Woman In Mirror Is Stronger Than She Appears

When I was first learning to read, I loved reading wherever I was. The very first word I recognized in the real world was “Stop”. The very first sentence was on the rear view mirror, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” All these years later, that sentence is reverberating in my head. And now the rear view mirror I’m talking about is not the one attached to the car.

I was sitting around the kitchen table with my family one night and the conversation turned to the past, most specifically my unusual childhood. From the time I was 4 until I was about 14, my family raised our own chickens and turkeys for Sunday dinners, and Thanksgiving and Christmas. What that means is that we raised them from baby chicks in the Spring and then come late Summer, early Fall, we’d butcher them ourselves. It sounds gruesome now, but some of my earliest and happiest memories are of those years. When I was 4 or 5, I remember singing to the naked (freshly plucked) chickens and praying for them to get teeth so they could eat real food. The fact that they were headless slipped my tiny mind as I asked every question under the sun. This is where I learned everything about “guts ‘n’ stuff”. I laughed so hard I cried as my mom and grandma got so silly gutting those birds. It may not have been the most conventional classroom, but this is where my biology class took place. Everything I learned out of a textbook came back full force as I recalled “butchering days”.

Looking back, this is also a portrait of part of who I am. Remove the germ phobia, the perfect makeup and hairstyles, the manicured nails and the picture-perfect way I try to conduct myself at all times and I’m the little 4 yr old covered in blood and feathers and drenched from rinsing the chickens out in the tubs. That was my job: rinsing, after my mom finished gutting. Sun burnt with messy hair, I was a happy and healthy child. I don’t believe my calling in life is to work for a butcher, but I know that whatever it was that made me clutch the freshly slaughtered chickens to my chest like they were my babies is still in me.

I believe that it was strength, the gift to live within the moment and not let the grossness of it all even faze me, it wasn’t gross at all, it was life and I loved it. What made me this wild child? And how can I get her back? Her, with all her freedom, her radiance and her fearlessness? I realized as we chattered on and on about the “good ol’ days”, that I’m stronger than I realized as I looked at my pampered life of today. I have the luxury of talking myself into being freaked out about germs and other gross stuff. I realize that I’m a self-made woman and that’s not all that flattering, if I do say so myself.

My niece will be 7 weeks old this week and recently, her mommy told me that she loves her “tummy time”. My sister-in-law told me that Tamara gets up on her elbows and pulls herself up a little. In listening to the cute little anecdotes, I’m remembering something else of my childhood, something that speaks of the strength I’m talking about now. I was born with club feet and contracted polio at 2 months. The club feet were a sign of a terribly stressful life survived inside the womb. I believe based on the little history we have about my birth parents that I was a hair’s breath away from death the whole time. When I was 2 days old, I was put in an orphanage and that’s where I was sick w/ polio. I was moved from that one to another orphanage where I caught another strain of polio. God protected my life and 4 months later, I was delivered into the hands of my parents and I’ve been here ever since. For eleven years of my life, I lived unashamed of my disability. I was even proud that I was different. I wore shorts that showed off my skinny polio-stricken legs, and if people noticed, I didn’t care. Then, all of a sudden, I “grew up”, started wearing long skirts and more jeans and hid my legs for the sake of “modesty”. What started out being a noble reason became a shield behind which to hide. I’m now 25 and I’ve begun doing battle on my mindset toward my disability and my still skinny polio-stricken legs. I’m tired of hiding behind any shield other than the one that Jesus Christ holds out to me: The shield of faith.

My point isn’t me, or my disability. I give that to you as an example of the strength God gives babies. I believe that God has given babies the strength to live and thrive. We’d never live to adulthood if as babies we weren’t as strong as we are. I also believe based on my own life, the less dependent we become on someone else taking care of us, that unless we choose to depend upon God’s strength, we begin to lose that strength He equipped us with. Call it a loss in muscle tone. We are flabby when it comes to being strong in the LORD unless we’ve been working out. But, as it is with our bodies, when we start working out and keeping at it, we gain results. The results I want to see in myself and other unattached woman are a gain in dignity and a loss in “singleness” depression. Because trust me when I say, we’ve lost our dignity as women unattached. If we can’t see it, the male race can, and it ain’t pretty.

Our womanly value does not rest on gaining a man or having children. If so, we’d be seeing happier and more secure wives and mothers than we do. Our own mothers would be more restful and less cranky if their value solely rested on having obtained the status “motherhood”. And divorce would be on the decline instead of the rise. My example of how going from singlehood to being married and becoming a mother does not define you as a woman comes from a lady I’ve seen around town who’s got to be the crankiest mother I’ve ever seen. Her children, nor her, are to be envied as she yells at them and slaps the tops of their heads. Clearly, motherhood hasn’t defined her as a woman, or if it has, it’s not a pleasant definition.

One of my most favorite things to do is to hang out with veterans of marriage and childrearing. On occasion one such victim, I mean veteran, could be a man, but most of the time it's women. I don’t intentionally hang out with them to gain their insight, I just always have hung out with them and I have gained so much from them. One such woman being my mother. If there’s anyone I can learn from, it’s her. She’s the picture of a praying, believing, fighting, loving wife and mother. Her relationship with God is one I envy. She’s fallen on her face many a time before her God and had fights she wondered if she’d recover and instead, seen His love and grace. I’ve watched her believe God and in my disbelief cried out, “I want that!!” I’ve watched her grieve to the point of physical pain and sickness over what God has taken from her and seen Him give back tenfold. I’ve seen God’s hand of blessing on her and been filled with holy jealousy. And in the last month or so, I’ve watched her become at rest with God and His plan for her life, no matter the cost. Nothing rocks her anymore. She still has her days of pain sometimes, but they’re becoming fewer. But her life is different now, her whole outlook is, “God will take care of me, whatever comes up, He will guide me and show me. I just have to trust Him.” She’s now the epitome of the Proverbs 31 woman who laughs at the days to come. I find that annoying when I read it, but when I look at my beautiful mother, all I can say is, “I see it, I want it, LORD, I want that!!!”

In hanging out with my mom and having coffee with friends who are the aforementioned veterans, I’ve learned that different men can have the same affect on different women, the veterans of marriage and child rearing have all said the same thing about their husbands. Men who couldn’t be more different, do the same things that drive their wives nuts. Women who couldn’t be more different say the same things about their husbands and their children.

If there is anything I’d like single women to understand today it’s that THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN JUST WAITING FOR MISTER RIGHT. Not that that’s not important, it is; but there’s a life to be lived out there and not just so we appear busy to the men we’re ignoring so they’ll notice us. We, as a whole, have been living as if it’s the all encompassing thing when in reality, NOW is when God wants to use us and HERE is where He is calling us to give our all in whatever we do for Him. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:34

I want to close with one of my favorite movie lines from the end of one of my favorite movies, “Secondhand Lions”:

“Those men, from Great- Grandfather’s stories, they really lived?” Oil sheik’s great-grandson
“Yeah, they really lived,” marvels an amazed Walter.

Let the same be said of you and me.