I look down at my little boy’s smile- I watch his complete lack of reserve, his total vulnerability. He buries his head into my chest and with my whole being I pray to God that he never feels ashamed of his tenderness.

I recall the many times I’ve heard a boy or man say that “nice guys don’t get anywhere.” “Girls don’t like nice guys.” And I guess they think it goes without saying that guys don’t like nice guys. We all watch it happen around us. Suddenly, the once sweet and genuine little boy– the little boy who used to feel– turns up to third grade and he’s got that new look about him. He saunters with his hands in his pockets and he hangs his head. He doesn’t smile or laugh except at crude jokes or in making fun of other people. He’s scared to say he loves anybody. He’s scared to say he cares. He’s scared to say he hurts.

And who would blame him? He may feel like he’s the last one to finally man up. Finally. It’s a cruel world and it wants it’s men to be cruel too.

So what do we do?

A lot of people say it falls in the hands of fathers and other male role models. There’s no doubt about that. One football coach can make all the difference in the world on a boy’s tenderness. We know this.

But are women powerless in the cause? I think we are often too quick to assume so. We are too likely to watch the leagues of little boys pass by, their tenderness robbed or stifled, without saying a word because we figure that’s just how things are. That’s just how boys are and we don’t know what or how to do something about it.

But then we expect them to just figure out the tenderness when they need it. To go from tough guy to flowers and letters and date night and Daddy. We turn a blind eye to the suppressed tenderness but then expect it to come out easily, full force, when it’s for us. This is obviously a contradictory and ridiculous expectation. So why do we perpetuate it?

In the end, women want two different things. We want the lover, but we don’t necessarily want to do what it takes to encourage him. We don’t want to spend the time and energy on the nice guy when he’s not our guy. It begins in elementary school (or even before.) Tenderness, especially male tenderness, is delicate and sometimes awkward. To recognize it, embrace it- you have to be willing to be shunned. Tenderness makes many people uncomfortable. So the girls on the playground shy away from the nice guy. Associating with him requires too much courage. The jerk gets continually affirmed over and over because nobody wants to be the one to change that. The nice guy assumes he’s not wanted and he quits.

This is unacceptable. As mothers, as sisters, as daughters, as teachers, as friends, we have to be proactively aware of the tenderness in the men around us and proactively encouraging of it. We have to be willing to stand by them when they feel foolish or lonely or embarrassed. Too often, women make the careless remark that there “just aren’t any good guys anymore.” And I wonder– of those guys who aren’t “good”- weren’t they once? Weren’t they all once little boys on their mothers’ laps? But in a world of cruelty, the tenderness won’t stick around on its own. We have to encourage them. We have to let them know it’s worth the fight. We, women, have to want them. We have to want their tenderness before the romance. We have to cherish and cling to the tenderness of the men around us- from little baby tears to grandfather hugs. We have to be willing to stand by it even when all the world rejects it.

If you’ve heard of NFP, you’ve probably heard about all of its wonderful effects. You’ve probably heard about how it gets you and your husband in tune with your body. How it teaches you both to be disciplined and how straightforward it can be. How it helps you focus on aspects of your relationship other than sex. How it makes things exciting and how every month you have another honeymoon. You’ve probably heard that NFP strengthens your marriage and makes you more fulfilled, more in love, and happier.

And though I appreciate those sentiments and have no doubt that NFP has improved countless marriages, I’ve always felt like the stuff I hear and read about NFP sounds a little bit like an infomercial. It sounds a little too good to be true. I await the sped up “side effects may include…”

But so often, the side effects of NFP are written in fine print below the many benefits. So I’m not surprised that many people don’t trust it and don’t give it a chance. We sense that there has to be a downside. And I’m going to tell you assuredly that there is. And what is it? It’s not that it isn’t effective. Abstaining when fertile is most certainly effective—it’s in the couple’s hands to decide how liberal they want to be about that abstinence. The problem isn’t about charting—charting isn’t that complex. Plenty of women chart their cycle for all sorts of reasons from hormonal imbalance diagnostics to preparation for conception. The problem with NFP is the abstinence.

Because the truth is, abstinence for the sake of postponing children, while perhaps prudent, is not some glorious thing. It’s self-denial, plain and simple, and self-denial hurts. It varies in its degree of hurt—for some lucky couples the abstinence is a couple of days a month. For some couples it could be weeks or even months at a time if you’ve got really crazy cycles. Either way, NFP means regularly depriving your marriage of sex—that expression which comes physically and emotionally most natural to romantic love.

And what does that do? That hurts you and that hurts your spouse. I’d say it might even hurt your marriage. Yes, NFP may hurt your marriage. That’s the fine print.

