I Want to Be a Pilot
I’ve just turned ten years old when my male P6 teacher goes around each student in my class, one by one, listening to every child’s answer to the age-old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“When you’re eighteen years old,” Mr H adds rather specifically. Why eighteen is the magic number, I have no idea.
I sit on the edge of my seat, ready to combust. My 10.30am milk churns in my stomach with excitement and hope. My cheeks are still flushed from running around outside in the crisp March air, the hints Spring making me feel alive with future career potential. I’ve spent most of my childhood thus far wanting to become an author, but on this particular day, my answer is going to be different.
To me, writing is serious business. No room for dreaming. Hard work, only. (I know, wouldn’t ten year old you like to be friends with ten year old me?) But recently, something new has captivated me. I already know it probably isn’t the most realistic future career, but for today, it could be.
I don’t grasp the power of words yet, but I feel the weight of speaking a dream out loud.
The resident good girl, the future author, my desk is as far away from the teacher as it can get. I'm trusted to be out of earshot. I’m too busy writing stories and trying to beat everyone else in class tests. I’m here to hustle, not cause trouble. The downside of this is that I’m nearly eighteen by the time it’s my turn.
I don’t hear what everyone else plans to do with their lives. I just about catch the tail end of what the girl in front of me says. Something about teaching art. Or was it drama?
I practice my announcement in my head for the final time and I clear my throat as everyone turns to look at me.
“What about you, Rebecca?”
I look him in the eyes, try to steady my shaking voice, and muster up a brave smile.
“I want to be a pilot.”
He hesitates.
“Don’t you mean…an air hostess?”
“No. I mean… I want to be a pilot.”
He says nothing and moves on to the next person.
Cue: Feminist-Reb is born.
(Kidding. Sort of.)
On the cusp of turning twenty-seven, the boys and I are finishing up our pasta as Paddy gets ready to read the next passage in our dinner-time Bible plan. We’ve finally made it out of Genesis after living in it for approximately six months (just in case you were feeling less holy than us for a sec: we’ve got your back), and to my horror, the plan jumps straight into Exodus at Moses’ birth, skipping one of the best parts of the whole book.
Paddy looks at me with a smirk that says, “Oh, here she goes…”, as I passionately fill in the missing details.
No one listens, but I tell them anyway. I tell them about the Hebrew midwives we should be meeting in the first chapter and how they courageously disobeyed Pharoah’s savage orders to kill all the Hebrew baby boys (his attempt to stop the nation from becoming too powerful).
Not one to miss a story about God using women to carry out his divine rescue mission, I tell my house full of males how these women delivered all the baby boys safely and preserved the lineage of the Saviour in the process. I convey how the Midwives cleverly told Pharaoh that the Hebrew women were so strong, they delivered their own babies before their midwives could get to them.
Absolute heroes.
They delivered Moses, just as Moses would some day deliver the Israelites, and Jesus would some day deliver us. By risking their lives, they preserved the abundant life we know today and the eternal life we’ll know some day (all while basically giving a middle finger to Pharaoh and Satan while they were at it).
The irony pleases me. Pharoah attempted to halt the Hebrews from becoming too powerful, while the most powerful people were standing right in front him, under his nose. These midwives were overlooked and underestimated, both by Pharoah and by the curator of our reading plan.
I can tell Paddy thinks I’m reading too much into it, but for a moment I let myself be sad that someone else has overlooked these powerful, world-changing women. It’s a timeworn story, really. At some point, we’ve all been unseen as women. Our work has been undervalued and underestimated, as we sacrifice everything to preserve life, nurture it and raise the future, all while shaking a fist at Satan.
The eye-roll inducing, icky feeling I got in my stomach on both occasions is the exact same. It’s the familiar exasperation I’ve experienced plenty of times since. I don’t actually think Mr H was responsible for my first experience of wanting to smash the living daylights out of the patriarchy. I was simply embarrassed that he crushed my fleeting dreams in front of the whole class. Growing up, by and large, I had the privilege of genuinely believing I could do and be anything my male classmates could. And knowing ten year old me, I probably thought I could do it better. And it goes without saying, at the age of eighteen, I wasn’t a pilot. Just pregnant, actually.
But I do remember this being the first time someone’s assumptions about being female didn’t sit right with me. Mr H’s implication that I should be dreaming about serving the food instead of serving the world with my plane-driving abilities, well, it simply didn’t make sense in my innocent mind. Surely I was capable of both. I mean, okay, traditionally more women become air stewards and more men become pilots, and okay, even today only 7% of pilots are female. But wasn’t I allowed to dream? Apparently not.
