen-year-old going to a weeklong summer camp for vocation-discernment and smack! there's the curveball. That was the summer that I met happy nuns. I had only met a few nuns before and although lovely they were quite professional due to their charism. But these nuns!! They were the most joyful and delightful individuals I had ever met and more so than I could have ever thought possible on earth!
That's when it hit me: I wanted to be happy in life, and most women that I had met, whether they were confused high schoolers like myself or women well into their married vocation, they were all too tired and worn out to be happy. They lacked the bandwidth, the down-time, and the self-love necessary to live joyful and purpose-driven lives. This realization severely saddened me and lead me to think (queue the melancholy) that if married women are so unhappy, and nuns are so ridiculously happy, then I have to become a nun to be happy, right?
I spent around three years with this question reeling through my mind, and there's a lot more to say about how I arrived at a conclusion, but let me simply say that happiness is not exclusive to a convent or a perfect household. It has nothing to do with how much money you have or how much money you give. It is not about how many litanies you pray or how often you make it to daily Mass.
What it really comes down to, is how much do you love yourself?
Christ gave us two rules to live by that combined all the wisdom of His revealed-Word thus far: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Everything you ever need to think, breathe, and live is in these two sentences.
Primarily, to attain the supreme and eternal happiness of heaven, we must direct ourselves toward loving God with everything we've got, i.e., everything He gave us to live our lives with.
But we must not stop there! We also must love our neighbors as ourselves.
It's not enough to pray and tell God how much you love Him. This will not fulfill you. It is the first thing you should do, absolutely! But it is no the only thing you should do. The second thing we, as women, tend to do backward, and this I think is where a lot of us fall short, do things out of order and then feel like we're failing at life. We love others more than we love ourselves, which leads to us running on empty, and others not knowing how to treat us with the love and respect that we don't even realize that we deserve. It's like trying to stack up books, but putting the little books on the bottom and the big books on the top, and then hiding all-day wearing leggings and no bra, hating ourselves because the stack of books fell. Instead of loving others with the full and vivacious, unconditional love with which we love ourselves, we love others unconditionally whilst telling ourselves that we suck at loving people and therefore don't deserve to be loved. Thus we end up empty and tired and old at the ripe ol' age of "15 and up" and wish life was different. We become those women who a 14-year-old looks at and thinks twice about getting married and making love and babies. Was that the goal you set out with? Is that what you want your marriage to be? Is that who you want to become in life?
No!! Of course not!
Personally, I find this pathetic and do not want to spend my days like this. So here is my call to get out of bed, put on a bra and your big-girl-bad-ass-pants and restack the books with the big ones on the bottom and the little ones on the top, so that it's all secure and sturdy.
I do not pretend to understand what a woman is. I know that I don't know that. But I do know that stacking books with the smallest on the bottom and the biggest at the top is a stack that is doomed to fall. So why not stack biggest to smallest, eh? How about we, as women, love ourselves before we love others, just like Jesus told us too!? How about instead of counting rosary beads and litanies, you take a good hard look at how you live your daily life and figure out how to straighten out the things we've got backward so that we love more? How about we make sure that we get the sleep, the nutrition, and the physical activity that we need to feel energetic and whole? (Feeling like yourself should be normal -- yet it is such a phenomenon).
How about instead of looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself that you're not pretty enough, or too fat, or too tall, or not tall enough, how about you treat yourself like your best friend? What would you tell her? You would tell her words of unconditional love. You would tell her that she is beyond beautiful; that she has the power to break out of anything in her life that makes her feel chained up; you would tell her that she deserves the best and happiest and freest life imaginable.
Get out there, and discover what it means to be a woman.
Love,
Laney <3
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