Servitude

One of the main reasons I am no longer Catholic is because of the treatment and view of women within the church. This coupled with a heavy skepticism of all things organized by human beings led me to leave religion very young.

I remember watching our priest in the pulpit reading a scripture about how a woman's place is beneath her man and a man's place is beneath God and feeling, even as a young child, rage burbling in my chest. I looked at my mom as the priest told us a woman's job is to be dutiful to her husband and wondered that she stared on with seeming indifference. An entire audience of adults looked on without so much as a rolled-eye or labored sigh or silent chuckle at the absurdity.

That rage built and built and built until my certainty landed square in my chest, a rock-hard determination that I'd rather burn in hell for all eternity than bend my knee and give my freedom to anyone who labeled me as less than because of my gender. We so often look at children as though they can't understand injustice and assume complex ideas are too difficult for them. But when I look back at my views as a child, it is clear that many of the things I think and feel now already existed at a young age and the emotional weight of them was probably more visceral (the years, and exhaustion, have blunted some of my extremism).

I trust that young girl kneeling on a hard pew. She was right.

I recently watched the graduation speech delivered by Harrison Butker in which he stated: "I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother."

Being a mother has been the absolute greatest gift of my life and it has brought me intense joy and filled my life to bursting. However, it represents only a sliver of the human being I am. I am a musician, a writer, a sonographer, a sister, a daughter, a dog-lover, and on and on and on ad infinitum. And what Butker does not mention is the irreparable harm we do when we simplify women into tropes of domesticity.

I am glad I am with a supportive and kind husband. I am also glad I make my own money so that I always have the option to leave. My life has been so enriched by my study of music, by my devotion to words. When I am in an exam room with a patient, evaluating their baby, absolutely everything else in my life falls away. In those moments, I am a living act of service for another human being; my vocation has enriched my soul and made my days feel meaningful and important in a way they don't when all my attention and focus is poured into my children.

I am grateful to leave home and to feel the grit and dirtiness of the world outside our little bubble. My heart grew bigger and perhaps a bit sadder with my journeys overseas, but I am so grateful I went so that I could see the world with eyes that now know the limitations of my immediate vision.

And while I cannot abide by Butker's viewpoints, I also cannot prescribe to Sheryl Sandberg's lean in philosophy; I think for many of us, this is a destructive way of thinking. I cannot do it all. I cannot have the career of my dreams and the children of my dreams and the home of my dreams and all the things because, for average humans, there are money and time restrictions that simply make doing so impossible. However, we also should not boil women down to boring, domestic tropes. And we should not normalize their worth only emerging once they begin their "vocation as a mother."

The little girl who turned away from the church would have been looking around the auditorium where that commencement speech was made, making sure everyone else saw the absurdity in that messaging. And yet, when he finished his speech, he received a standing ovation. The auditorium went bananas and, according to news agencies, the men in particular were hooting and hollering their agreement.

I will not be made a caricature. I will not have my life boiled down to my motherhood or defined by the fact that I am a wife. And I hope each of us who is capable of living the freest life possible do so with pride and determination that our daughters and their daughters and all the little girls who come after us will have more access to career choice and higher salaries and reproductive choices than we did.

I hope my girls live as bravely and courageously as possible and are never bottled as a commodity to be utilized in service to their husbands. I hope my son is the kind of man who is an equal partner in all things and who sees his wife as a multi-faceted, complex human being. And I hope the rest of us feel the outraged vehemence my young self did when the priest reminded me that a vagina is a second-class ticket and that my true value was in my potential as a breeding mare.

To all those young girls, kneeling on hard pews, I hope you know your richness and complexity. I hope you find a career that feeds you and nourishes your community. I hope you always know your value and have enough independence to walk away if it should ever become necessary. You are beholden to yourself and to the ethics and values that bind all of us together. But you are not limited by your gender, your breeding potential, or the assumptions of archaic, outdated, and insecure minds who fear your liberation.

The Thrum of Your Heart

I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing the development of the universe and the way matter pushed out from the center. Our bones are constructed of the same atoms that created the sun and Jupiter and the worms beneath our feet. We are literal stardust. There is something comforting in the idea that the universe holds our place; any separation we feel is fabricated, a myth we perpetuate because our own consciousness pleads our superiority and individuality. What a terrible, terrible construct to feel separate; what a horrific crime against the potential of humanity.

And if the atoms which erupted from the center of the universe created some semblance of order from chaos, then we are not separate from that order. We belong here. You belong here.

There is so much noise now. Palestinians are being murdered while we gaze upon the genocide, seemingly incapable of meaningful action. The planet is warmer this month than it was last. Donald Trump runs for president yet again and he seems to be leading the race. We look at our countrymen and see only difference and that which divides.

And yet I meet people every day with whom I find commonality. Though the traveler who worked beside me this week waxed poetic about her deeply held beliefs that all fetuses are living, sacred souls regardless of their gestational age, we agreed upon far more than we disagreed. The day sped by in conversation, in getting to know one another, and despite a difference in opinion around abortion, I think we mostly liked one another. The day was joyful and giving and I left fulfilled.

And if I look inward in any meaningful kind of way, I also know that she is no stranger. She, too, is stardust. And on a grand scale, if we are all constructed of the same organic material, if we are all products of that initial ignition, is there any degree of separation between us at all? If we recognize in the person across from us not a separate entity but an extension of ourselves, then there is no longer room for hatred and there is only space for listening, kindness, empathy, and connection.

Our time here is so short and there is so much noise. I yearn so desperately to turn it down and to listen to the thrumming of the atoms that compose this temporary form--to hear their resonance and the way they seem to shout that I am just one small whisper of a symphony. I am one wave in a long tide, crashing on the beach, and returning yet again to the center of things. I want to remember, despite this individual form, that I belong to you and you belong to me and the blades of grass that dampen my footstep and the ants which work tirelessly in the hot summer sun and the murderous monster who killed my neighbors are inextricably tied to my own humanity.

I want to be capable of empathy for those who have done heinous wrongs. I want to feel the pain of their victims and their loved ones. I want to whisper in the ears of all the new souls who have joined us that this is a beautiful place; that it can be painful and tough and lonely but it is also full of wondrous beauty, fragrant flowers in the spring time, the brush of long grass against your thighs, and delightful bodies made for a myriad of machinations.

I want to love each of you intentionally and aggressively and ceaselessly because to do otherwise would be to forget that we are all stardust. We are on a marvelous journey together, a set of waves tumbling toward the coast, mustering all the speed and voracity we can before we crash, yet again, on the coast.

Listen quietly now. The thrum of your heart (there it is again, do you hear it?) is the remnant of the cosmos. If we are still enough, we might hear the echo of that first blast and the smallest of whispers echoing over and over again that our place is amongst the stars.