New Lines to Womanhood

I recently read a review of the award-winning HBO show Girls in the April 2013 issue of Christianity Today.  The show focuses on an early 20s woman named Hannah as she tries to figure out adulthood—jobs, renting, friends, boyfriends.  It is a coming-of-age show, written and directed by 26-year-old Lena Dunham.  “What’s new about the show is that these women, like many real-life ones, are working from a rough script.  The lines that signal ‘womanhood’ are absent, coming later or not at all, or look quite different from the lines our mothers followed” (pg. 70). 

Like the author of the review, Katelyn Beaty, I also fit into the category of real-life women working from a rough script.  When I was younger, I assumed that I would follow those traditional lines to womanhood: I would meet a nice Christian guy (probably in college), get married shortly after college, buy a house (unless we were missionaries living overseas), and have kids.  I would work before the kids were born and maybe part-time after.

None of that has happened in my life, so far.

I don’t regret my life—it has been full of unique experiences I would have never had if my 13-year-old-self’s life plan had come to fruition.  But at the same time, I have had to figure out new lines to womanhood.  Maybe I should say I am trying to figure out new lines to womanhood.  One day at a time, I am living the life God has called me to and trying to find the lines.

To be honest, it can be a lonely and confusing place.  I don’t have that many role models.  There are portrayals in the media, Girls and Liz Lemon in 30 Rock come to mind, but TV show characters tend to hop from boyfriend to boyfriend, sleeping with them all.  That isn’t part of my life, but the church is a part of my life.  The church gives me stability when everything around me seems to be changing.  The church gives me a community of people who love and care for me, but also don’t quite know what to do with me.    

That’s why I am writing this.  So far in my life I have kept my experiences and feelings about being single pretty private.  I’ve only let the closest circle of my friends in.  But that needs to change, so I am going to be writing more about this part of my life in the future.  I hope to write about the joys, the sorrows, the practices I find helpful, and the habits that are unhelpful.

By sharing my story, I want the 12-year-old girls and boys in my congregation to see what life looks like if you don’t marry early.  I want the 22-year-old woman who just graduated without her Mrs. Degree to have hope that God has beautiful plans for her life even if they feel unconventional.  I want the 45-year-old married pastor to have a glimpse of what it looks like to be in this space and how he or she can be hospitable to people who don’t fit the mold.  I want the 60 year-old who never married to have the permission to tell his or her story, too.  

I want the church to warmly welcome people into community, no matter who they are.  Beaty asks “Are our churches places where women like Dunham can know and be known?  Where their ambitions and dreams are encouraged, not squelched or made to fit into old scripts of womanhood that don’t speak to them?  Where a story is told and retold that speaks to their deepest desires and orients them toward wholeness and self-giving instead of self-gazing?” (pg. 71).  I hope and pray that sharing more of my story can help the church to be such a place.  I hope that together we can develop and affirm many paths to adulthood. 

                 

Top photo by Wally Gobetz, used under a Creative Commons License.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8416119593/.

Bottom photo is a personal photo taken August 2012.