Womanly

 I recently watched Gone with the Wind (1939), and seeing the story hit me just as hard as reading it. My main takeaway this time, though, was to appreciate the people who love me. Scarlett is so blind and selfish, she doesn't value or even really trust the love of those who love her. Like her, I have such good intentions, but then I go and get annoyed and snap right away. How different she is (and how different I am) from Melanie, who is always kind, always thinking of others.

In her book Unseduced and Unshaken, Rosalie de Rosset asks, "What kind of woman will you become? That is the central life question you must ask." In an earlier chapter she mentions the necessity of cultivating good woman role models. After thinking about that, I came up with a few people I'd like to emulate.

1. My mother. I wanted to have her patience and her charitable outlook and her humor–particularly her ability to laugh at herself.

2. Aunt Kathy. I want her constancy of prayer and her love for Jesus.

3. My friend Kim. I want her frank honesty and her generosity and her willingness to take life as it comes.

4. And Melanie Wilkes. I want her unwavering kindness, patience, courage, and charity. Her quiet, supporting strength.

I could add others to this list, of course, but I'll leave it at these core four–they present a full enough plate of virtues for me to cultivate at present.

In one of her books–Persuasion, I think–Jane Austen describes one of her heroines as "an elegant little woman". (I even found the quote–thanks, Goodreads!–"Twelve years had changed Anne from the blooming, silent, unformed girl of fifteen, to the elegant little woman of seven-and-twenty, with every beauty except bloom, and with manners as consciously right as they were invariably gentle.") 

In the years since reading that book, my mind has altered the quote slightly to "little and womanly." Womanly. What a lovely idea; what does it mean? I hope I shall be finding out my whole life long.