It is weird being grown up. It never feels real. I keep waiting for the consummate moment when I will feel a woman, no longer a girl. Even after 3 children and almost a decade of marriage, I feel inadequately aged. Like I am an adult charade. I even feel foreign in this grown up body, curved and matured.
Surviving inside me is that small girl who spins in the wind, and cries when she falls down, but inhales the smell of grass stains, and even, every now and then, wants to be calmed to sleep.
I've long contemplated and deliberated over the essence and mantle of womanhood, the kind of womanhood expanding across culture and continent. What makes girls become women? Does becoming a women reach beyond just a physical transformation? Is there also a spiritual metamorphosis accompanying girlhood to womanhood?
This is what I have learned: I have determined that girls become women when they exist for more than just themselves. A woman’s purpose generates beyond the individual and ruminates within lives outside their own. And a girl feels she has become a woman when she embraces her otherness, the life she gives in addition to her own life. This life giving source not only lives in the physicality of child bearing, but also in the creating, strengthening, educating and growth of souls.
And when a girl fulfills this role of vitality, she has matured into and received the distinction of “Woman.”
In regards to that girlish wonder that is still thriving within, it is never lost. A woman gets to keep that. For from that wonder a woman implants hope to lives that are thirsty for life.
Even seeing our grown bodies as life giving emblems, bodies created after the pattern of the “mother of all-living”, we are reminded to breathe hope and nourishment into our fellow men. And we may eventually experience comfort in our mature frames, knowing they are a symbol of our life-giving abilities to both bodies and souls.
We must never let life experience, relationships, or trauma suffocate our capacity to sustain and nourish mankind. If we no longer feel capable of creating, we aren't whole; we are at the crux where we must regain our womanhood. It is imperative to reclaim. And the world at large will undoubtedly benefit by us doing so.
"It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life."
- C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
