There’s nothing wrong with having a close relationship with your children or being a friend and confidant to your daughter.
I’m saying that’s not the same thing as being her friend.
When we make too many rules in our lives about what it means to be a woman, we limit our ability to reach out to one another.
How did the two of you get this way?
We are constantly imposing new boundaries on women’s lives.
One of the things I’m trying to work on myself is actually telling my daughter I love her when she asks me.
I’d say it but I don’t. I’m not sure why.
I’m sure it has to do with my internalized misogyny and societal influences.
I am constantly trying to justify my actions and my place in my daughters’ lives to myself.
It’s like when you got out of bed late one morning to go to work and your daughter is always “asking” if she can stay up late to watch a show.
Or when she doesn’t have enough money to pay for ice cream and you insist on paying for the rest of the ice cream for her after you pick her up.
You rationalize all of this nonsense. “What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t buy my child ice cream?”
You think about all the things you can tell yourself to make sure you aren’t breaking your daughters’ hearts.
You don’t realize that by telling yourself these lies, you are in fact breaking your daughters’ hearts
Most women are brought up in a culture that already tells them that they have to be the gatekeeper for their emotions and their bodies.
If they are female and they aren’t the ones giving birth, they don’t have a right to feel whatever it is they are feeling.
They are not allowed to let down, they are not allowed to be weak, they are not allowed to cry in front of people, they are not allowed to voice their innermost feelings and they certainly aren’t allowed to express what their wants and needs are.
Every time a woman “breaks out” she is suddenly taken to therapy and told to do this, don’t do that, do that, don’t do that. If they want to have a bad day, well, they must have been raped.
If they don’t want to get married, they must be damaged and broken. If they decide to have sex, it was an act of unspeakable violence.
If they decide to leave an abusive relationship, it’s self-imposed.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard, “I just don’t get why this happens.
How can women love each other so much and then just end it? We are such toxic people when we are in love.” It sounds ridiculous when I write it.
I know. I was raised by the same people.
For some reason, we think it’s OK for girls to love and have relationships with boys and girls can’t be friends.
Boys can just hang out at each other’s houses, go on dates, and go on sleepovers, but girls can’t hang out, go on dates, go on sleepovers.
For some reason, the male need for female companionship has to come first.
Why? Who gets to define what is acceptable?
Feminism teaches us that our own liberation comes at the cost of others’ happiness
Who decides what is good for me? For a woman, every choice is a political choice.
Every decision affects another person’s life and I am paid next to nothing for my work as a writer.
How do I explain to my sons and my daughter that I can’t quit my job, not have children, or do any of the other things we would normally think we could do to be happy?
How do I explain to them that I can’t have what I want when I want it and that their happiness, as important as it is to me, is not all that’s important.
It’s been two years since I was released from my marriage and I thought it was time I wrote a post about it, but I am still shaking. I have never in my life felt so broken.
When I was married I was not a woman, I was a wife. If I didn’t like the way he treated me, I was a horrible wife, or a terrible mother, or a complete failure in life.
There was no room for me to be myself, no room to make a decision that made me happy. There was only one way to be a good wife, to make it through the days and nights of misery that consumed me.
There is something very wrong when one person is allowed to dictate the life choices of another person, especially when there are children involved.
I now know that the Bible says that a husband is the head of his wife and it also says that Christ is the head of me, so I am supposed to submit to my husband.
I was raised by good Christians who believed in the Bible. But then I started reading the Bible.
And then I started reading a little about the early Christians, and then I started reading about the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and then I started reading about how women were treated in other cultures and I started realizing that my religion is so very wrong.