But in the end, it’s worth it. My husband and I still use NFP. But not for all the “benefits.” We use NFP to avoid doing what we consider to be wrong—we use NFP to avoid using contraception. The wrongness of contraception (something I’d like to address in the future,) is NFP’s true and only real selling point. We don’t practice NFP to “bring us closer together.” We don’t do it to “spice things up.” And we don’t do it in order for me to “get in touch with my body.” Really, we shouldn’t need NFP to do all of those things. The popular idea of needing NFP for marriage is contrary to the very philosophy of marriage. The philosophy of marriage says that though absence may make the heart grow fonder, it is better to grow fonder by choice, with presence—indeed, with prolonged, evolving, natural presence. The philosophy of marriage says you don’t need “monthly honeymoons.” You need one. And it’s not the end-all-be-all of your entire marriage. It is a step in a journey and adventure together. It is a step in a lifelong commitment to giving and receiving. Given that we believe contraception is a contradiction to that commitment, we have enough reason to practice NFP so we don’t deeply harm our marriage and ourselves in the times when we aren’t ready for children. We practice NFP because we find it better to suffer together than to sin together. And do we benefit despite the suffering? Of course we do—but not because of what NFP is. We benefit because of what NFP isn’t.

One of the current popular video trends on YouTube consists of men going through simulated labor. It’s an interesting concept and the men have some funny reactions. But when you read the comments underneath the videos you start to wonder if women get a little more pleasure out of them than simply for curiosity or humor’s sake. It seems as if the videos are being used to back up an accusation, a popular accusation—the accusation that goes like this:

Women are stronger than men. Women suffer more. And men will never, ever, EVER understand.

Women say this kind of stuff all the time. About how men “don’t understand.” We complain about the stretch marks that babies give us but don’t give them. We insist that the father cannot ever know best for the child simply because he didn’t birth the child. We rant about PMS and about countless other “female problems” that we assume far exceed what any man must have to deal with. We expect the husband to change oil and to change diapers and to be an expert at both. And then if he ends up being an expert at both, we dismiss it because it still won’t ever compare to all the sacrifices we do.

And why do we say all this? Because it builds us up. It makes us feel stronger. And a lot of this is a reaction to the many ways in which the strength of womanhood has been overlooked or taken for granted throughout history and today. We want to be appreciated, and rightfully so. But too often we go too far, and unsatisfied with simply being appreciated, we feel the need to depreciate men. We aren’t content knowing we are strong, and so women fall into the trend of delighting in a man’s weakness– delighting when he doesn’t fully understand, or better yet, can’t fully understand.

But what women do not consider is that we may not always understand either. We don’t know what it’s like to be a man. Now I know that eyes are going to roll at that sentence. Women are thinking, yeah, and like being a man is difficult, but who are we to say unequivocally that it is harder to be a woman than a man, harder to be a mother than a father? Who are we to make that sort of judgment? We know that no one fully understands our life and our suffering, so how are we to conclude that anyone else’s is any worse or any better?

And moreover, even if we could come to such a conclusion (which is not possible)—state as fact that men have it easier—why should we hold that against them? It is a dangerous business—tallying up suffering and using it to judge other peoples’ worth and goodness. It is dangerous because it is an incorrect method. Human beings are not good according to how much they’ve dealt with. They are good according to how they’ve dealt with what they’ve been dealt. The fact that they may deal with less does not lessen their worth. If we believed otherwise, then we would think most children the worst people of all. After all, we generally assume that children don’t have as much to deal with as adults (although this too is questionable). And yet, we don’t blame them or hold that against them. We judge them on their own scale. We judge them according to what they do have and the suffering they are dealt. And rightfully so. For is that not how we would like to be judged? What would a woman think if one day, after critiquing her husband for having “no idea what I went through in my thirty hour labor,” he replied, “well, my friend’s wife was in labor for forty hours, so you really shouldn’t be talking.” It would hurt her down to her core! And she would find it such an unfair statement for him to make. After all, it’s not her fault that she didn’t have a longer labor! He should be proud of her for how she made it through whatever she made it through! He ought not judge her according to the difficulty of her suffering.

We know this. We know how we would like to be judged. So why don’t we judge men the same way? This ongoing insistence that “men have it easier” and we are therefore, somehow, “better” needs to end. It doesn’t make men feel bad for us. It doesn’t make them more likely to be helpful or kind. It doesn’t make them want to get closer to us, (in fact, it does the opposite.) And it doesn’t make them better men. Women cannot help men be better until they recognize the good that is already there. If we want men to understand us, we have to at least try to understand them. And most of all, we have to admit that they are worth understanding. There was a time when it was standard to consider women not worth understanding—to consider the woman’s task and life frivolous and easy. We’ve seen the damage this outlook has inflicted, not only on women, but on the whole world. So how dare we test our luck by turning the vice around? How bold we are to assume that devaluing men won’t have a negative effect on the world at large. How bold we are to assume that it won’t hurt all of us, not just men. We risk much by depreciating men. We risk much by treating them as if they “can’t possible understand.” No, simulated labor will never be real labor. And men won’t ever fully understand. But women won’t fully understand either. Nobody will. Nobody ever fully understands anything another person suffers through. But the good news is we can at least begin to. We can see further and further into the depths of another person’s soul, and them into ours—we can see and be seen, appreciate and be appreciated—we just have to be willing to open our eyes.

I recently came across the mother-in-law prenup, in which a mother of a little boy jokingly  lists the things her future daughter in law must agree to in order to marry her son. The basic underlying premise of the post is as the writer puts it,

We have to take a stand against son stealing right now.

