Womanhood Is Not A Curse

I wrote this post one night when I had far too much energy and a billion thoughts racing through my mind. It is muddled and goes off in random directions without warning. Proceed with that in mind. 😆

For the longest time, I’ve been ashamed to be a woman. I think it must have started when I began to physically mature. I was 10ish when I got my period (embarrassing and so humiliating that I refused to talk about it for years). It was around then, too, that my *coughs* chest started to grow and expaneded so rapidly that I have ugly stretch marks. 😑 Too much info? Sorry.

I’ve always hated that part of me. I’d look around and see all of the very small chested girls and wish so much that I was them. I hated how I couldn’t wear shirts that fit my (at the time *sniffles*) thin middle because they were crazy tight on the top. I hated it all.

I was busy reflecting on this recently as I read Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage on the transgender epidemic among teenage girls.

In the last chapter, Abigail speaks about the differences between men and women. Not only the physical, but the emotional and mental.

I would have probably cried if I hadn’t been at work with a co-worker in the room. And the fact that books never make me cry. 😆 (Also please don’t think I was reading instead of working, it was the very end of the night and everything was done).

Because she made it so easy to understand that women are no less valuable than men. We are equal.

God has given us differences for a reason. We are gentler, more empethetic, we are built to love and nurture. Not that men aren’t, but women have special qualities that make us perfect. Perfect mothers. Perfect caretakers. Perfect for bringing comfort to the terrified and love to the lonely.

There is a reason that almost all of the staff at both the men and women’s home where I work are female. We are caretakers by nature and that is in no way something to down play or be ashamed of.

We live in a culture obsessed with strength. As women we are physically weaker than our male counterparts and somehow my mind always took that to mean that women were less worthy of being loved, less worthy of being alive.

It’s a lie.

We are not men. We don’t have some of the gifts that men are given. But that doesn’t mean that we are any less worthy of respect or of life. Men are to be the heads of the households and to lead. But that doesn’t mean that women should lay down and be trampled on.

We matter. God didn’t make two Adams. He made Eve. Men and women complete each other and bring out the beauty and gifts in each other that God has placed there.

Together they create what I would say is one of the most sacred things: the family. The very thing that modern culture is seeking to stomp out.

I’m learning to love being a woman. I’m learning to embrace those things about womanhood that I’ve hated for so long. I doubt I’ll ever love my body, but I’m trying not to see it as a curse anymore. God gave me my annoyingly large nose and my *sighs* non existent chin and even my awkwardly large chest for a reason. Those things make me unique. God doesn’t make trash, even though it feels like it sometimes.

You’ve got this, sister. Womanhood is hard, oh so hard, especially now. But it is beautiful. You are beautiful.

Many hugs. ❤

~Hattush