Dawn Is Me

So, this month over at Women on the Verge, our topic is Women Changing The World — and we do, don’t we?

Further elucidation comes from Our Glorious Leader, Ana Lewis:

I am in awe of some of the things that people in our wotv community do on a daily basis. Women are changing the world – right here, today, and this is an opportunity for them to tell us all those things that they do every day to spread the message and achieve the mission that they are aiming to do – sometimes by themselves. They are no longer alone. We will help showcase how Women Change the World.

My very first thought was this factoid: in economic development circles it is well known that, if you give business development assistance to a man, he will improve his lot and that of his family but, if you give business development assistance to a women, she will improve her lot and take her entire community with her.

But that’s not what Ana was talking about. Not really.

If I want to turn the spotlight on myself, I could say, glibly, that any woman who is a mother is changing the world … one offspring at a time. That would be true, too, but that would be cowardly.

Sometimes, I hide behind my children. I love them passionately and will fight for the to my dying breath. But right now, where I’m at is all about me and what I like to think of as My Interrupted Journey.

Is it possible for me to think of myself as changing the world when I’m in a place that is All About Me?

So, what are you doing this year, Dawn, and what does it have to do with anything?

I am discovering myself and giving myself permission to be who I am and where I am most alive.

Where do I come alive? When I’m learning.

I find that everything about me is about learning.

My relationships consist of opportunities for me to learn from people. I learn from them about themselves and what it is like to view the world from inside their skin. I learn from them about absolutely anything about which they know more than I do. I learn how to connect with them. And, because people are continually evolving (or at least, the people I best relate to), there is always more for me to learn about them — so those relationships don’t have to end when I’ve learned all there is to know about and from a person. That just doesn’t happen.

I learn about things and then I write about them in my newsletters and my white papers and my research and my books.

I learn about myself and I write about that here.

I learn about my children and that helps me to parent them.

And, of course, there is the minor matter of returning to school. No need to state the obvious, right?

The fact is that everything I do is a learning opportunity, because that is the way I see it. It’s possible that nobody else on the planet sees it that way, but that’s not important.

So, what did I need in order to give myself permission to be this learner? I need to be physically, emotionally and psychologically safe.

I am an abuse survivor. Fear has been a very big part of my life so far. It gets in my way in more ways than I have time to describe here. The fact that I have continued to function has been itself an act of bravery.

So, in order for me to feel free to keep learning, I have to believe that (a) I can protect myself, (b) there will be people in my life who will love me and want to protect me, and (c) there will be times when I will get hurt or otherwise threatened but it won’t be anything I can’t handle.

My job, as I see it, will be to convince myself of that by figuring out how I got to where I am right now and, more importantly, finding ways to prove to myself that it’s true.

And where does changing the world fit into all of this?

That’s easy. What I learn, I share.

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I AM A WOMAN ON THE VERGE

Women Change The World is our theme for 2012 and for the month of January. Please join in the conversation by joining WomenontheVerge.net, on Twitter @WomenontheVerge, on Facebook or by listening and chatting on the WOTV monthly radio show (where I am a panelist) on January 18th from 7pm to 8pm ET on BlogTalkRadio.

I’m probably not in the best place to be writing about healing between the genders.

That was my first thought when I started out to ponder this month’s Women on the Verge theme.

I’m just about six months out from finalizing my divorce. At this point, I’m sad and lonely and scared. I’m not sure that I have anything to say about healing; I’m not sure I remember what it feels like. In my current circumstances, it would probably be fairly easy to refuse to say anything positive about him, in particular, or about men, in general.

But if I stop to really think about it, I find myself wondering … what’s to heal?

As odd as it sounds, I was with a guy who wanted to stay married to me without being required to have an actual relationship with me. But I’m not angry with him about that, I guess because I haven’t taken it on. Once I understood that was the lay of the land, I realized almost immediately that was his issue and not my fault.

Even now, my sorrow and fear have nothing to do with him. Instead, I’m realizing how long I’ve been alone, even in this marriage. And I’m wondering if I’m going to be alone all my life.