Of course, she’s half-kidding and the post is humorous—but the thing is, you know that the fact that she’s half-kidding means she’s also half-serious. And the fact that she’s half-serious is, quite frankly, pretty scary.

Especially if you’re a girl who plans to ever marry a boy.

But I’m already married and my mother in law and I get along great. So when I read the post, it didn’t scare me for my sake. It scared—no rather, alerted—me for the sake of my son. I had recently found out I was having a son when I read it and all I could think was:

Please God don’t let me be anything like this woman.

But the scary truth is that this woman’s feelings are natural. If you scroll down to the comments you may be surprised how many women agree with her and have genuine anger towards their daughter/future daughter-in-laws— sometimes because they have been genuinely mistreated, but often simply because a daughter-in-law guarantees that you’re no longer the number one woman in your son’s life. And that hurts. When you’re no longer the most beautiful woman in the world to your son, when you’re no longer his source of everything, it hurts. Because you’ve lost something that gave you meaning and value. And that loss is real. And as with any loss, in that moment, a mother is presented with an existential crisis:

What is my purpose?

Now the typical human response to this question, in any situation of loss or change, is to not really address it. We either live in denial and keep acting as if the relationship is as it once was, or we deflect our pain through anger at another person. Both of these reactions lead to unhealthy relationships between mother and son, mother and daughter-in-law, and in general, unrest within the family. Even in those circumstances where the feelings are completely hidden (or only revealed in jokes and/or side comments and gossip) they are still doing damage by not being dealt with and remedied. Any time we have hatred in our hearts we are doing damage because we aren’t open to love. So there is no question, that even if the feelings described in the blog post may be understandable, they must be stopped. The question is: how do we stop them? Well, I believe it starts with answering the existential question honestly. And most importantly, answering it long before circumstance shoves it in our face.

My experience as a mother is obviously incredibly small and I know I can’t begin to grasp all the feelings and pains and joys that come with motherhood. But I am a human being. And so therefore I do understand the feelings and pains and joys that come along with love. And that’s what motherhood is all about, really. Love. The problem is, human beings don’t always understand how best to love. We are overcome by the feelings of it all and in the process forget the point of it all. It is wonderful to be loved, but we twist our hearts into a mess the moment we value that feeling we get above the other person’s well-being. We set our psyches up for trauma the moment we allow that feeling we get to completely define us. Because the feeling is never guaranteed to stay. That little boy is going to grow up. One day, quite soon, he may ask me to marry him. And then twenty quite soon years later he may be asking another woman instead. That sweet and tender feeling that I will get from having this adorable little creature depend entirely on me will one day be somewhat taken from me. And that is a fact that absolutely must be dealt with. I must ask myself, now, how I will deal with it then. I must decide that something else is more important than those tender feelings. For tender feelings are not the substance of love.

Tender feelings are beautiful. But they are only the product of love. Love has to be bigger than that. Love has to say I’m going to love you even when you do not give me tender feelings—or, in this case, when you give your tender feelings to someone else. If anyone says this, it is usually mothers and fathers. They get this better than any of us do. Partially because their natural instinct is a little more selfless. But it is not enough to go off of instinct because instinct only takes love so far. If we want to learn to love, we have to consciously decide to do so. Even when it hurts us. Even when we feel rejected. Even when that rejection comes from the human being who we have literally given everything to.

And if we learn to love like this, if we learn to love above and beyond the tender feelings, we will receive an even greater peace and joy, because we are living as we should. We are living the way a human being was meant to live.

And what’s cool about it is that oftentimes when we do learn to love like this we end up finding even more tenderness. We may deepen and enrich our existing relationships or even discover new ones (like a relationship with an in-law.) I hope that one day my son grows up and finds a wonderful woman to spend his life with. Because his happiness, not primarily the tender feelings we share, but his happiness beyond me, is my purpose in his life. If I don’t live up to that purpose, neither of us will ever know our own true potential or the potential of our relationship. He may be a mere three or so pounds right now, and he may have never known anything outside of the little crib he nestles in inside of me—but true love has to start now. Or before I know it, as all experienced parents warn, I’ll be watching him walk down the aisle. And I want to be, as my parents and in-laws were for me, brimming with happiness. I want to be able to watch him give himself to her and think this was the point of it all. This was why he asked me to marry him. So he could learn how to marry her.

In this age of delayed and prolonged childbearing, it is expected that every expectant mother be completely “prepared” for her child. She should know the ins and outs of everything there is to know. She and her husband should have done all the things and travelled the world in all the ways they could ever want so as to ensure they’ve gotten all their other interests and desires out of the way before the baby comes. She should be in charge of her fertility. She should have completely planned such an occurrence and timed it perfectly. (Before long, she may be expected to have planned the baby’s gender or the color of her hair.) The nursery should be painted and furnished and the nanny already selected. Schools should be lined up, with the tuition allotted for them in a savings account. But most of all, in this age of planned parenthood, it is expected that, because she “planned” and “chose” it all, every expectant mother should be completely unafraid.

