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| Image Credit: genderpolicyforum.wordpress.com |
You know, at their best, women are honest, communicative, warm, supportive, and my GOD, we are strong!! The other day, I sat in a cafe nook with a couple of the women from the poetry group I've joined. Both older than me (closer in age to my mother) - but it felt like time with sisters. We talked and laughed, and shared. I got to know them in ways that their public personas never reveal... and was awestruck by their strength and dignity, SO hard-won in the struggles and challenges of their lives. I got to hear them share about the ways they have adjusted to the difficulties and disappointments of life, love and relationships, often making choices that meant great personal sacrifice - yet never in any way diminishing their knowledge of their own value and personhood. Sitting there, I saw women who had found their worth, and knew it was not in the needs or estimation of any other person. It was both humbling and inspiring.
Chatting with another woman friend this morning, the talk turned to "motherhood", and the ways in which we as women tend to "hold it all together" socially and relationally, for our families. She is a mum who has until recently homeschooled a daughter with special needs, is now an advocate for her as she transfers to formal schooling, is dealing with significant health challenges faced by both her daughter and herself - and in spite of seemingly never-ending challenges, is looking to the future, celebrating some wonderful successes, and remaining strong. When I talk with her, I get the sense that she is creating a world of opportunities around her family and herself, and teaching her daughter to do the same.
Sometimes it seems, in our culture, that women do all the nurturing, give of themselves, hold their relational worlds together for the sake of others, while our men focus on wage-earning, live on some kind of "auto-pilot" and become more and more disconnected from their families and the real heart of life.
