Maleness of Being

When dealing with wicked stepfather as a young teenager I often wished I were a boy because: 1) Maybe he would stop making his quasi-sexual advances, and 2)I could possibly be larger and stronger than him ultimately and make him pay for his verbal and emotional abuse against all the other women in the household.

At the time, I didn't want to acknowledge Drama Mama's role in all this misogyny, but I've since had to process that. As a pre-adolescent, I always felt insecure and awkward in my very tall relatively boyish body. I can remember thinking how much easier it would just be to be a boy since I was bigger than most of the boys anyway. Eventually, about a little over half the boys surpassed me in height. I still carried my awkwardness about my early height well into adulthood and wanted to be petite not slightly above average height for a woman.

In the early eighties Grace Jones came on the scene. I loved her short hair cut. I cut my hair this way and received so many compliments. During the time I wore my hair that way, and all the previous times, I'd often thought I'd make a more attractive man than I did a woman. DH did not like my hair so short because he felt like he was having sex with a man.

Thereafter, I wore my hair longer to please him. In the last decade, I've worn it very long to please me.

My body before it was injured to the point where regular weight bearing exercise is difficult, was sometimes mistaken for a man's from the rear. My shoulders and arms muscled up to sizes many men would be happy to have with the heavy work I was doing at the time. I wasn't offended by then and was very happy with my femaleness of being, especially motherhood.

I'm content being of the female gender, emotionally and physiologically. I've resolved my feelings of inadequacy regarding my gender that society imposed on my body shape, size and my own kind of beauty. I also know that being a boy may not have changed the relationship much at all with bullies, but that wicked stepfather may not have married Drama Mama but for the easy access to prepubescent females. But, if not him, then she might have found one who wanted prepubescent males and I would have been exactly in the same situaiton.

Nevertheless, I remember what it was like to question ever so slightly if God might have gotten something a little out of kilter when he sent me here to earth as a woman. Now I just think society and media culture was out of kilter.

Desperately seeking safety

Lately, I've found myself wondering about the quality of decisions I made earlier in life and I cannot decide whether or not I would have been able to make other choices. I was not safe as a child or a teenager, but usually not because of my own choices. In retrospect, I tried hard to make safer choices, but they didn't always work out entirely as planned. Imagine that, a person's best laid plans don't work out!

Safety is a rather elusive commodity that is subject to the demand curve and our human foibles. And the human foibles of others. It's perplexing to me, a safety seeker, the existence of the human inclination towards risk taking. And, it is the most frustrating thing about raising teenagers and watching my young adult children move on with their lives. No risk equals little or no growth. Too much risky behavior equals little or no growth, damage or even destruction.

Finally, I've managed to carve out what feels like a much higher level of safety physically, financially, and emotionally. But I don't feel safe spiritually. I feel surrounded and alone too often. Reading this I know what the answers are to remedy this void of spiritual safety, yet I've let the expediencies of the moment control.

Scriptural role models abound. Moroni moves me the most because he was so physically alone and clearly at times felt spiritually alone. And, he was not safe physically. I love the change in his perspective as he writes and fulfills his calling. It becomes ever clearer that even though he is alone in an unsafe environment, he has found spiritual safety and was not spiritually alone.

I want the same.