I don’t have everything completely “prepared” for my baby. And I know I won’t by the day he comes. After all, are we ever truly prepared for anything in life? We do our best. We use our prudential judgment and we definitely should plan as much as we can. We try our hardest and love our deepest. But there will always be delays and unexpected changes. There will always be something to mess up our plans. And if we waited on doing anything until absolutely everything was “ready” we might never experience anything at all.

One of the nice things about having a baby young is that people know I’m not completely prepared. They know there’s no way my husband and I have the nursery painted when, ten months after our wedding, we only now just painted the kitchen. They know we’re new to this. They know we’re going to struggle. They know we’re going to be exhausted. They know we’re going to be even, at least a little, afraid. And that’s okay. Because we’re young. And so we’re excused for such feelings. People want to help us and they do help us. Because they know that we need it.

But it seems like the older you get, the less mercy you’re given for any shortcomings, fears, or needs. After all, if you are the type of woman who did “take charge of her fertility,” (or even if you didn’t, but were unable to have children at a younger age,) then you are assumed to be an independent woman. That is part of this whole concept, is it not? Our modern mentality of being on the pill, of being sexually available, of planning everything, of having the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy—so much of it is about independence. And it necessarily transfers over to parenting. We expect the older parent to be independent. Oftentimes, they inevitably are forced to be independent due to family members growing older themselves or moving away. You read now of parents throwing their own baby showers because no one offers to throw one for them. And how sad this is! How sad it is that we force so many parents into such complete and cold independence. Because such independence is actually a lie. It doesn’t work. It isn’t human. No parent is ever fully prepared. And every parent needs help.

And we understood this years ago. We understood this in the days when grandparents, extended family members, and neighbors and friends were an integral part of a child’s growing up. We didn’t expect expectant parents to know everything there was to expect. And in many ways, children were better off because of it. In general, I imagine, our children are better off the more we admit our shortcomings—children are better off the humbler we are as parents. Because when our children know that we know we aren’t perfect (but that we do our best,) and that the world isn’t perfect (but that people will be there to love and help them,) they learn to forgive. They learn to forgive us, and they learn to forgive the other people in their lives.

But a child will never learn forgiveness from a parent who is not allowed to be imperfect. A child will never learn forgiveness from a mother who is not allowed to admit she is at least a little afraid of labor pains or postpartum depression—of a mother who is not allowed to admit she’s genuinely concerned that she may gag each and every time she changes a diaper– but is ready and willing to try her best and love her hardest and ask for help when she needs it. A child will never learn forgiveness from parents who are supposed to be completely prepared– because no parent is completely prepared. We must teach our children forgiveness by first admitting that we will fail and that we cannot do it alone. And we absolutely must teach our children forgiveness. For if a child cannot forgive, how will they ever love a child of their own?

And so as a young expectant mother, blessed to have many people ready and happy to help me and forgive me my lack of experience and my shortcomings, I ask the world to do the same for the older “more prepared” mothers and fathers. The truth about planned parenthood is that it doesn’t work. The unplanned may be as significant as the baby himself or as insignificant as a diaper leak—but either way, planned parenthood is an impossibility. We can only do our best and ask for forgiveness and help and for friends and family to laugh with along the way. So let us do so. Let us learn to embrace unplanned parenthood (which is every case of parenthood) at any age and let it teach us better how to love.

I’d always heard about being comfortable in your own skin, about how every body is beautiful, about how you shouldn’t let the media affect how you feel about yourself. I knew that models were airbrushed and pushed up and manipulated in all sorts of ways and that they didn’t represent “real women.” I’d even been told that I was beautiful. But despite what I was told, I always felt like I knew of a deeper truth- that there was an ideal, far more perfect than I was and that I could never reach that ideal. As it does for many females, that idea stung. And it stung deeply. I’d try to reason it out. You don’t need to be perfect! You don’t need to be flawless! Nobody expects that of you! They love you as you are! Imperfections are lovable! But it didn’t matter. Though I believed it in theory, I didn’t believe it deep down, or at least, I didn’t feel it all the time. I didn’t feel it when faced with what I considered the ideal.

And then, I got pregnant.

I’d always heard the pregnant woman hailed as the beacon of femininity—and I interiorly scoffed—yeah maybe when the bump is small and cute! But beacon of femininity when she possibly weighs more than her husband? Come on! And I’d seen websites of women sharing their post-natal bodies—stretch marks and all—with pride. This body gave birth to new life and I’m proud of it! They’d say.

Good for you! I’d think, but my body better never look like that!

And now? Sure, I’d prefer it didn’t. But I’m not so concerned about it anymore if it does. All of a sudden I actually feel beautiful. A type of beautiful that is irrelevant of anyone else’s affirmation and irrelevant of what imperfections may happen upon my body. A type of beautiful that only I could convince myself of.

Because now I know what makes me beautiful. I can actually see it for myself. Now I know why the female body was made like it was. It actually has a purpose. And things are beautiful not just because of how they look, but because of what they are, what they’re meant for, what they can do. Pregnancy has forced me to see what my body can do.

I don’t mean to claim that the female body is only beautiful because it can be a pregnant body. Not at all! The female body is beautiful because it can love. And that is the most beautiful thing in the world. It’s just that pregnancy is one of the many ways in which the female, body can love. Hopefully, those who cannot, or have not, or will not ever be pregnant see that they have that same beautiful body capable of just as much love. But for me, it happened to take pregnancy to understand that.

