The Black Moon

This is an email from KT who read the little article I posted about marriage about a week ago:

I have read your article and I wish that I could have had the same insight at a young age. I am the same age as you and I would like to do all of the things that you are able to do as a young independent woman.
I am married with five children although I love my family so much I wish that I would have had the insight and the guidance to make the decision not to give in to the notion that you have to get married and have children. I want so much for my life but now I have to wait until my children are grown and out of college before I can truely [sic] enjoy being who I want to be.
I applaude [sic] you for your strength it encourages me
to be strong and stand up for me even in my situation.

It is tempting to turn to those men who unleashed a barrage of email on me and yell, A-HA! So I won't--not yet.

KT's email was one of three written by women; it was the only unequivocally positive message, if you can count a woman's sadness toward her life 'positive.' Writing those 4 essays (which will be put together eventually to make a whole, legible diatribe against un-fun marriages) provoked such hostility from male readers, it was stunning, though not unlooked for. I was called whore, worldly, unsaved, unsound, sinful, rebellious, destined for hell and wrong. There is a certain exhileration in being the target of masculine ire; if one was to make a current foreign policy analogy, one could say the attacks on my person are signs of a desperate foe who is terrified I may be right. But the thrill of debate fades when you start to think about how quiet these women are.

Over the past six months, a handful of women wrote me telling me they agreed but, shh, it'll be our little secret that this is how we feel. They wrote they had friends who thought the same way and to whom they showed the articles; they all agreed with them.

But it's a secret and I don't know why. Apparently, there's a small group of Christian women who didn't want to marry quite so young, didn't want to have quite so many children (if any), would rather travel than debate Ecclesiastes (though that's fun, too) and don't want to link their lives to men who can't get rid of a suffocating view of a woman's purpose. But these women are silent; they're in relationships, watching their partners, their husbands, strut around the home confident in their superiority while they are resigned and silent.

I wonder if KT's husband knows about how she feels; I wonder if he knows what she dreamt about before they married. I wonder if he knows that she's counting the years until all five of her children are gone and she can finally escape her house. I wonder if he ever feels conflicted, torn between love of his family and a desire for *something else.* Or, does he wake every morning, kiss his wife and kids, do his morning devotional, go to work and come home to a scene that is only slightly different from the one he left in the morning, completely unconscious of the tiny ripples that moved through his home while he was gone?