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

by Elise Loehnen

intergenerational trauma drives addiction;

We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be.

the world needs us, just as we are.

As a white woman with privilege, just a few theoretical steps removed from power, I’ve often wondered if women like me are most attached to the system, convinced we have the most to lose.

it’s easy to find textual evidence of Jesus’s feminism.

The irony, of course, is that if you go back to Jesus’s teachings, an all-male apostolic tradition was never the point—nor was an organized religion. And Jesus himself did not write.

the experience of the divine is personal and direct, mediated only between you and God.

The Gnostic Gospels prompt us to ask: How might a world work in which we recognized a direct connection to the divine, no translator or middleman required? Had Christianity survived as a direct-experience religion that required no church or priest—just a deep, inner knowing—our culture might look quite different.

we will never be worthy, never fully redeemed—in part because we will never be men.

Our culture has little tolerance for or interest in women past their procreative prime, and certainly we have no reverence for them. While we have sanctified old men and propped them up as the ultimate authorities—the priests, lawmakers, judges—we have exiled their counterparts.

Divine Feminine, with the full force required to rebalance society’s ills.

The patriarchy has run its course.

the invisible work of life fell on her,

myth of meritocracy,

time is a nonrenewable resource. It’s insane to put a price on something so valuable.

as a man he’s immune from the programming that he should be proving his worthiness by doing more.

Nobody can quantify what a “good mother” even looks like these days; most of us just swim in the shame of certainty that we wouldn’t qualify.

While we look back at this period with nostalgia, this was the reality in America for only ten years.

In the seventies it became impossible for one person to earn enough money to support a family.

We’re all drowning.

One extra piece of baggage that women carry around is the idea that we’re somehow responsible for destroying the sacred family structure,

Perhaps I don’t need to “do parenting” and instead need to find peace and grace in just being a parent,

I wonder if I should fear for my children’s future: They are not primed for a postpatriarchal world.

The cleaning up of messes in the home and outside of it must be shared.

If you’re single or childless, your value in the capitalist market approaches that of a man—but socially, you’re perceived as broken or selfish. Pick your path.

This effort includes our sons too, whom we must teach to distinguish between their Masculine and their Feminine

qualities, and then teach to cultivate the latter as fiercely as they’ve been taught to attend to the former.

Apathy, not sloth, would be the more appropriate “sin,” the one against which we should collectively rail.

we’re confusing peace with security, believing that by ensuring the latter through unyielding effort we will arrive at the former.

“Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic…but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.”

one look at recorded history suggests women were barely present.

how to know who you are and what you want without clinging to a certain outcome.

We have these limitations in part, she explained to me, because we’ve been conditioned to think that satisfaction, abundance, safety, and security aren’t possible.

shame is a tool of the oppressor.

“Self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not.”

you can get a lot from your parents and still not get everything you need.

our obsession with the ones who stand in front means we miss the gifts of everyone else—we’re failing to recognize how the work gets done, who does it, and the essential role every one of us plays.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens

us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world…. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the

same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatical...