The Ghost of the "Good Woman"

I was supposed to keep sweet.

Sweet like the freshly canned peaches in the summer, sealed, sterile, and tender like the stewed beef sitting in the crock pot while we attended church. A girl who folded her ambitions like her hands in her lap during patriarchal testimony. I was meant to bloom in the soils of domesticity, fragrant and still, with a voice intended for prayers and lullabies.

The said I would marry a man with a calloused testimony, fresh from the battle of testing his truth and bearing his faith like Job in far away streets in a pressed white shirt. A man who would lead the home in God's truth while I baked bread from scratch and bore children to be raised for the Celestial Kingdom. My education? A waste of my future husband's money. My voice? A disruption to the divine patriarchal order.

But I was too loud for the pews.

I sat in Relief Society, nineteen and starving; starving for knowledge, for truth, for a life that was more than casseroles and spending my life on my knees in service. I said I would search for my equal partner, a man who would stand beside me in the war that is our life. The old women smiled sickly sweet smiles the way a wolf might bare it's teeth after having torn apart a beehive: "That's not the way of our Lord, sweetheart. He is the head, you are the heart."

What good is a heart if I can't choose what it beats for?

They didn't know I had been told I might never have children without medical intervention. That my body might never serve it's purpose and bloom on command. I was already feeling broken for the possibilty that I may never serve my purpose, that I may never have the worth of filling my future husband's quiver full of children.

So when they told me "Your future babies will need you at home," I felt the floor give way from under me, and the earth swallowing me into the pits of a hell I didn't think I deserved.

~

The joke is on them, though.

I got the life they promised, but on my own terms.

I got the return missionary, who came to me with a bottle in hand and left a remarkable absence in the church pews. I bore two children, a personal miracle in beautiful defiance. I run the schedules, the birthdays, the gentle bedtime rituals. I hold my home together with grit, not grace. And my partner, my Holy Christian Warrior no more, walks beside me. Not ahead of me. I stand next to him; I will not kneel. He teaches our children that their mother is a storm and a sanctuary, and both are sacred.

I am everything they told that girl to be, without giving up everything they told me I had to lose to be worthy.

But she still visits me.

The ghost of the "Good Woman."

The woman I was supposed to grow to be.

She trails behind me to the laundry room, reminding me to make sure my husband's socks aren't turned inside out, that his work clothes should go into the machine first. She waits for me in the kitchen, clutching leatherbound scriptures and begging me to pray over and bless the food before I serve it to my family. When I ignore her, I hear her praying for my soul, that my children may find the way of our Lord and Savior.

She sucks her teeth when I curse. She sobs when I tell her that I am enough without obedience. She begs for me to lower my eyes, bow my head, to bite my tongue, to just let the man explain myself to me.

I don't banish her.

I let her stick around, to haunt me, to remind me of the version of myself that I left behind.

Because outside my home, they are still building cages. They're passing new laws with old bones. Our rights that were hard won by the generations of women before are being turned into relics of an old dream turned to dust. They hold up the ropes and corsets, wanting our bodies to be bound and controlled again. Our wages erased, our voices quieted, our choices being made for us in rooms that we aren't welcomed or invited into.

We are still fighting the battles of our mothers, our grandmothers, our ancestors. Of the girls who were promised that they could live a soft, quiet, easy life if they just said yes and stayed small.

But I chose autonomy.

I chose not to stay small for the egos of men around me to feel enlarged and throbbing.

I hid my fangs behind my smile, and marched forward with my fist in the air.

I folded laundry in one hand and threw a punch with the other.

I taught my daughter to speak with the force of unholy thunder.

I taught my son to listen.

~

And yet, she lingers. She hides in the corner of the room, shaken in fear when I stand up for myself. The woman I was supposed to be.

She will never yell. She will not pose a challenge. She is adored and obedient. The perfect woman.

But she is also empty while I am full.

Full of life. Full of stories. Full of passion and vibrancy and chaos. Full of the achingly wonderful and beautiful life that I got to choose for myself. Not the life that was written and designed for me, that I was meant to accept quietly.

I am not a good woman.

But I am a good mother.

A good partner.

A good fighter.

And that, I do believe, should be enough to haunt the patriarchy for generations to come.