Pregnancy forced me into an ultimatum. That is, either you accept that you won’t be physically, sexually flawless and culturally “perfect” or you don’t ever let your body fully love and do the amazing things it is meant to do. Because love hurts. Love stretches and bends and breaks and wrinkles and tires. Love wears on the body. But love gives the body purpose and meaning.

The old Skin Horse explains this phenomenon perfectly in his dialogue with the Velveteen Rabbit:

“Generally,” he says, “by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Pregnancy is teaching me how worth it is to be Real. For some of us, it may be a different lesson, but we can all be Real. We become Real when we love in the ways we were meant to love and when we accept fully the ways in which that love may bend and break our bodies (and even hearts.) It is in becoming real, that like the Skin Horse, we may one day look at all the new stuffed horses and think for a moment, “It’d be nice to look like them again,” but if we have really loved and lived we will surely laugh at such a thought. Laugh because the beauty of physical perfection, while nice, pales in comparison to the beauty of love.

When I first got pregnant, I was amazed at how pro-life the world suddenly seemed. I remember Googling “five week old baby” and realizing shortly after hitting “enter” that I would probably have to change my entry to “five week old fetal development.” And yet, the search engine produced exactly what I was looking for: “See what your baby looks like in the womb at five weeks!” And it wasn’t just one website. All the headlines were like this. And the images—they weren’t of newborns, but of tiny little creatures curled up inside tiny little bubbles—fetuses.

And then I started looking at ultrasound pictures and videos. And I was amazed at what the parents said about their fetuses. First of all, they never called them that. They were “my baby,” “our little one,” even when only a tiny yolk sac was distinguishable on the machine (at which point, the fetus isn’t even considered a fetus yet—but an embryo.) But more than just being called “baby,” they were treated as such. The mothers and fathers—they talked to their fetuses. They interacted with them—the mother might laugh and the baby might move which would make the mother laugh again and the baby move even more. And then these ultrasound images would be taken home, maybe even framed (especially with the new 3d ultrasound technology in which you can really see the baby’s facial features—many parents frame a picture from the 3d ultrasound side-by-side with a picture of the newborn, amazed at how they can often look like the same exact picture.)

But perhaps most striking of all is how women, at their most casual, speak about their fetus. Again, they never call it that. They rarely even call it an “it.” Even before the sex is known, many will say “he/she” or switch out he and she or stick to one until they know. You hear things like “I felt the baby move,” or “I don’t think Baby would like that,” or “is it okay if I eat this cheese? Will it harm my baby?” There are countless tips on how to “bond with your unborn baby”—tips on talking to the fetus, touching the belly, playing music for it—and all of these people, they act as if they truly believe the fetus is more than a clump of tissue. They act as if they truly believe that the fetus is a child. And yet, I am sure that a good amount of them, in the political arena, would argue that it is not.

And perhaps this means nothing. Perhaps women are doing with their fetuses what anyone does with anything they desire. Wishfully thinking. Obviously, one might say, obviously they call it a baby. They want it to be a baby. It’s more emotionally satisfying to think of it as a baby. A woman who wants a baby is going to call her fetus a baby. But if you talk to a woman who doesn’t want a baby, you’re going to hear very different terminology. And this may very well be true. The inclination to treat a “clump of tissue” like a human being may be no different from the inclination to treat an imaginary friend as a real one, or an online girlfriend as more than that.

And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not the same as an imaginary friend or an exaggerated girlfriend. After all, those who tend to have these tend to have serious insecurities or wounds that incentivize such delusion. Most people don’t have imaginary friends or exaggerated girlfriends. And yet I have never met a pregnant woman who plans at the bare minimum to not abort her baby to refer to her baby as anything less than a baby. If the inclination to treat a fetus as more than a clump of tissue is a delusion, then all pregnant women who are not seeking an abortion are delusional. All have serious insecurities or wounds to incentivize such delusion. As do the family members and friends and acquaintances and nurses who deal with the pregnant woman. And this just seems so incredibly unlikely that it demands we take such an inclination seriously. That is, we must take it seriously that it is actually the norm to treat a fetus as a baby. Yes, our country may be split down the middle politically on the abortion issue. But the mother is not split. She may change her mind because she has been raped or because she conceived at an inconvenient time or because she is single, young, or for whatever reason reasonably afraid of the responsibilities of parenthood, and she may change her mind because someone close to her has fallen into or is in one of these categories. But if you take a woman at her barest, purest, unbiased self—unaffected by these ulterior motives, she will believe her fetus to be a baby. As will all those connected with and to her. And perhaps we are all delusional. But if we consider the nature of delusion, who is actually more likely to be delusional? The overwhelming majority of mothers and families and friends in their natural, stable state? Or the few, the pressured, the scared, the lonely, the very young in their anything but natural and stable state? It seems to be more likely that those in the latter group are the only ones who have any reason to be delusional. And so perhaps then, this overwhelming instinct to treat a fetus as a baby (unless that baby is no longer desired) means something and ought to be taken seriously. And if we are the delusional ones, then we had better start changing our ways—because delusion is not a healthy thing to live by. Changing our ways would mean changing every instance of “unborn baby” to “fetus,” or “embryo.” It would mean never saying “my baby” no matter how big your stomach gets—no matter how soon your due date may be—no matter the little foot you saw make an imprint against your belly button. It would even mean telling the poor families who have suffered a miscarriage that they ought not treat the loss as if it really was the loss of a child. After all, delusion would not be a healthy thing. And yet, which one of us is ready to do this? Which one of us doesn’t find such a thing to be cruel and inhumane, and quite simply, incorrect? And perhaps it is because it is incorrect. And if it is incorrect for the mother who wants her child, it is likewise for the one who does not. Our instinct matters. If our instinct is wrong, let’s resist it, in all ways, shapes, and forms. But until we are ready to resist it, we had better listen up.

