For some reason, after you lose your mother, you spend a lot of Mother's Days thinking about messages and advice you would like to give your daughters. For me, it is not so much about the "be independent," "stand on your own two feet," "be educated" and "have a career" messages that my divorced mother of two girls drummed into my head.
It is more about how to live in the world of today where there are new, exciting, creative, leadership opportunities available to women and yet we are still faced with some real, hard-to-overcome obstacles. These obstacles come in many forms.
It is still not easy to manage a career and a family and have a "satisfying" home life. We still haven't gotten to a point of equal pay, equal opportunity and any shared responsibility in the home. We're closer, but not there. But worst of all, we are still faced with a level of resentment for our success ("non-deserving" or "she only got the position because she is a woman" or "she plays the gender card") and a level of distrust ("she won't stay" or worse yet "she schemed her way into the position" or "is manipulative.") The recent discourse in our political arena only further supports and perhaps gives credence to the problems underlying true gender equality.
But we live in a new world and one with great change and opportunity. Given all that can be in this world of technology and opportunity, here are the messages I thought about on this Mother's Day that I would like to pass along to my 21st century daughters (and my 21st century daughter-in-law):
- Don't let the world, your husband, your employer or your career define you. You need to define who you are and what you stand for, but it is important to stand for something. You need values and a sense of what is truly important to you. This can guide how you move through your life and how you move forward in your career. You need to have a compass -- something that you are looking for and something that guides your moves.
All of this advice and messaging would have been way too much for my mother. She spent most of her adult life just trying to make ends meet and provide food and a college education for two girls while working as a school teacher. In her wildest dreams on Mother's Day she could never have imagined such issues or such possibilities. We are blessed that we can engage in this discourse and that we can, if we work hard and persevere, move the world forward towards gender equality and hopefully change the perception of women and the discourse.