Don’t Be Like Dagny: Confessions of an Unlikely Wife and Mother

At the age of 14, I advised my mom not to expect a son-in-law or grandchildren from me. “Who says I want to get married and have kids, Mom?” I quipped. Now, at the age of 26, with a wonderful husband and two young children, I have to laugh. A lot can change in 12 years. 

Reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged at peak middle school angst didn’t do me any favors. I was captivated by the allure of protagonist Dagny Taggart: a high-achieving, competent railroad executive. Dagny is hard, thin, strong, always makes efficient linear progress, and looks down upon emotion, which she sees as weakness.

In the spirit of Dagny, I hardened my body and mind through competitive running and restricted my eating to the point of several years of amenorrhea. An endocrinologist warned me that I might have trouble getting pregnant in the future without hormone therapy. I was young and the consequences of this path didn’t hit home. I now realize I was using these methods of control to resist femininity and womanhood, which felt far too unpredictable, cyclical, and encumbered. I was afraid of what would become of me and my dreams if I let womanhood overtake me. Running and restricted eating became my means of escape.

Some encumbrances are harmful, but others give life meaning: a spouse, children, parents, church, and a body that requires proper care.

But, haunted by a sense that captivation with Dagny might be misguided, my path led to a fascination with the feminist movement and whether it really helped women become freer and more fulfilled. As I read more, it appeared that it actually burdened women with significant pressure to compete with men while "eroding the inconveniently un-Machine like family unit.” I wrestled with these ideas, and just before my first year at the University of Virginia, I began to experience serious physical ailments as a result of the running and restricted eating I used to control my body to protect against the fluctuations of womanhood. The pain, which stopped me in my tracks, was the final wake-up call. 

The Myth of the Unencumbered Ideal

Brad Wilcox and Maria Baer reference the “unencumbered woman” in their recent article, “What’s Killing Marriage — Unmarriageable Men or Liberal Women?” stating that “seemingly every movie, show, book and podcast that brands itself as ‘celebrating women’ does it in the same way: by selling a picture of unencumbered womanhood.” Many of us have osmosed this, and it’s a major deterrent to forming families since family relationships are inherently encumbering. But encumbrances are not necessarily bad. 

One problem with talk of encumbrances is the failure to distinguish between harmful and life-giving ones. Some encumbrances are harmful to anyone: take addictions (to pornography, opioids, alcohol, or social media), pharmaceutical dependence, or consumer debt. Other encumbrances are the things that give life meaning: a spouse, children, parents, a church, nature and place, and a physical body that requires proper care. Limitations make us something and not something else. They define and root us, making us more than interchangeable workers and consumers.

This unencumbered ideal resists the limitations of rootedness and commitment, making it not only anti-family, but also anti-woman and anti-man. Dagny is often labelled as masculine, and in some ways she is. But, more than that, she is machine-like. And this individualistic, anti-family spirit is also machine-like since it denies the limitations of body, viewing it as “intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards” and as “an encumbrance of the mind.” A renewed appreciation for the human body and its limits is essential if we want to see a more widespread embrace of marriage and the family and a turn away from the unencumbered ideal. 

A renewed appreciation for the human body and its limits is essential if we want to see a more widespread embrace of marriage and a turn away from the unencumbered ideal.

Today, I look at my middle-school self and feel pity but also immense gratitude that my journey led to the reality that happiness is found in surrendering to well-chosen limitations and constraints. I think many young women are like me, forcing themselves to be hard, linear, efficient, and “free.” We think this is expected of us, but this path doesn’t actually make us happy. 

A Better Narrative for Women

Young women today need a better coming-of-age narrative: one that helps us embrace womanhood rather than reject it. It’s hard to deny that there is a crisis for adolescent women. We see it in high school girls’ increasing pessimism about marriage, in the dramatic increase in adolescent girls questioning their gender, as well as in the prevalence of eating disorders and anxiety and depression among teenage girls. 

Adolescence can be rocky. We need stories that give meaning to menstruation, a changing body, marriage, and childbirth. Maybe the wisdom of the old fairy tales should be revived rather than treated with subversive irony. 

Rather than waste time on screens, we also need to do embodied things, such as gardening, painting, singing, cooking, creating with our hands, hiking in nature, playing with kids, and living seasonally so that we can learn to more fully embrace being a finite human. 

As I write, our three-year-old awakens from a very short nap, tiptoeing downstairs to snuggle close to me, inserting comments and questions every 30 seconds. Is this efficient? No. But I am a woman and a mother, and this is beautiful and purposeful work. It’s normal to be afraid of these encumbrances. I certainly was. That doesn’t make them wrong. Paradoxically, they help each of us find our “true self.” People call for the unencumbered life in the name of finding one’s true self and journeying on the path to personal growth. These are desirable goals. But willingly choosing these good encumbrances can lead us along that path faster, more deeply, and in better company than any unencumbered individual search ever could. 

Morgan Morin is a wife and mother living in Richmond, Virginia. She holds a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia. 

*Photo credit: Shutterstock