When I was little and went to the grocery store with my mom, I liked to occupy myself by looking at greeting cards. There were funny cards, cheesy cards, stupid cards, pretty cards, sentimental cards — and I found it all very interesting.  But perhaps most interesting of all were the cards for those people turning forty or fifty.  They actually disturbed me a little bit.  There was so much color on all the other ones but when you got to these, it was like they were the death cards.  And if you didn’t know how to read you might as well have assumed that that’s exactly what they were.  Cards for the dead people . They were almost always black and they might even have a reference to a grave stone or something else rather morbid.  You’d open the card and there would be some sort of half-hearted, well, at least you can celebrate.

To little me, this was very confusing.  Birthdays were supposed to be a great thing! When and why do they become so terrible?  And if they are so terrible, why even celebrate them?  Why buy a card?  Why not pretend they aren’t even happening? Unfortunately, as I grew older, I began to realize that this indeed is the coping mechanism of choice for many people — pretend they’re not even happening or get drunk enough to forget they’re happening.

And what’s even sadder is that that age — 40 to 50 has lowered dramatically. Ironically, as our life expectancy increases it seems that we become more and more afraid of getting older.  Now it’s not the dreaded 40.  It’s the dreaded 30.  Because the end of your twenties is like the end of your life.  But it seems to trickle down even further.  I can count on one hand the number of peers I have who are actually excited about turning anything above twenty-one.  Indeed, you hear some version of this all day or all week long on your twenty-first birthday:

Enjoy it! It’s the last birthday worth celebrating anyway.

To make matters worse, it’s not even the first twenty years that are considered the prime.  It’s roughly the years between sixteen and twenty-one.  So while the adults are all wishing they could go back, with each year our culture is shoving the ten-year-olds further and further into a desperate climb towards the day they can get their license or the day they can drive off finally to the freedom of college.  We literally act as if life is only great for six or so years.  And we counsel those living them to live them well as they pass quickly and they’re gone before you know it.

Maybe I’m too idealistic, but this just doesn’t seem to cut it.  To live a life in which you believe that six out of your eighty or so years are going to be anything worth your time doesn’t sound like a life very much worth living.  There has got to be something more. There’s got to be a better answer.  Especially for women.  For women are probably the most plagued by this syndrome.  We all know how increasingly mature little girls are starting to dress.  And we all know how much older women are increasingly desperately pouring themselves and their money into “miracles” of botox and tucks and suctions and add-ons and push-ups and cover-ups.  Women are told a lie that with each year gets stronger and stronger.  And this lie is that their sexual prime is what defines them.  And that the time before and after it will never measure up.  If we were animals, I could maybe understand this lie, and it might not be such a lie.  But we’re not animals.  And I’m pretty sure life has more to offer.  And I’m pretty sure that most of us would agree it does.  But even if we won’t outright say it, why do we continue to perpetuate the lie?

I believe we do because we are part animal.  And we have instincts.  And when we start down the road of instincts, when we start to let instincts take over, we begin to forget about everything else.  We all know how increasingly sexualized our culture is becoming.  But why at such a fast rate?  And why is it so overwhelming?  Because instinct is strong.  And when let to run wild, it runs wild and it knocks over everything in its path.  We have, as a culture, let the sexual instinct rule.  Just listen to the beats and the grunted words coming from so many of the songs on the radio.  Sometimes they don’t even sound human.  And I would argue, that at some point, they aren’t human anymore.  We have resigned ourselves to the part of us that is enslaved to the instinct. And once we are enslaved to the instinct it is very, very difficult to turn back.  Even if we have many wonderful things in our life at thirty we can’t help but gaze backwards at the women younger than us, increasingly anxious as we see ourselves looking older and getting further and further away from that prime.  The more sexually focused our culture becomes, inevitably the more sexually focused we become.  The more instinct driven the advertisements and people and movies and music around us become, inevitably the more instinct driven we are pressured to become.  Because our culture is our pack. And in the wild, the pack defines your survival.

