Woman: Why do we still have to stop to think?

The simplest definition of woman: female noun, female human, according to the dictionary. Simple definition? Is it really that simple? According to American comedian and writer Sara Schaefer, “Woman is not the cross-stitch pattern.” After all, what is being a woman? What are women's expectations, what do they arouse in family and society?

When a female human being is born, a girl is born who, over time, becomes a teenager and later a woman. Along with it is born a new space in the family full of dreams, expectations, fears and future anxieties. Thoughts such as what she will be when she grows up, what she will be like in adolescence, what she will be like as a mother, are ordinary. We forget, however, that we live in constant transformation and that certain logics gradually change until they reach new meanings.

It is natural as a human being to be ready for motherhood. But as a social being, do we ever stop to think about what women want, how they want and if they want motherhood? The culture to which we belong has naturalized marriage within traditional paradigms that value issues of belonging to another being, confinement rules, and requirements. In this format, there is no full space yet for relationships to be actually built and questioned. The woman was convicted as the family center and responsible for all care and maintenance of the bonds in the family nucleus. Now there is a moment of possible clarity and discernment of ideas that inhabit the feminine and familiar universe. However, these are still far from being lived in practice. Motherhood appears remarkable in the female conscious because it is natural to her, and when structured by the paradigms of traditional marriage ends up establishing a very strong social role.

However, it is the idea of ​​complex thinking that confronts motherhood with the current way of facing a life marked by multiple choices. New spaces are being occupied by women as a way of liberating themselves and showing their different capacities and potentialities in the world. Being restricted to the role of being a daughter, wife, mother is not enough. You have to be and know how to be a woman! And knowing how to be a woman includes perhaps putting these roles - mother and wife - as life projects and not simply naturalizing them. In a world in which relations change at any moment, in which the process of individual freedom goes through experiments of different formats of family relationships and configurations, the possibility of choosing what one wants to be goes through the notion of desire for being, essential to tonic of life. That is, wanting!
We need to leave behind and bury once and for all the times of prejudice, violence, emotional boycotts and ignorance that mark ours now. Choosing the relationships to be lived and how, as well as whether or not to choose motherhood, and the development of a professional career are the responsibility of an individual. And it is this individual responsibility that when taken through a healthy, peaceful and conscious decision of every human being - whether female or male, reflects on the social environment. It is the human being as an individual - and not just as a woman or a man - who becomes the author of his own destiny.

Text: psychologist Cláudia Simone Silveira dos Santos