When the average person hears the word “femininity”, I suspect they conjure up one of two images in their mind. The first is the trad-wife version of the concept, all coiffed and domestically talented. The second is the sort of mystical “feminine energy” womb magic type of figure. I’m not knocking these versions, but I will say my own version is strictly what lies underneath both of these-femininity is the outward expression of the inner female landscape, informed always by physiology and it’s implications. It is a state induced by biological sex, born of what it means to walk this Earth female. And we walk this Earth female as maidens before we walk it as mothers.
I have been noticing a lot of talk discussing this idea of “integrating our maiden-selves” into our mother-selves in various online spaces and this is a concept I felt is well worth a ponder. Now I am no scholar of the maiden-mother-crone story but I feel it is easily understood. The maiden is the archetype of the young woman, the precursor to the mother archetype-and everything about her inspires the series of events that lead to her eventual initiation into motherhood. The common thought seems to be that once you are a mother, the maiden-self is shed and traded in in favor of the more careful and mature role of mother. It’s an either/or, not a both/and.
Having myself been initiated into motherhood while very young, this “either/or” idea just simply never occurred to me. It’s always been “both/and” for me. This means the maiden-self that I brought into motherhood was a self that wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, who never forgot the pure magic of experiencing the full range of human physicality, who didn’t let technology and society take away the ability to be an embodied human whose reality was shaped by her female-ness in every single way. The maiden, in my knowing of her, is the archetype of corporeality and she has a very rightful place of honor at the table of my own feminine feast.
And what is corporeality really? The simple answer would be something like “the fact of existing in a human body”. When we are discussing these archetypes, we are discussing the commonly held understanding of the typical pattern for the female life cycle. These archetypes are a way of explaining the experience of the full feminine story. So if the maiden is the archetype that represents the body, and she is the archetype that embodies the beginning stage of female life, we have to take notice that this means (of course) femininity is a concept rooted in female biology.
I have said this exact thing before (read more on this here ) but I want to expand upon it through this maiden-mother integration idea. Femininity is a state immeasurably and indubitably informed by our physicality. The palpable nature of both our female strength and vulnerability is what guides our reaction to the outer world and the way the outer world perceives us. To deny this is madness. The dirty little secret here of course, is that to be a physical being is to be a messy being, a being of the flesh. Is the root of femininity planted in carnality? Carnal is a word that is evocative purely of sex, but in its most accurate definition really means to live for the things animals live for. And we are animals.
I think this is important to understand because if we simply deny this fact and spend our efforts entirely on studying and pondering the intellectual and philosophical, we cannot truly appreciate the personal evolution we all rise up through as we surface to see the sunshine from those roots of carnality. We have to find temperance-a very uniquely human quality- through the trial and error of childhood and young adulthood. The sweet spot is when we gain that temperance but hold onto the lusty part of ourselves that follows that sun, that bends to the vital.
I appreciate myself as mother more because I know intimately my own carnal desires-some which I overcame and some which I embraced-in order to find my way to motherhood. Motherhood-a state that came to me by way of just this-embracing vitality in all of its messy reality. The messiness can be literal- the fluids of life, from sweat and semen to amniotic fluid and blood to breast milk and spit up. The messiness can also be a reference to the dance we must learn the steps to when biology ordains us mothers-a dance of acceptance and sacrifice, one that requires much practice and getting up to try again.
I am not only a mother but a nurse, a profession built on the backs of women who chose to embrace the messiness of humanity. I go from wiping little bums created by my own acts of conception at home to wiping little bums created by another’s at my place of work. I have picked blood clots off of floors, been sprayed in the face with amniotic fluid, manually helped mothers learn to hand express breast milk, been urinated on by infants and adults alike. I have placed wound vacuums on Cesarean scars that have dehisced, dressed the wounds of IV drug addicts who neglected them for months while desperately searching for other veins, and have seen and help treat horrible pressure sores of people who were withering away in nursing homes. I have prepared the dead to be viewed by their family members for the last time. For all of this, I am better. For it is in our most physically vulnerable moments, we are the most open to true perception from others.
I share this because the sheer “mess” factor of my job in addition to the constant mess factors that accompany my most important job-mothering-means that I am often just utterly immersed in the messiness of human nature and human life. Many common jobs that women dominate in the work force have a similar essence to them-the work that demands the ability to witness others when they are forced to be humble, thus making us all the humbler. Similarly, many of this work is the sort of work that is messy in the most intimate of ways. A man’s work is most certainly often messy, but in a more controlled way. The kids that can be showered off at the end of the day. The mess of women’s work is often not so easily washed away, as it is the sort of mess that leaves impressions on our hearts and minds. This extends to the daily ins and outs of parenting young children.
Bathing little slippery bodies covered in mud or applesauce or sand or juice or paint. Bodily fluid clean up daily. Wiping the kitchen counter roughly 85 times a day. The stickiness of dough kneaded in my hands, flour scattered on my kitchen floor, the oatmeal boiling over, the steam from the kettle fogging up the windows.
Digging my fingers into the fertile soil that grows the food we eat, peeling tomatoes by the pound for hours to can them lest the harvest go to waste, my arms covered in itchy scratches from picking cucumbers. Hand-scrubbing bathtubs and toilets and floors and blood and chocolate stains off of tiny cardigans and overalls.
The smell of boiled feathers of the chickens I raise and feed my babies, so they rip out easier. Puddles jumped in creating a spray of muddy kisses on little faces to be wiped away later, drip dips of snow trailing through the entire house on the precious wood floor my husband installed himself. Popsicles snuck and ate sneakily under tables only to have the sticky evidence found weeks later. Crayons marking the walls we painted.
