Time to Rise

For a million billion years (ok, not that long but it seems like it) women have been the weaker sex. We’ve been the one who needed protected, who couldn’t open jars and who needed our husbands to take our cars in for oil changes. I imagine the women of old needing their husbands to go check for sabretooth tigers while they stay near the fire and tend the baby.

But that has changed.

And the men nearly can’t bear it.

Let me explain.

Women no longer need men.

I said it. Ok? I said it.

We do not need men. They need us.

Part of my role in the company I work for is to host prized employees for long weekends at Walt Disney World as a part of their compensation. Our employees are nearly all women and these trips are a never ending pajama party full of girl talk and growth. They come to enjoy, they leave anew.

I was at one such trip earlier tonight. It’s so late now, the darkness around me. The dryer running in the laundry room, zippers hitting the metal. A soothing sound. A glance at the clock, it’s 3:21am. And my six children are asleep or if not, faking it well. My husband went to bed long ago, but I’m on night shift with the baby, Judah. She is napping now but will need fed soon.

But earlier today I was surrounded by eleven of our best women. We have so many good women. And we sat at a table in a Deluxe Disney resort in our pajamas and ate food from one of Disney’s best restaurants that is expensive and bougee but the business can afford to cover it for our people because God has been kind to us. I had the prime rib and my ladies cut it up for me because I had the baby and she needed her milk.

As we sat there comparing notes on motherhood with Judah the catalyst for the conversation, I realized how little the dads would know of the things we spoke about.

My milk supply has been down, I struggled with it. Pumping to get it back up. Drinking brewer’s yeast in my smoothies, munching down lactation cheeseits (I’m not making this up) and crunching on lactation cookies (I do not recommend the lemon ones, dry.)

So I clearly tried.

And yet Judah had a bottle at the table with us. Full of goat’s milk formula that my husband had shipped in from Europe overnight when my supply was so low we worried Judah was hungry (although the little chunker could have been crying wolf.)

We had to get it from Europe because the formula in the United States is full of seed oils that will hurt my baby girl. I’m trying to stay on topic, but I can’t resist throwing a dart at Big Food. They have stripped the milk God made of its fat. It’s valuable as cream and butter and they can make more money. Raped the milk God has provided for their greater profit, and then since babies cannot grow on skim milk, they have added “fat” back in by pressing the stalks of soy beans and other vegetables into something they can get away with calling fat on the nutritional label. I’m guessing God is pretty anti-this behavior.

My women rallied around as you would expect and as you’ve probably experienced. There’s maybe one goat’s milk formula in the US, one says, they are based in Utah. Try there. It’s spelled like this. The bottle feeding won’t affect you’re supply if you learn paced feeding, explains another. She shows me how to hold Judah and her bottle in such a way as to allow Judah to drink as though from the breast. Judah responds immediately and begins to swallow, pause, suck, suck, swallow, pause. Taking little breaks. She will remember to do this at my breast now and will not give up when the milk doesn’t just fall into her mouth as though from a bottle.

On and on the moms went, suggestions, stories, mine did this, mine did that. You need this. You could do that. Check her for a tongue-tie, here’s how to know if she has one.

Community.

Connection.

Literal centuries of knowledge here at this table. Our mother’s words in our heads, our grandmothers, back and back.

Here is how to care for your young.

Here is how they need to be held, here is what they need you to know.

Flash back to the sabretooth days I mentioned before, women around the fire. Not a woman. Women. This one holds the baby, that one does the laundry. This one tends the fire. They talk as we are now. They learn to communicate and care for each other in a way the men will not learn for ions. They may not know it now.

Women will teach it to them.

Like God taught it to us.

The men were out there with their spears, hunting. Grunting. Lifting heavy things and throwing them. I’ve seen them do it and I do not understand. Some drive left from these pre-modern times.

But they do it alone.  

The women rally. Oh, Suzie is sick let me take her baby today. Here’s tea I made from leaves that seemed to have helped me before. Marla is quiet, let me ask her what’s wrong. Her husband has not killed even one sabretooth tiger in the past 11 days and she is beginning to worry how they’ll eat. Give her some smoked sabretooth tiger of our own to help calm her fears. We will survive together.

Women take care.

Men take off.

Not far now. Not too far, because they need us for sex so they stay nearby. Close enough to come back and let their wives make them feel better.

They aren’t the tom cats that made my little girl’s baby kittens. We see the toms once in a while but the mother cat stayed to nurse the babies.

They aren’t the dozens of lower species I read about that hold their mates down, raping them, then leaving them.

