Fope's Blog

This weekend has me feeling some type of Chimamanda way about the word "beautiful". Photo credit:  terriem  via  Foter.com  /  CC BY-NC-SA Being mothers' day weekend, I've heard the word "beautiful" thrown around carelessly more than usual. It's  like we become mentally lazy when giving women compliments. We think, "Women like to be called beautiful, and it's a word that is generally endearing." I don't doubt that many women enjoy being called beautiful, but it's demeaning when it's used in situations where there's so much more to be celebrated, where beauty obviously played no part in the achievement of success. It's the curse of a patriarchal society that we've somehow forgotten that words that apply to men, can and often should apply to women too. So I thought I'd help a little.  For the next time you want to praise a woman in your life for something that she didn't use her face or good lo

I think my kind of feminism is what Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie calls  Feminst Lite .  This is me  : Feminist who believes in equal rights for men and women, and who also believes in the Biblical model of womanhood- in and outside marriage. In marriage it's with the infamous submission, outside it, it's a  celebration of the uniqueness of being a woman. I don't believe that men are "naturally superior", rather I believe God has bestowed different responsibilities on men and women in a marriage that the order of headship and submission gives room for. This difference in roles comes with no qualifier of what's more or less important. To me, the bottom line of  Feminism is having a choice, a real choice. Not the kind of choice that is available on paper, but gives room for systemic misogyny, where taking a maternity leave can severely damage my career. Photo credit:  richard evea  via  Foter.com  /  CC BY-SA I think both views - Feminism and Submis

I never understood the whole " playing hard to get" movement. In my head, if you liked someone and felt like it could go somewhere; if it felt like you'd done your due diligence - a.k.a you'd checked that there were no obvious red flags and that you shared similar values, then you'd let things flow...albeit cautiously. That was my old thinking. Photo credit:  Cate Storymoon  via  Foter.com  /  CC BY-SA I now feel like a scarred person, and I don't like it. I mean with other things in life, it makes sense that you adjust your behavior as you learn, that you go into the future armed with lessons learned. But for this, it feels like a bad idea that I'm allowing negative experiences influence how I approach the future. Then again, I think it'd be stupid not to. It's now so bad that I no longer go into any _ships (read as: situationShip, friendShip, potentialShip and other ships) with open arms. There's no longer my usual e xciteme

Pride isn't always big and grand or loud. And I think this subtle kind has to be the worst. It's the kind that makes me see her mismatched eyebrows before I see her. It's also the kind that makes me hang on so much to the error in the order of his words, that I end up missing the point of what he was saying. Sharp, critical tongue.  That's what Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth calls it. On some days I call it telling it as it is, on other days I sandwich it between cozy good words. But that's like handing someone a blade sandwich; nicely cushioning the blades between bread doesn't make it less cruel. A sharp, critical tongue is one way to show pride, but there's also the habit of interrupting people mid-speech, the need to control outcomes, and  whole list  you can self-diagnose against. Photo credit:  ~Momma B~  via  Foter.com  /  CC BY-NC- I haven't quite nailed it yet, so this isn't a here's my "victory over pride" self-help

I had this idea to write what I'd like to have experienced by the end of 2017 now. They're not quite detailed goals for the year, but rather, some overall themes to hold myself to in the months to come. So here I am, actually sticking to one of the many things I've resolved to do this year: turning more ideas into actions. I remember 2016 in two parts: the first was January to March - incredibly strange periods of my life, lots of acting out of character; then the other part was October to December - trying to stuff in a year's worth of personal achievements into the last few moments. I don't really remember much of the middle. So in 2017, there'll be a lot of this - writing. Not just in a journal tucked away somewhere safe, but here too, out in the world for the days when I can't remember the meaning of all the code messages I've embedded in my journal for secrecy sake (ironic right? I too cannot deal with myself sometimes). There'll also be