But the good news is, we are not all animal.  We are human.  And our humanity raises us above the silliness of the pack.  Our humanity allows sexuality to be merely a facet of who we are, and even still, our humanity makes sexuality so much more beautiful than it ever was when ruled by instinct.  Humanity has so, so, so much more to offer. Humanity is not the time between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one.  Humanity is eternal.  But we cannot know and fully understand and fully reap the benefits of being human until we learn to stop looking backwards (or forwards) in anxiety.  We have to accept where we are and until we do that we will never know what that point in eternity has to offer us. Sadly, too many ten-year-olds will never have known the beauty of being ten.  Sadly, too many forty-year-olds will never have known the beauty of being forty.  And sadly, too many people will have lived and died without ever having known the beauty of being human.  All they will remember is the crazy party days of satisfied instinct.  That will be the summit and high point of their lives and how sad that is.  So I challenge us to resist being slaves to the instinct.  There’s no need to be.  (Besides, it’s a losing game anyway!  There’s no rush and there’s no ticking clock.  And to live like there is, is to miss life itself.)  So celebrate your birthday this year.  Tell everybody how old you are and how proud you are of it because it’s a beautiful and amazing thing.  And the more you choose to act like it, the more you’ll believe it and see how true it really is.  In turn, you will then give others the courage to be human too.

One of my favorite pieces of marital advice I’ve ever heard was given to me by my friend when we were just teenagers looking at clothes in my closet. She said, nonchalantly,

My mom told me that the secret to marriage is to make sure you always wear pretty pajamas.

We probably laughed and didn’t talk much about it, but it forever stuck with me.

Around the same time I was looking at pictures of myself from when I was about four years old and I noticed how unique my outfits were.  Almost every other picture I was in a princess gown or an animal costume or a vintage dress from my great grandmother.  It was the age when we would play dress up just because.  The age when you assumed you were beautiful and adorned yourself as such.  The age when you didn’t question if it was appropriate to wear ruby red slippers to school.  The age when you dressed totally impractical, and yet you never thought twice about it. Nearly everything you did was impractical.  And how freeing such an outlook was.  Little girls in their princess dresses have such confidence, such happiness.  They’re so human and they’re so beautiful. But what happens?  Somewhere along the way they put away their personality and don Abercrombie jeans so as to win approval of girls and the sexual attention of boys.  And through this process, they lose something so precious.  They may even forget to wear pretty pajamas.

Too often, we think of beauty simply as a means to an end.  And that is the problem with the little girl who grows out of dress up.  She forgets what it was like to dress up just because.  Dressing up becomes simply a tool for getting something.  Her own beauty becomes meaningless, except for whatever it can do for her.  And so we hear of the married woman who “gives up.”  The married woman who stops caring about what she wears or what she looks like.  She’d found her guy, checked off her list. Now what else was there to do besides watch TV and live vicariously through other people trying to check off their lists?

But here is where my friend’s mom’s advice comes in.  Always wear pretty pajamas.  We are instinctual beings.  We are animals.  And so there is a natural explanation for why the eleven year old begins to see her beauty as a means to an end.  But we are more than animals.  We appreciate beauty for more than its practicality.  Beauty lifts us to heights beyond the realm of instinct.  Beauty nourishes us and gives meaning to our lives.  Beauty enchants us and gives us hope.  And one of the greatest things anyone can ever have in their marriage is hope.

Therefore, if you want your marriage (or relationship, or just your life in general!) to be full of hope, if you want it to be transcendent, if you want it to be more than instinct, do the things that don’t make sense.  Do the things that aren’t practical.  The things that are beautiful just because.  Like pretty pajamas when you’re sixty-five.  Like pretty pajamas when you’re nine months pregnant.  Like pretty pajamas when you may feel entirely unattractive.  Like pretty pajamas because you’re beautiful and because your beauty, not just your sexuality, is what gives you purpose and meaning, and it is what in turn, enchants a man, even when he has, in the world’s terms, gained everything he can practically gain from you.  When the practical has expired, when instinct has been fulfilled, it is beauty that must remain to keep us going, to give us reason, even more reason to live and to love.

I’ve made a rule for myself that I will always light a candle when my husband and I have dinner.  There have been many times when I have said oh but we’re eating really quickly or ahh the table is a mess or I’ll light a candle after I clean everything but every time I make such an excuse, I know in the back of my head that I am making a mistake, that I am depriving us of something, perhaps incredibly simple, but something perhaps more important than the meal itself.  Precisely because we don’t need candles.  The animal says, we just need to eat.  But the human recognizes that the things we need most are the things we don’t need.  The things we need most are the things that are impractical.  The things that are simply beautiful just because.  I used to always wonder why my mom insisted that we “set” the table with pretty napkins rather than plain old paper towels.  Wouldn’t paper towels be easier?  But now I understand. When I light a candle, it gives meaning to the meal I cooked.  And it tells my husband, or my husband tells me when he lights a candle (which he is much better at doing!) that we’ll love each other beyond what makes sense.  We’ll love each other even when our bellies are full and our senses satisfied.  That we’ll dance around the kitchen just because and that we’ll continue to hold hands even when our children are grown and our hair is grey. Because that’s the kind of love that means the most.  That’s the kind of love that sets you free—the kind of free that you were when you were four years old.  The kind of free that makes you human.

Whenever I say the word modesty it sticks to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter.

