My daughter is nine and has a scream that will make your ears bleed. She also can run so fast she will become a blur of elbows and knees in three seconds flat. "These are your super powers," I tell her.
My girl, who has a quick mind, says, "And they are good ones, too."
Indeed, they are. And she has plenty more; in fact, she has power to spare, but as my girl approaches adolescence and the mindboggling amount of social and cultural pressure to look and behave in very limiting ways, I am increasing my vigilance around this subject of her empowerment.
This is the era of feminine power. The Chinese calendar tells us so, as it makes a flip from a 5,000-year-long masculine cycle known as "Yang" to a new 5,000-year cycle known as "Yin." At the Vancouver Peace Summit in September 2009, the Dalai Lama announced that he is a feminist and opined that Western women will save the world. I do not disagree. Just look at our friend Oprah, leading the charge as number six on the Fortune 500 Most Powerful Women List, and Arianna Huffington, who has given voice to so many women via this medium..
Western woman are free, educated and have opportunities that most women around the world can only dream about.
The question becomes this: How do we western women, so often raised by unempowered mothers, make a necessary shift in our thinking and our actions in order to gift our daughters with a full inheritance of feminine power?
For me, the answer has been two-fold. One, I have gotten to know myself very well. Two, I have brought about change in my attitudes and actions.
For almost 20 years, I have investigated every nook of my conditioned history. This is the "getting to know myself" part. I am a daughter, born in the '60s, and while so many women of that era were burning their bras, experimenting with birth control, exploring mind altering drugs and getting higher educations, my adoptive mother -- a product of the '40s and '50s -- made a point to put her makeup on and do her hair just so, even as she was dying from a tumor lodged in her spine. "A woman doesn't make a fuss," she liked to say, taking copious quantities of aspirin to mask her pain. She died when I was seven, and I'm pretty sure that if she spoke up a little sooner she may have lived.
Further back, my original mother -- 17 when I was born -- had been forced to give me up for adoption, against what was legal and even moral. My original mother, a beautiful woman in her own right, allowed herself to be silenced for all of her life, too, because that is how she had been raised.
From my long personal investigation, I have deducted that being silent, compliant and merely beautiful are not traits I intend to pass down. And this leads to the "change" part. Only with consciousness can a person awaken to make new choices, and this awareness happens by looking at one's history very carefully. As it is Woman's History Month for all of March, I invite all my western sisters to study what we have inherited -- both good and bad -- from our mothers, our grandmothers and even our great-grandmothers.
In my own genetic history, I found that I hail from a line of silent and ineffective women, but these same women have also had moments of remarkable strength and accomplishment. My great-grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Nevada, and my grandmother ran her own businesses for years.
I pass this story, and many more, down to my daughter and make a point to show her where she is strong and capable in her own right -- thus our recent conversation about her super powers.
I want my daughter -- as a free, educated and powerful western woman -- to be strong, bold and to know she is a force of nature to be reckoned with. I want her to be a woman who loves well, touches others with care and knows how to do what is right -- for herself and for the world she lives in.
And I've come to realize that my super power is being a mother who gives her daughter these gifts.
Follow Jennifer Lauck on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JenniferLauck
Brienne Walsh: An Open Letter to the Women Who Are Telling Me It's My Fault I'm Not Married
Lacy Schutz: Women at Work: Historic Photos From the Museum of the City of New York
Alina Tugend: Women, Men and Handling Mistakes
Kate Kelly: Women's History Month: Female Firsts
Women's History Month - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
though many have lost their focus on fitness which isn't doing anybody any good
success comes from confidence and confidence comes from success
and both success and confidence start with feeling good
and a big part of feeling good is looking good
the most happy, successful and confident women I know are in great shape and take care of themselves
Too often parents that I meet are more interested in only their own child's needs, at the expense of all others. That has to stop because that teaches and already ego-centric child that her/his needs always come before others' needs as well.
I am a feminist but I reared two boys and a girl to be equals. They each had their struggles in life and they each had their dreams. I could not favor one child over another because of gender. What I could do, and should do as shown by my own father's example, was to make sure all of my children had their emotional, physical, and intellectual needs met. Two of my children are now in medicine and one is in the music industry. They also still give their off time to others through various programs of building schools in South America, teaching afterschool programs, and working with homeless families. I can be glad that those values of empathy, and the example I set, are still at work.
We don't have to have supergirls or superboys. We need balanced kids who know they are loved and supported, of all along the gender continuum. That is the best springboard for success.
Young women will benefit also from knowing their *inner* Self. When girls and women learn Transcendental Meditation, for example, they have a tool to contact their inner reserves of energy, creativity and intelligence -- their latent potentiality that otherwise remains dormant. Scientific research has found that students who practice the TM technique have increased creativity and IQ and improved academic performance.
Awakening the treasures of inner silence gives power, confidence and stability to a woman, more fully enabling her to express herself and find her role in the world.
Whatever happens with me or anyone says about me, she is a marvel, and I know I have done things that will make her life better.
All the best to you and your daughter.
Two of four women are assaulted, in this free country, the numbers are higher in other nations and in all instances are under-reported. Men are also assaulting young men--in stunning numbers that are under-reporter. So sexual assault and assault in general,, crimes committed largely by men, creates a whole new conversation.
Teaching our girls to be strong--that is the point of this post. My daughter won't be a trite statistic, not if I can help it!