Sisters: It's Time to Stop Viewing Our Superpower As A Curse

By all standards, my grandpa was a pretty impressive human being. He studied aeronautical engineering and graduated from Stanford in 1957 before going on to earn a law degree in 1963. He flew P5Ms in the Naval Air Squadron and always seemed to rise to the top of any given endeavor, serving in VP and Director positions at both United Airlines and Hertz. He wrote regular op-eds for the Palo Alto Times. In every way, he was a brilliant, accomplished man, and everyone knew it. He held titles and respect he had more than earned.

But here’s something most people don’t know; for as brilliant and accomplished as my grandfather may have been, I strongly suspect that my grandma may have been even brighter. That’s my personal bias, of course, but she was one really impressive lady: she was a classically trained dancer on the corps of the San Francisco ballet, who worked as an administrator for CBS in New York, and served as a nurse at Stanford Medical Center. At one point, she was engaged to Merv Griffin. In many ways, she was ahead of her time.

I used to watch my grandparents’ interpersonal dynamic with curious fascination as a child. Everything between them was a light hearted contest- from proper classification of the various birds that would descend upon their kumquat trees to the timely completion of the daily New York Times crossword puzzles they took out two newspaper subscriptions to allow. (My grandma usually won- and she did it in pen.)

As part of a lifespan psychology assignment in college, I got to interview my grandmother about her life. It remains one of my most cherished conversations to date.

She spoke candidly to me, almost as though we were peers instead of relatives. She needed me to hear her as a woman instead of just as a granddaughter. “Kaeley,” she said. “I’ve had a marvelous life, and I don’t have any regrets. But if I’m honest with you, you should know there were times in my life and marriage where I felt like a sex slave with benefits.”

To be clear, this wasn’t a condemnation of my grandfather or an admission of regret for her choice to get married and have children. It was an honest summation of the limited avenues available to her in society once she tied the knot. There wasn’t any bitterness in her voice as she spoke. I think she just needed to be understood and seen. The 1950s were not all that kind to brilliant woman; there were few available outlets for their brilliance. They got to look pretty and throw cocktail parties and maybe be a secretary if time allowed. Those were their options.

My grandma didn’t resent having children or being a housewife. I just think she had a whole lot more to contribute than people were ready to receive or value. And in 2021, I can’t say it’s an unfamiliar dilemma. I’ve experienced it myself in certain church scenarios where the available avenues for women to serve are limited to the children’s ministry or the hospitality table. I’ve experienced it when I have something important to say to men who’ve conditioned themselves to believe it is wicked to submit themselves to the teaching of women. I’ve experienced it from men in leadership who’ve literally told me that my intelligence as a woman is of questionable value since my primary function in this world is to breed children.

I say all this to conclude that I can fully understand why so many women have rebelled so fiercely against the attempt to pigeonhole us into boxes and roles for which we were never created. I think it’s wicked to stifle our God given gifts instead of encouraging us to freely exercise them for the greater good. Some women were designed to be housewives. Some were designed to be engineers and doctors and data analysts and writers. Some of us were even designed, gasp, to SPEAK- to mixed sex crowds. I cannot emphasize this firmly enough: Forcing people into rigid gender roles is harmful. Not all women were meant to have children. We must have freedom to choose to follow where we think the good Lord is leading us to use our skills and gifts. We must create space for those gifts to flourish and be blessed.

But in recent history, I’ve seen a dramatic overcorrection of this problem. I’ve seen a shift toward a mentality that scorns motherhood entirely, that shuns it as a lesser calling, that mocks women who procreate, and that positions children as burdens and hindrances to fulfilling lives. And I think this is just as harmful and just as damnable a lie as anything I’ve condemned heretofore.

For decades, we women have been conditioned to view our superpower as a curse. It’s a cognitive distortion that is wreaking all kinds of havoc in the world. Rather than celebrating the single monumental feat our bodies can accomplish that men’s can not, we are increasingly working to neutralize it at every turn.

There have been more than 63 MILLION abortions since Roe v Wade was enacted in 1973. To offer some perspective, that’s more than the combined total of American soldiers who’ve died in every war since the dawn of our nation. It’s the equivalent of the combined populations of 19 US states. If you rang a bell once per minute to commemorate each of these lives, you would be ringing that bell until the year 2135. That is every minute for 114 years. Here’s another way to picture it: If American women went on baby strike and collectively decided not to have a single baby for the next 15 years, that would be the equivalent of the number of lives lost to abortion since 1973. How many cures for cancer? How many next great American novels or Nobel Peace prizes or Albert Einsteins has the world been deprived of in these last 48 years?

When women face a crisis pregnancy, society tells them they’re not strong enough to handle it. They’re told they have to choose between their dreams and their children. It’s a lie, a lie we have to stop choosing.

“Maybe I’ll have children later,” women are increasingly telling themselves as they delay marriage and procreation as long as physically possible by pumping over 7 billion dollars into the contraceptive market while they pursue their careers. By the time they realize there’s a shelf life on their eggs, it’s often too late, so they turn to other dangerous and expensive fertility options like IVF and even more exploitive practices like womb rental. And hardly anyone is slowing down to question any of this. We just barrel full speed ahead, insisting this is what freedom and empowerment look like without ever evaluating the big picture cost.

Enter antinatalism, which has gone completely off the rails with female supremacy hysteria, denigrating women who choose to gestate male children as traitors to womankind, screaming into the void about climate change and population control and a bunch of other heartstrings talking points designed to frame eugenics as wisdom.

In all these circumstances, overcorrection of a legitimate problem has made the problem infinitely worse. Rather than carving out lanes for women to be productive in society as both mothers AND employees, we continually play into a viciously false dichotomy that insists we have to choose just one at the expense of the other when we don’t.

Our ability to reproduce is not the problem. Children are not the problem. Housewives are not the problem. We have to stop infantilizing women and subjecting each other to the soft bigotry of low expectations. We have agency. We can do hard, amazing things, and we should.

My grandma taught me to take advantage of the opportunities available to me that were not available to her. And I have. And it’s been fulfilling in many ways. Through God’s grace, I’ve climbed corporate ladders, traveled the world, been published in national outlets, spoken on national platforms, testified in Senate hearings, filed proposed legislation, contributed to Amicus briefs for major court cases, and achieved so much more than many of my female ancestors would have ever dreamed.

But I’ll be honest with you; not a single one of those accomplishments can touch the satisfaction and pride I feel when I see one of my children extending compassion to someone in need. Not a single one of those accomplishments comes close to the feeling I get when the child society told me I should abort, reaches out,, touches my face, and says sincerely, “I love you, Mom.”

I could write the next great American novel or be nominated President of the United States, and it would still pale in comparison to the joy of being a mother. My kids are and will remain my magnum opus. Men can have both kids and careers.

Why can’t we?