The Seeds of Women

Girls are such a lovely way to start women.  Have you ever watched girls playing, the casual, graceful way they move, the passionate interactions, the deep affection they have for each other?  As the mother of a daughter it is amazing for me to watch my girl grow up.  She’s 8 now… a lovely age, teetering far too quickly on the edge of adolescence… burgeoning, though not so much physically as emotionally.  Already she is a fireball of emotion, passionate, vibrant, colorful emotion which we are tempted at times to dismiss as excessive.  We do so, I feel, at great cost to ourselves.

Isn’t it true that women baffle us?  As a woman I have often been unsure of how to relate to other women.  And you men, well, don’t we baffle you?  Yet what can we say when we are so unsure ourselves of what it is about us that is so confusing.  Yet for those of us with girl children in our lives we have these little object lessons that dance through our days calling us to a new understanding of womanhood.

I believe that the reason we are all so baffled is that with the best of intentions the people in our world stifled us women when we were little girls.  Afraid of, overwhelmed by our words, our tears, our passion, our emotion, they helped us tone down… helped us learn how to communicate more effectively.  Or did they?  Instead did they abdicate their responsibility to learn how to understand us?  Did they make us smaller because they couldn’t handle our bigness?  I wonder these days in the company of my daughter, and watching my friend raise her very spirited 4 year old with a lot of courage and determination to let her be her own true self.  It is interesting to me, as I reflect on over 20 years of therapy and recovery from one addiction and another that much of the journey has been back through the layers of “controls” I developed to be present more effectively in the world back to the core of who I am.  And before me, dancing through each day is the gift of my daughter calling me home to myself.  She shows me the joy, and the pain, and the joy again of living fully engaged with life.

She has such courage in her relationships with her friends, both boys and girls.  She is completely engaged, deeply connected, and brutally devastated by the disappointments of the fact that others do not seem so focused.  I try to help her, of course, with many of the same platitudes that I was offered… but more and more I am beginning to wonder what service I do to her passing on the same, lame direction.  Perhaps I need to find a way to honor the fact that she, and every other girl she plays with connects deeply with the people in their lives… but that also means that they connect deeply with EVERYONE in their lives, so when they play with other girls it is not a comment on her worth. Or a statement that she is doing something wrong, but rather that they are now connected to someone else… help her see it as an opportunity to make another connection of her own.  I gave up on women, on other girls, in about grade nine, because no one helped me frame the disappointment I felt at the way relationships form and reform in a way that allowed me to move through it with my heart, though bruised, intact.  How can I do that, I wonder?  It is a great challenge to consider.