On Femininity, Being Misunderstood, and Just Rolling With It [Part 1]

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the attic lately.

It’s filled with junk—I cannot tell you how many physical objects we own, or the level of chaos that is literally hanging right over our heads. I can only tell you, with all sincerity, that I’m fighting a losing battle up there.

And yet, I seem to be nesting early. I get angsty, I haul a load of stuff down the stairs, I find a home for it, and I feel better. One day a week or so, I go up there and see what kind of damage I can do. It soothes me.

On my most recent trip to the upper lair, I went through a box of framed artwork and photos that, for various reasons, have been relegated to the darkness. One of them was a black and white photo taken on our wedding day. It used to hang above our bed in our first tiny apartment, and I’m not gonna lie—it’s sexy as all get out. Ethan is dipping me backwards and his lips are allllmmooost touching mine, and my hair and veil are flowing in a glorious cascade before a backdrop of apple blossoms.

When I first pulled it from the box, I couldn’t help but feel a little taken aback. That New-Bride-Me felt like such a drastic juxtaposition to the Current-Day-Me, who at that particular moment was crouching in sweatpants and feeling winded from the exertion of merely bending over.

I studied the photo closely; I couldn’t look away. What was it about New-Bride-Me? Gosh, she was magnetic. It wasn’t her slender arms or tiny midsection (although I wouldn’t mind having a spin with those again). It wasn’t the sweeping hair or the magnificence of the fairyland blossoms, either. No—it was more of…an aura. Of happiness. Of possibility. Of eagerness and willingness and openness for delight. The girl in that photograph had an air of unapologetic femininity.

I’ve been playing with that word in my mind since then: femininity. It sounds so beautiful, so light, and yet—so loaded. It seems everyone has tried to have their way with that word, to define it and own it and disown it, too.

But it is, I’m realizing, not something that can be easily pinned into categories, like a bird to its genus or a book to its genre. It’s got a recognizable air, yes, but much like a fragrance on the breeze, it can be hard to capture and identify and quantify. This, of course, drives me nuts. I work in the realm of words, so nothing really feels like it’s mine until I can wrestle it into two-dimensional letters.

Today my efforts to make it tangible took me right out the door and down the road, and as I tried to give it solid edges I was distracted by our neighbor’s enviable patch of lily-of-the-valley. The smell was so glorious that I couldn’t help myself: I knelt right down beside the road and plucked a stem. I examined its creamy bells, then held it to my nose. I admired how something so delicate could be so potent. I tucked it into the pocket of my button-up shirt for safekeeping and whispered the word to myself again: femininity.

But it is, I’m realizing, not something that can be easily pinned into categories, like a bird to its genus or a book to its genre. It’s got a recognizable air, yes, but much like a fragrance on the breeze, it can be hard to capture and identify and quantify.

That was it, then. Femininity isn’t a cut-and-dried, yes-or-no concept. It’s a both, and kind of thing. Like that blossom at my breast, femininity is a fascinating mixture of delicacy and beauty, strength and power. To try to call it one or the other is to destroy it, to dumb it down and remove its magic.

I imagine how that’s how it’s become such a loaded word. We have tossed it about like a hot potato, afraid that if we are considered too feminine we’ll be regarded as silly and weak and flippant, and that if we’re not feminine enough, we’ll appear brusque and cold and heartless. We’ve made the mistake of believing that it’s just another label the world can use to condemn us for not twisting to its ever-evolving demands, and so we’ve grown shy around it. We don’t know whether to stand for it or against it.

We cannot win, by the world’s standards.

But femininity—though it has been manipulated every single which way by this world—is not of human origins. It is an essence, a quality, an idea that the God of the Universe formulated and it is at once powerful and tender, whimsical and solid, distinct and complex and abundant and kind. And when we step into this wildly creative realm, we find that it is spacious and open. It doesn’t make us narrow-minded or stereotypical to wear our femininity; no, it liberates us from the world’s standards altogether.

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I brought our wedding picture down from the attic and put it on the mantel. As I look at that girl in the picture, New-Bride-Me, even now as I type, I am envious of her femininity, because I realize now that it was something precious that I should have protected more, something that I have regrettably shrugged off a bit in my navigation through motherhood and my understanding of what it means to be a grown up who wants to be taken seriously.

I realize, too, that it’s something I want to pursue again. Not necessarily the outward appearance of beauty (though I do believe that’s part of it), but more so that essence of freedom and abundance, of a total and joyful abandonment to God’s design and intention for my life, knowing that I can bend over backwards and kiss amongst the apple blossoms and not give a single freaking care what anyone thinks about that.

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I have more to say about this. But it’s after 10:00 PM, and anyone who knows me know I should have been asleep two hours ago. So let this be Part 1, and anticipate Part 2 in your inbox soon, with more thoughts on losing femininity in the process of motherhood & aging, taking it back again, and dealing with the inevitable reality of being labeled and misunderstood. Subscribe now, if you haven’t yet, to make sure you don’t miss it ❤️.

Until then, I’m dying to know: What does femininity mean to you? Leave a comment below or, if you’d rather, send me an email. Hearing from you is my favorite.