The Bird Has Two Wings

gender roles, patriarchy, and Mother's Day

Although some things appear not to have changed, things are constantly changing. Our consciousness, as individuals and as a society, has been raised. We’ve realized that women have souls, and men have feelings.
Melody Beattie, Codependent No More

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

On Sunday, I spent a few celebratory moments scrolling Instagram while my husband made dinner. I was considering posting about our wonderful afternoon hiking at Mohican, but the family picture we had taken after the hike was on my husband’s phone (he has longer arms for taking group selfies) and he was, as I mentioned, too busy to send it to me. The idea got further derailed when I ran across a post from an artist I follow, @nakedpastor. Usually he posts comics he’s drawn about the process of deconstructing from Christianity, but this time it was a reel about the hesitance to celebrate Mother’s Day as post-patriarchal people (my term, not his, but that was the idea). His premise was that, in a patriarchal society such as is prevalent in America, celebrating womanhood only in the socially-acceptable role of “mother” makes the day an exercise in inferiority for women who don’t—by choice or circumstance—have children, and it sends the wrong message to all women about our value as humans apart from our ability to make and care for new humans. I agree with all of this, yet my immediate reaction was as surprising as it was strong. I was furious. How DARE this man tell me how I “should” feel about a holiday that, after nine years of qualifying for the day, I was only now feeling that I had any right to celebrate at all? Wasn’t that ironically patriarchal? (Actually, he wasn’t telling me how to feel, he was only sharing his personal hesitance to celebrate the day. The caption “Why We Are Hesitant About Mother’s Day” didn’t give that impression, however.) I took a breath, exited Instagram, and went on enjoying my day. But the message and my reaction to it stayed with me. Perhaps, I mused, it is time for society to update our understanding of terms like “mother” and father” and the expectations with which those roles are inevitably replete. Not to mention our understanding of gender itself.

For centuries the opposite, and complimentary, energies associated with the sexes have been used as an example of perfect balance. A culture’s myths and deities usually depict pretty clearly how that culture felt about the roles of men and women. “In most mythology and fairy tales,” Father Richard Rohr notes in his landmark book, The Universal Christ, “feminine gods tend to come out of the earth or the sea and are often associated with fertility, subtlety, good darkness, and nurturance.” Masculine gods, on the other hand, “tend to come from the heavens, and are usually associated with the sun, sky, power, and light¹.” A quick internet search of the Chinese concept of yin-yang supported this division of power. According to the World History Encyclopedia, yin represents:

• feminine/the female force/feminine energy

• black

• dark

• north

• water (transformation)

• passive

• moon (weakness and the goddess Changxi)

• earth

• cold

• old

• even numbers

• valleys

• poor

• soft

• and provides spirit to all things.

While yang represents:

• masculine/the male force/masculine energy

• white

• light

• south

• fire (creativity)

• active

• sun (strength and the god Xihe)

• heaven

• warm

• young

• odd numbers

• mountains

• rich

• hard

• and provides form to all things².

In reading this list of attributes, I find myself consistently drawn to the “feminine” energies. Yet, painful experience has taught me that seeking to embody all—and exclusively—the ideals of femininity did not lead to balance and health for me, but to unhealthy imbalance. As I have progressed in my journey towards better balance I have become increasingly aware of the unfairness that comes with disassociating one set of qualities—or “energy”—from the gender widely considered to be their opposite. The “masculine” and “feminine” energies, behaviors, values, clothing choices, accessories, hairstyles, mannerisms…if you can name it, it’s been assigned to a gender stereotype. The unfairness to women is obvious to me, as I have personally experienced the consequences. But imbalance affects us all. Consider the significance of men to women as described by Vision Forum Ministries (yes, I’m going there again…bear with me here) in Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin’s book, So Much More:

We would not exist but for men: man was our source. We read in Genesis that God created man in His image, saw that is was not good for him to be alone, and so took a rib from him and fashioned it into a woman. Man was formed from dust, but woman had her origin and being from man and for man³.

What are we to make of this? Insulting to the very humanity of women, of course. But it is equally insulting to men. By that logic, man was formed from dirt and for dirt. How come I’ve never heard that preached? “Man looses his identity and reason for existence the moment he outgrows playing in mud.” And, if he wasn’t a playing in mud sort of boy, I guess he never had it at all.