It’s no surprise, then, that my ‘feminism’ quickly morphed into the loud, bra-burning kind. I hesitate to use this loaded label, but I please bear with me on this one. I recall one heated ethics discussion with a boy in my R.E. class in my mid-teens. I don't remember anything he said, but I do remember the pit pat of red-hot tears landing in my lap in the bathroom cubicle afterwards, not because he’d hurt my feelings, but because I just didn’t know what to do with my all-encompassing, ragey, GIANT feelings.
Granted, I feel everything deeply. I still cry when I’m overwhelmed by the tangled web of emotions in my sleep-deprived brain. It’s a losing battle for my husband, but a win for my sons whose mother can empathise with their meltdowns.
This was different, however. This was grief. This was horror at history’s injustices and the present day’s prejudices. This was a resolve to do something about it. To shout about it from the rooftops.
But this week, as I celebrate both my birthday and International Women’s Day, I can’t help but notice that at twenty-seven, my feminism is much quieter. The ragey fire in my belly is still there (just ask my family), but it’s much less extravagant. Both ten year old me and teenage me would be less than impressed.
I’m absolutely here for the 7% of female pilots and I’m here to raise a glass to the sisters who’ve impacted our lives near and from afar. Those we know intimately and those we know from history. I’m as passionate as ever about women’s rights and women’s ministry in the local church.
Please hear what I’m saying: IWD is one of my favourite days of the year. But my bras remain intact (and not just because I have the same two nursing bras on rotation).
There is no shouting from the rooftops, but there are plenty of ordinary opportunities to whisper in love. And I still shave my legs. I guess I’ve learned I don’t need a mic, a platform, or power over policies, to make progress.
What happened, though? Well, in my twenties, I let a man shape my feminism. Gasp.
That man being Jesus, of course.
For the first time in my life, I really paid attention to how Jesus viewed women. Yes, I saw him deal with their sin and shame, but I also saw Him addressing women in public, while the rest of the first-century Roman and Jewish world ignored them.
I saw Him going about his ordinary, everyday life, treating women as first-class citizens, with intrinsic worth and value, made in His very own image. I saw Him stop everything he was doing to tenderly, compassionately speak to a grieving widow. “Do not weep,” He told her. I saw Him raise her son from the dead, but not before acknowledging her pain first.
I saw Him stop for the bleeding, ‘unclean’ woman and call her “Daughter of Abraham”, giving her the same spiritual status as a man. I saw Him publicly heal her, reintroduce her back into society, and then I saw Him leave to go and raise a female child from the dead. In a culture where women and children were viewed as physically weak burdens on society, Jesus acknowledged them as entities in their own right. He came to save this infuriating world women find themselves in, but while He was here, He raised women and children to a new level of human worth.
Seeing this with my eyes was one thing, but experiencing Jesus’ tender treatment in my own every day life was another.
“Do not weep,” He often tells me.
In my job as a Women’s Worker at church, most of my work was quiet and unseen. It was wildly ordinary. People who didn’t know any better often joked that I did nothing all day. Maybe in the world’s eyes, that was true. But I drank tea with widows and mums and teenage girls, and I tried to handle their precious stories with the worth and dignity they deserved. I tried to find the words to honour and encourage them in their walks as the women God has created them to be.
After all, Jesus may have taught me how to love women, but Mr H also taught me the power of words.
And in my current season as a fulltime mother, my every day acts of feminism are more quiet, more ordinary and more unseen than ever. But I keep looking to Jesus who modeled this best. While I celebrate many of the women who paved the way - the Hebrew midwives, Miriam, Rahab, Ruth, Deborah, Mary, Elizabeth Elliot, Amy Carmichael, and Corrie Ten Boom, to name only a few; I can’t finish this blog post without mentioning Elizabeth Newton.
Confined to her bed by the disease that ravaged her body, she didn’t let her illness stop her from teaching her son, John, everything he needed to know about God’s incredible love through Scripture and catechisms. Her son later wrote that it was the ‘pleasure of her life’ to do so.
Elizabeth was twenty-seven when she died. John was almost seven. And after years of heartache, rebellion and wrestling with death and life, John ended up writing the famous hymn, ‘Amazing Grace’. He said he owed it all to his mother’s instruction.
As I celebrate IWD and turning twenty-seven this week, I’m not a pilot or a Women’s Worker or an author. But I am a mother. And if my earthly life ended now, I’d like to think my everyday acts of feminism might change the world in a small way for the women coming after me. And maybe shake a fist in the face of satan while I’m at it, of course. So off I go to tell my sons about God’s Amazing Grace and the Hebrew midwives and how to treat women as Jesus treated women. And I think ten year old and teenage me would agree, it’s the ‘pleasure of my life’ to do so.