The men in the wilderness, in the grass hunting, aren’t those men. But they aren’t so far removed, and neither are our men of today.

Because as we commune discussing our babies most basic needs for nutrition, one mother checks her phone. Her husband needs help. He doesn’t know where their child’s school is. She texts him back with a smile. Another mother chimes in, oh my husband needed me to order groceries for him while I was on the way here. A third tells a story of how she reminded her husband twice about a chore and he still forgot and blamed her for not reminding him again. She shares how she handles it, not allowing him to verbally abuse her. She knows now this is the right thing and asks for space when he is angry.

I applaud her. I tell her how I’ve learned that God has set up our marriages- men are to be our protectors and we are not supposed to need to look after our interests with our husbands. They are to look after them. We are to be able to come to them with a need, having nothing and needing nothing for their acceptance. Our men are to take us to their hearts and help us with our lives.

This relationship is to be to women like the church is to God. The imagery of the church being married to our husband, the bridegroom, our savior. Made pure by Him, for his pleasure.

I tell her to go to God. To talk to Him. To tell Him what she needs. God built these men, and He is the one that gave them these big emotions. Those of the rock throwing, the sword wielding, the ocean crossing. And if the Big Strong Man God has given her turns to face her in anger instead of facing away in protection with those emotions, God is the one to sort that.

My experience of God is that He would love nothing more than for you to talk to him in writing and let Him take it from there. Why in writing? Because writing enables you to use your body and your mind on the same task and there is something powerful in that. Speaking out loud to God would do that as well, but I do prefer to write out my feelings and sometimes I feel him on the other side listening and learning my heart. Loving me. Saying yes, as His word says He will. Not maybe, but yes.

He says, Yes, I will sort your husband’s heart, but I do require time and a certain willingness on his part. Don’t give up on either of us, girl.

And if he won’t be, I’ll be your Husband.

Because God made us to need that Big Strong Man. And if your husband is not that for you, God will be.

God is to be your husband’s Big Strong Man too; He is the Husband of the church, you and your husband included.

And He’s especially willing to stand in this gap today as He grows up his men. They are lagging behind us, we are the leaders that we weren’t meant to be. We are the Big Strong Men too often, ordering groceries, texting directions to our children’s schools, reminding him, reminding him, the relentless reminding, the mental load.

We don’t need our men.

They need us.

Not the way it was intended and not a situation God will allow for much longer I suspect.

Because His men are facing us in anger and not in love at the moment. Collectively. He won’t have it. He just will. Not. Have. It.

Why are they?

Power.

Offense.

And it’s been going on for too long, my loves.

1974

Ten years before I was born.

This is the year women finally receive the rights to their own money. We are now allowed to open a bank account without a man.

A checking account, friends.

Ten years before I was born, banks insisted that you have a man help you if you wanted to simply give them money in order to write checks. We are not even talking about borrowing.

10 years before I was born.

Ten. Years.

My mom was 19. She remembers this.

Ten. Years.

It was not so long before we were born that women had no rights- so few rights.

Because money gives us choices and we had so few.

Wife. Mother.

Then, teacher, nurse, waitress, whore.

With our own money came our ability to make our own decisions. To say, I do not think I will get married at this time. I will not go from my father’s house to my husband’s. I am not property. God has not created me as such.

With our own money we were able to look further ahead for ourselves- to not get into a painful confining situation. To leave those we found ourselves in. To ask our Husband in heaven for support and to provide, and not stay under the abuse of an emotional man.

We rose.

They didn’t.

My mother, born in 1955, taught me to rise. She said do not put yourself in a position to be dependent on a man no matter how much you love and trust him. He is not God, and you do not know the future. Money, she said. Do not have a child you cannot afford to support on your own. Do not clip your wings and lose your options by relying on a man for your daily bread. God will provide it directly to you.

My version of listening to that advice led me to wait for my round pregnant belly until I was gainfully employed and making more money than my husband.

The God of the Universe would applaud my decision, applaud His women for leaping. He would say, look at my women. He knows this is how it goes. The women will level up first. They will rally around the fire, they will feed their babies, they will bring tea. And the men will lag behind, every time, but they will get there.

The lower animals, the insects, the males mate and go. The next ones stay closer, but don’t rise. Today’s men are here, but not present. Oh ye of the trash never going out and the desperate need to be thanked for existing.

But the time is nigh, ladies.

They are rising.

Can you feel the shift?

The reels, our weathervane, predicting the future. I see them teaching the men. Come along, this is the way. Like the women at the fire. The men are now teaching each other, come along, this is how you be a Big Strong Man. This is how you take care of a woman.

They’re rising.