the privilege of wildness

These convenings of women. This precious space we can hold for each other. Those looks of knowing.

In the last couple weeks of work in the Dominican Republic, running mobile clinics and completing interviews to more deeply understand community knowledge of and relationship to health, there have been frequent moments when I’ve felt this fierce kinship among women.

A woman walks into the clinic with her face covered by a hoodie, bruises all over her face. Bouncing sleeping babies while women receive examinations. Keeping my eyes locked with a woman nearly my age who explains through two male translators that someday after her third child she’d like to learn more about contraception. A fifteen-year-old desperate to be pregnant, in adamant disbelief of her negative results. The mother calmly explaining that if ever there isn’t enough money for food, she does what she can to ensure she’s the only person in the house to skip a meal. The community health promoter hugging the woman whose preteen has just gone missing with an older boy. The woman who proudly states “me” when asked who in her partnership decides if they’ll use condoms. The mother giggling as her young son dances emphatically to the bachata music on the radio.

There’s this union that forms through the lived experience of being a woman. And it’s powerful and empowering and a gorgeous thing. My heart has been alongside so many women in the last couple weeks. In anguish, in fear, in joy, in nervous smiles, in discomfort, in confidence, in that knowing that you only know until you know. But also. We are not all the same. Certainly, I have not lived all that they have lived in the way that they have lived it. But also. No good intentions, no unequal power dynamics, no presumed unity of womanhood should wash out our unique wonders, unique weirdness, unique wildness.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve also heard many grand statements. Many blanket understandings. Many assumed universal truths. Many “they’re so [one thing]” and “it’s all so [one thing]” and “to be [one thing] must be so [one thing].” Usually, that one thing exists in extremes: they’re all so happy, they’re all so sad, it’s all so depressing, it’s all so beautiful, to be a woman must be so difficult, to be a woman must be so empowering.

I do it, too.

I walk into every interview and every interaction with some hint of presumed understanding. This woman must be weary. This woman must be feisty. This woman must be hardened. This woman must be courageous. And I walk out of every interview and every interaction in surprise. Women just keep surprising me.  

And it makes me realize, in a deeply and necessarily uncomfortable way, the great privilege it is to be truly seen, to be truly heard, to be truly known, as messy, as full of quirks, as socially awkward and deeply feeling and prone to dancing and obsessed with pronouncing the ‘o’ in ‘opossum’ and sometimes defensive and sometimes weary and sometimes courageous and usually strong, but not always.

It’s not a privilege I always hold, of course. Today in a park a man sat at a bench next to mine, turning his body so that he could overtly and unapologetically stare directly at my body. And I thought: I am one thing to you. And even if I boldly glare at you, or calmly stand up and walk away, or steadfastly remain seated, that will still only be one thing of me.  

What a fight, then, for this convening of women. What a complexity, then, to allow into this precious space we can hold for each other. What a fuller knowing we could know.

I have had deeply moving, deeply personal, deeply vulnerable, deeply telling conversations with women. I have sat quietly alongside, held space with locked eyes, as women’s truths have come forth. But even in these gray areas, in these complicated moments, in these halting realities, I’ve so often still listened to women as one thing: women in struggle, women wanting choice, women tired of fighting, women surviving, women wanting more, women assaulted, women in power, women in need, women in health.

In the name of this kinship, in pursuit of this convening, in the midst of this knowing of women, I have neglected to fiercely and feistily fight for the privilege of women to be messy, and not at all the same, and entirely surprising.

I haven’t fought for the woman in the hoodie to have a favorite dance move. For the woman with the baby to be known for laughing at her own jokes. For the woman wanting contraception to sing off-key. For the fifteen-year-old to have an irrational pet peeve. For the mother skipping meals to have a mantra she repeats to herself. For the woman with the missing preteen to eat around her plate clockwise. For the community health promoter to have a sunset ritual. For the woman choosing condoms to have an obsessive love of spelling. For the mother of the dancing son to daydream.

I’ve neglected to ask: What is your weirdness? What are the wonders you’ve found in your soul? What creates your wildness?

So what if I did? What if we all did?