what if you aren't the main character

there is no "Ideal Woman"

There is a new avatar of modern feminism, and she is perfect.

She comes in two forms. Both of them are flawless.

The first is the protagonist of all of the recent divorce novels and memoirs that Becca Rothfeld writes of here. By the accounts of these memoirs, divorce is the new coming-of-age. In the storyline of today’s modern woman, it is the shackles falling off the ankles and the scales off of one’s eyes, the stepping into the morning light after a long decade and a half of servitude. She is Paul on the road to Damascus, but also fierce. Divorce is the first act in a story of women’s fulfillment. The only thing keeping these women from happiness, pleasure and self-actualization was men.

With the new feminists, the old fashioned reactionary ones, the plot is the same but the mitigating events differ. Women find themselves still the main characters of their lives, but their agency is not bound by men and children but invigorated by them. It is marriage and childbearing that become the first act of these stories. The birth of the first child is the invitation to bliss, previously unknown- the “aha” that gestures toward a woman’s true selfhood. The children that populate these women’s lives serve to define her role in the family; she is the Matriarch, the self-mastered ideal who governs her family and homestead with frugality and beauty and, of course, joy.

Missing from both accounts is the plodding reality that defines women’s lives, only because it defines all lives. In real life there is no mitigating event that sets a woman free to find herself fulfilled; there are only the ordinary forms of service and beauty-seeking and, yes, even joy that all lives contain. To seek the storyline of women’s lives with such formulaic accounts is to miss what lives are, and indeed to miss what stories are.

It is to miss, also, the forms of failure and flaw and even sin that mark all stories. These crags and crannies are what actually make good stories. Perhaps she is lazy or perhaps she is jealous or perhaps her wedding china was stolen from under her. Though these qualities- the first two- or happenings- the latter one- are not good, they are the stuff that make lives lives. To make women flawless and without sin is not only to tell a false story; it is to tell a boring one. Sin is how we give an account of the grace that mends and tends and draws us to God- a story that by my account is always an interesting one.

Give me an account of a woman whose marriage was flawed and still, it held her. Tell me of the mother whose child nearly broke her with his fierce obstinance and yet, she loved him. I want to hear about the husband whose sullenness you could cut with a knife and the winter that the firewood ran out and the nights you nursed a child whose fevers would not go away. Tell me about the divorce that came only because he spent all of your money and so your father had to pay for the attorney. Tell me about the time you sought out sex and pleasure to fill your soul and you found yourself in bed with a man who snored. Tell me all of these stories, any of these stories, except the one where you and your divorce or you and your homestead and many children reveal only you as the Main Character of a life that is not real.