This was originally published as past of a series called In Her Own Words, in recognition of International Women’s Day 2011. Angie of One Cat Per Person and Clare and Aisling of Any Other Wedding organized the series, but sadly these two blogs aren’t up anymore. I’m reproducing the post here.
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My mother was lucky enough to be born fourth in a series of five girls.
Or maybe I should say unlucky. “I didn’t want you,” her mother told her when she was still very young. “You were supposed to be a boy.”
Ouch.
Maybe it was a moment of weakness on a bad day. Maybe my grandmother later felt sorry for what she’d said. Or maybe she doesn’t even recall ever saying it. I don’t know. All I do know is that those words stuck. I can still see the hurt in my mom’s eyes when she first recounted the story to me. Not only was she unwanted, it was all because of a stupid pair of X chromosomes.
I could chalk her experience up to the archaic views of an older generation. But time and again I’ve been struck dumb to hear people my age and younger — themselves women — echo the same opinions. Once, at a shower for a friend’s baby boy, a cousin barely out of her teens loudly observed that if she ever had kids she’d never want to have a girl. Girls are too much trouble, she said. Girls are catty. Girls are emotional. Girls aren’t worth it. It’s better to have a boy. And everyone in the room sagely nodded their heads in agreement.
In that moment I opened my mouth to speak, only to shut it again silently. This was not my home. This was not my family. This was not my fight to fight.
And yet it was.
Right in the middle of that joyous baby shower my stomach clenched up in a ball of hot anger, because that girl was indirectly speaking about me, and what she was saying wasn’t true. Yet more than anger I felt helplessness and despair. When anyone speaks ill of women it cuts me to the core, but it’s particularly wrenching to hear it come from women who seem to despise their very womanhood. Because somewhere along the way, someone must have told them that a woman is inherently flawed; that a woman is less of a person than a man — and they believed it.
My mom didn’t believe it.
My mother is not a particularly confident and trailblazing person by nature, yet at some point in her life she looked around and decided that the messaging she was being sold about womanhood didn’t apply to her. Given that the rural American midwest of the 1970s was not exactly a wellspring of feminist thought, this was quite a remarkable thing. She decided, independent of any outside influence, that she was worth it after all.
And this in turn ended up being one of my mom’s greatest gifts to me: the knowledge that I’m valuable, regardless of my sex. Her other gift was the affirmation that I was wanted. Not in spite of being a girl, but because of it. That being a girl was something I could be proud of and happy about.
It’s a scary time. Right now, an alarming amount of legislation is being drafted and voted on that serves to strip women of their rights. To strip women of their personhood. I don’t have a daughter, but if I do one of my biggest fears is that she’ll inherit a world in which her body and her decisions are not her own. I can’t tell you how terrified I am for the future.
But more than ever, I’m surrounded by excellent women: funny, intelligent people who defy stereotype. And for that reason, I have an incredible amount of hope for the future.
If I ever do have a daughter, I’ll want to tell her so much. But I’ll start with this:
Everything you do will be judged in the context of being a woman. Your stories will not be your stories — they will be a woman’s stories. This is the way it is. But it’s not the way it always has to be.
Know that more than being a woman, you are a person.
And know that more than anything else, you are wanted.
Me and my mom.
