“Submit”

So, yeah. My forthcoming memoir is called Learning to Submit: How Feminism Stole My Womanhood and the Traditional Cowboy Who Helped Me Find It.

Yep. This scares some people.

Let me reassure you.

I’m aware that the word “submit” is charged with emotion, both negative and positive. I am a writer. I understand the power of words.

I have intentionally chosen this word for its multitude of meanings, all of them relevant to my relationship with the cowboy and to the changes he’s brought to my life.

As a transitive verb, “submit” means to give something over for consideration and analysis — as in “I submit this book to my editor.” In finding real love, I’ve had to submit my spirit, my behaviors, my SELF, to the cowboy; he, one of the strongest, smartest, most compassionate people I’ve ever known, has helped me to grow as result.

As a transitive verb, “submit” can also mean to offer an opinion, as in, “I submit to the judge that the evidence is clear.” In loving the cowboy, I’ve learned to submit my opinion (aka disagree) in a healthy way, for the first time in my life.

As a transitive verb, the word “submit” also means to yield to an authority; YIELD, not obey. I’ve had to learn to do THAT, too, especially on the ranch, where I know nothing and where my controlling nature could be fatal, as it nearly was the time I asked the cowboy to spare the life of a bull that later nearly killed him; as a formerly domineering woman, letting someone else be in charge was hard. Is hard. Continues to be hard. But so valuable. It took meeting a man as strong as me to teach me the value of weakness. Of trust.

Drs. Dan and Kate Montgomery are brilliant psychologists with a Christian take on the field. Together they have developed something truly remarkable called Compass Therapy. Basically, using Christ’s model, they have come up with four compass points for a healthy personality. As you can see from the illustration at the top of this post, one of them is weakness. Yes, weakness. This means that we must all know when to be strong, and when to be weak, and to let these two modes balance one another out. I was far too strong and not weak enough. It was ruining my life. When any one compass point gets out of balance, it veers into psychological unrest. Any compass point, in its extreme, is pathological.

That all said, I do NOT use “submit” on this blog, in my memoir, or in my relationship with the cowboy, as an intransitive verb — which is to say “surrender” or “permit oneself to be subjected to”.

I am amazed (but not surprised) by how many people immediately assume that’s what I’m saying with this book. No one has read the book yet (I’m still writing it) but lots and lots of people are already opining online about how I’m setting women back a million years, yadda yadda yadda. What these people are doing is jumping to the most pathological place on the weakness compass point, because for many people that is the ONLY definition they have of submission. Reacting from fear of this, they assume I am advocating a pathology. I am not.

I am aware of the Biblical use of the phrase “wives submit to your husbands.” I am a Christian — Unitarian Universalist Catholic hybrid, if you must know.

I submit to you that the Bible intends, as I do, that “submit” be a transitive verb, not intransitive. (The Bible also says husbands must “kill themselves before their wives,” and we all know it’s not literal.) Basically, the Bible is saying what I’ve had to learn the hard way. In relationships, we all have to give and take.

My particular upbringing made it hard for me to give. To submit. To be analyzed without fighting. To yield when necessary. I needed to learn to do these things. I. Not you. Me. My life is not your life. My mistakes are not your mistakes. My memoir is my life story, not your guidebook. My memoir is about me, learning to submit, in every glorious, beautiful transitive sense of the word.