The list is seemingly endless.
Motherhood is knowing that my time and space will never be as perfect and tidy as it could be. It is knowing the hours it takes to write my silly little rambles on here are often out of reach. It is putting down my knitting handfuls of times in order to tend to children before I even teach the end of just one row. It is the state of perpetual interruption, of perpetual practice of patience, of perpetual chosen bliss.
Mothering is being acutely aware of the blood I am willing to spill in order to protect the lives I made if ever called to the task. The contrast of my severe dedication to the survival of my young with the absolutely doubtless willingness to kill for them should I have to is the most vivid example of the way the feminine, the mother, walks the line between life and death. We must have a tinge of darkness in us to truly be able to serve the light. It is this severity, like a shade of red with just a few drops of black added, that makes us so complex and formidable when truly witnessed.
When I speak of mothering I am speaking of femininity. This is because this state, to me, is the ultimate consecration into the feminine, my proudest place. It is an experience gifted to me by my female biology which feels like the most beautiful and special expression of my own feminine physicality. This is why I feel it is so important to name the sort of lascivious, embodied, playful nature of maidenhood and to integrate the spirit of this into who we are as mothers. It is that quality that can enable us as mothers to find the place where we are both of our bodies and of our spirits, of our children and of our desires, a sort of domestic felicity.
You see though- “polite” society is interjecting sterility into every aspect of what makes this integration possible. True femininity isn’t all all gentleness and softness and empathy-it is feral and fervid and hot-blooded. If it is a vessel, the liquid inside is simmering. In this sense, it is an absolute devotion to life and beauty and all that is truly good. In addition to existing as a devotion, it is a living example of these qualities as well. An example to inspire men to behave well and for children to see what is of value.
The part of me that embodies this example is the part that inspires the making of life. My desire to tend to it is warming up again after birthing and breastfeeding back to back in the last few years-it does not need thawing, however, as it was always present, but now its presence is more fervid in nature. It is that very deeply centered drive that ignited every bad decision I made in my youth that I have learned to temper and harness with age and time and experience. In this warming, I feel called to illuminate the way society tends to sterilize the opportunities we have to tend to this most vital part of ourselves.
Girls and women are bombarded with imagery and messaging throughout their lifetimes which makes having children appear decidedly unsexy. Whether it is the idea that bodies that have sustained life are no longer desirable or the idea that no one has sex after children, we are served up a rotting platter of negative expectation. We hear other women complaining about the “stickiness” of children, the never ending laundry, the “hacks” to get you through the mess. We numb every unpleasant experience-whether it be childbirth or a fever in our children or our natural feelings of discontents with various drugs. We wipe our shopping carts down, we obsess over first aid kits, we fret over kids drinking out of the public water fountain. We switch from listening to the music we love to listening to Kidz Bop in the car. No wonder it is so hard to integrate our maiden selves into our mother selves in this day and age.
We have to actively reject these stereotypes if we want to integrate maiden into mother. Listen to your own music, take a break from the endless information inundation. Put your hands deep down in the cold dirt, wipe the sweat away from the hot sun and take some glee in your reflected face when it is streaked in soil, like ashes in church. Roll your eyes at the internet moms making a buck off of complaining about how gross and annoying their children are with a glass of Pinot in one hand and a bottle of Xanax in the other. Kiss your equally gross children and love them for it. Feel into life, let any fear you hold be directed at numbness and indifference, not pain and illness.
Feel the gaze of others and do not avoid it. Eat food with your hands. Laugh heartily and from your belly. Let your body remember the swish with which you used to walk. Cover yourself in oil and tallow. Wear your hair down and wild down your back. Get the messaging of the mainstream out of your head. Do couples not have sex after children because of children or because everyone tells them they won’t? Take delight in knowing you are sexually safe (if that is the case, and I hope it is) and as such can indulge accordingly. I look at this as a matter of what we have earned in our lifetimes. If you have made it to motherhood, it is due to your sexual desirability, you have fully realized the complete cycle of human sexuality as a result of it. If anything, this should make us all the more lustful for the experiences we are owed. For creating life, we have the gift of pleasure available to us as a reward if we will only claim it. Let a little filth into your life. This is how we integrate maiden into mother, this is the brand of femininity that is neither trad or woo-woo, but which is undeniably of the body, the female body.
The antidote to the metaphysical neutering of the feminine is our female physicality and the rediscovering of its potential through this integration of our before-motherhood versions of ourselves. I think of integrating like a blending of miscible fluids, motherhood and maidenhood are water and vinegar, not water and oil. They are synergistic. The wildness we hold deep in our bodies still has a place at this convivial feast, but she knows how to mind her manners now.
What a read. Perhaps we have added so many “hacks” to motherhood that we have effectively hacked away who we used to be and who we are. I’m not perfect, but I think I’ve maintained who I was before motherhood pretty well: I still enjoy the same hobbies and activities, it just looks different now. And that’s okay! That’s the beauty of real life.
So many topics you speak of are near and dear to me. What really hit my heart today was the part about feeling sexually safe. I sadly do not feel safe because of my partner's pornography addiction. And I wonder how many moms are suffering silently but don't know how to react or what to do. I didn't at first. But I started reading book after book and I found support groups. In this age, I think every adult should read "Your Brain on Porn." Even if our partners are not ready to get to the root of their issues, we can still grow and heal despite. I refuse to allow my femininity to be destroyed by the demons of our modern technological sex buffet.