It’s a perfectly fine word and it’s not it’s own fault that it has become cliché.  But for whatever reason, its use inevitably hearkens to thoughts of ankle-length khaki skirts and stiff, shapeless button-downs.  For a girl who likes to wear things that look beautiful on her beautiful body, modesty sounds like pretty unappealing.

Now, there have been some good efforts made to make modesty a positive thing and to eliminate the type of reaction that so many of us have to it.  There are stores that have devoted themselves to making modest and fashionable clothes.  And though some have achieved this, unless you were way fashionable before you started preaching, you’re not likely to be taken seriously.  The modest and fashionable stance too often says you can have it all and still be modest!  And while it is true that you can be fashionable and modest, you can’t be modest and have all the convenient advantages that come with being immodest.  And I don’t think we’re helping anybody by telling them otherwise.

The truth is – modesty is difficult.  And it will always be difficult.  It sucks when you want to buy the string bikini but you don’t and then you feel dumb at the pool party.  It sucks when you want to wear the shorter skirt but you can’t because you know you shouldn’t.  It sucks when you go back inside to change because you know better than that and you know that someone you love will tell you that you know better than that if you don’t tell yourself.

And why does it suck?  Well, because I don’t think we were meant to cover up. They certainly didn’t cover up in the Garden of Eden.  The body is a beautiful thing.  And a beautiful thing should be seen and adored.  I know and have heard all this stuff about covering up because you’re beautiful but that hasn’t ever really made sense to me.  We don’t cover up anything else because it’s beautiful.  Sure you would be careful with it and cherish it but there are few things you cover up because they are beautiful or because they are sacred.

No.  We don’t cover up because we’re beautiful.  We cover up because we’re screwed up and we don’t know how to properly deal with something so beautiful.  And we’re likely to screw up the beautiful if we don’t cover it up.

I know that sounds pessimistic.  But I honestly believe that it’s the truth and that we won’t understand how to dress in a way that it is good for us until we admit the truth.  We are prone to do bad things—good things too—but bad things.  And in the wrong context, the beautiful body is tempting.  In the wrong context, the beautiful body can be misused.  And though a misused body at the time makes us feel like we have it all, it actually leads us to lose so much of what we had in the first place.

In the end, nobody “has it all.”  The modest girl is eventually respected and given the choices that usually go along with modesty she probably ends up happier down the road. But she missed out on things.  She missed out on some fun and she missed out on the thrill that comes with promiscuity.  We can’t deny that she missed out on this.  We can’t deny that Sandy from Grease gained something when she switched out her innocent dress for the black leather pants.  She probably did have more fun.  And I don’t think it does any good to pretend like she didn’t.

And yet, Grease is a tragedy.  Fun did come along with the black leather pants. But so, so, so much more was lost.  For the first time, Sandy was misused. What was so pristine while hidden, became marred when finally exposed.  What Danny so badly wanted to see, shattered the minute she stripped off the veil.  It’s not that she couldn’t have ever done so.  But just that it was the wrong time in an imperfect world.  By trying to show Sandy to everyone, Sandy lost everything that everyone wanted to see in the first place.

In the end, although modesty comes with its fair share of feeling awkward and stupid and lame and ugly, modesty is worth it.  In the end, our world is not Eden.  Our world is not perfect.  And so nobody ever is going to have it all.  The best we can do is protect what we do have.  It takes a whole lot of patience to protect something beautiful.  It’s like covering up a painting in a museum.  It feels so paradoxical and ridiculous at times.  And the last thing you want to hear is about how freeing it is and how much you respect yourself once you do it.  Because a lot of the time it doesn’t feel freeing.  It feels stifling. A lot of the time you may respect yourself, but you also feel unattractive.  A lot of the time, for a lot of people, modesty feels like a weight on your shoulders.  Especially when everyone else seems to have nothing covering their shoulders… or stomachs, or legs.

But the cool thing about weights is that they make us stronger.  And the higher we hold them, the prouder and taller we stand, the stronger we get. In an imperfect world, we’re all weak.  And so it’s going to hurt to get stronger.  But strength is such a wonderful thing!  It is the strong person who later looks back and is thankful for the weight that was placed upon him.  It is the strong person who one day will look back and not regret all of the things he “didn’t have” because he has something better now.  Modesty hurts now because the beautiful isn’t meant to be covered.  But better the beautiful be covered in order to keep it beautiful than disclose everything and allow it to be tainted. Perhaps one day we will reach a place where we are not imperfect.  Perhaps one day we will not need to worry about being responsible for tempting other people towards something bad, or tempting ourselves towards something bad. I hope we get there.  But until then, we have to protect the beautiful.  We have to protect the men who belong to other women.  We have to protect the men who belong to us.  We have to protect each other from the tendency towards jealousy and vanity.  And we have to protect ourselves.  The body is beautiful and it’s so fulfilling to adorn it and to show it off.  And so I think modesty will always be a word that sticks to the roof of my mouth.  But eventually I have to, along with my pride, swallow it, and be thankful for the nagging in the depths of my heart and thankful for the weight on my shoulders, for these things have saved me from myself, and have brought me to places and people that cherish me and eventually to a husband who adores me in a way that far surpasses whatever thrill I could have gotten otherwise.