On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

by Elise Loehnen

Our patriarchal society would dictate that my focus should be on my children, that a career can only be gravy. Our capitalist culture has me believing that the summation of a valuable life is in a checking account: what we earn, create, and monetize. But my soul argues that it’s not an either/or, that my children’s goodness should not be used as a measure of my own and that my contribution is not supposed to be so fixed.

We must drop the ball and force others—men—to pick it up. We must let ourselves off the hook, cultivate deep self-love, and then learn how to turn and reflect it back on other women—unabashedly, fervently, with the full force of our empathy and compassion. We need our rest, our energetic reserves, for putting the world back in order. We need to move past our worry that we’re not doing enough and get on side with each other so that we can expand together.

It may have been the yoke around our necks for eons, but it is actually not a woman’s job to make everyone else happy. It’s not our job to serve the needs of others at the expense of our own. It’s not our job to stifle and suffocate our own desires out of fear that we’ll offend or lose connection to those we most love.

It’s an impossible balancing act to parent any young girl to be both strong and universally adored. Strength is partnered with respect; love, with sweetness, obedience, and care.

To be humble is to be grounded in knowing who you are. It implies the responsibility to become what you were meant to become—to grow, to reach, to fully bloom as high and strong and grand as you were created to. It is not honorable for a tree to wilt and shrink and disappear. It’s not honorable for a woman to, either.”

I cannot liberate you; you cannot liberate me. But if you liberate yourself, perhaps I can model my freedom after yours. We can show each other what it would look like to live in a state of loving ourselves, celebrating ourselves, living in service of purpose, and delivering on our own unique prophecy, fully bringing ourselves to the world in pride.

When we let our minds run over with likes and dislikes, we are disappointed when the world fails to meet our preferences. The only part of the equation that we can control is ourselves and how we choose to react to our environment, yet we insist the world and other people should change, or be different, instead.

We might think our feelings are gone, but every unexpressed emotion is biding its time in our bodies, waiting to come out. When we refuse to listen, to process and metabolize every icky or hard feeling we’ve shoved down, the experiences don’t evaporate. They metastasize.

“When our minds remember, our bodies are free to forget.”

We’ve been trained to make other people comfortable. We’ve been directed toward passivity and its implied dependency and victimhood. We’ve been instructed to suppress our natural aggression, or we’ve been told we shouldn’t have any at all.