That’s what mating is supposed to help us deal with, isn’t it? The fact is that we are alone when we are born and we are alone when we die. It’s the being alone part that makes both those experiences so terrifying, and that terror is a big part of what drives us to avoid solitude in between.

I don’t want to be alone, I readily admit it. This what I have in common with every single man, every widower, every divorced man in the world, up to and including my own ex-husband. We are all human, are we not? And we all crave that very special intimacy-tinged-with-sex that is the recipe for mating.

(Here I hesitate. I call it ‘mating’ for want of a better single-word [I don't want to use 'marriage'], even as I realize it makes me sound like I’m writing a script for one of those Nature movies. “And the male warily approaches the female to see if she is open to mating … .”)

And then, too, when I reach into my heart in search of less painful gender-related stuff, I encounter another kind of intimacy. That is because I have sons.

These are the only two men in the world who have drunk from my breasts. I bore them both of my body and I share with them the kind of physical intimacy that can only come from being among that rare set of individuals whose diapers I once changed and who were once allowed to throw up on me without fear of reprisal.

And the funny thing is that it is in the nature of the relationship between a mother and her children that healing will one day be necessary there, too.

I don’t know yet what I’ve done but I’m sure I’ve done something for which I will be called upon to apologize to one or both of my young men. I’m not perfect and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get both these guys to adulthood without having screwed up somewhere. And that’s okay. Experience tells me that, as long as I am willing to apologize and own my faults, that healing will be possible.

That is what my own mom taught me, you know. It’s difficult to forgive somebody when they greet your injury with blame and derision instead of validation and comfort … and a genuine apology.

And maybe, if I step back from the personal to look at the big picture, that is what I can contribute to this conversation. The knowledge that real healing of any kind begins with a non-vengeful statement of injury, on the one hand, and a non-manipulative admission of responsibility, on the other.

“You did that. It hurt me.”

“I did? I’m so sorry! I won’t do that again.”

It’s nowhere near as easy to do as it sounds. Hell, it’s not even especially easy to write.

But this writing is good for me. I cry. When I cry, I am free.

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I AM A WOMAN ON THE VERGE

Healing Between The Genders is our theme for June. Please join in the conversation by joining WomenontheVerge.net, on Twitter @WomenontheVerge, on Facebook or by listening and chatting on our monthly radio show where I am a panelist. Join us for a fun and intriguing conversation on our monthly theme on June 15th from noon-1pm ET on BlogTalkRadio.com/womenontheverge.

It wasn’t so very long ago that I decided that, even if I never manage to accomplish anything else of significance in my life, I can truthfully say that my life was not wasted because I have been a Good Mother.

I remembered that conviction even more recently when I came across this article I wrote about a dozen years ago, which at the time I called Some Reflections on Raising My Daughters:

I had always had a sense of owing something special, in the way of vigilance and encouragement, to my daughters. Perhaps that sensitivity is a result of coming of age during the ’70’s, at the height of the women’s movement. Much more likely, it was firmly impressed upon me by my own mother. She was born in the 1930’s, raised to marry and bare children, ultimately abandoned to the frustrations and burdens of single parenthood, and bitterly convinced by it all that her life had been stunted.

I watched her terrible struggle. She made no secret of her belief that her life might have been full and happy if she had been childless, and I felt all the sorrow that could be expected of a child who knows her mother regrets her existence. But, for me, the underlying message was crystal clear: women should not be homemakers or stay-at-home moms. Women should be emotionally self-sufficient and financially independent.

For many years, I believed that, too.

Then, I gave birth to my first baby. Nothing I had heard or read in any way prepared me for the intense and primal instinct I felt, to devote myself to the care and protection of that tiny creature. I didn’t even try to resist it. Emotional self-sufficiency was a laughable concept in the face of the bond I was forging with my baby. Financial independence suddenly just didn’t matter to me anymore.

But I was soon to discover that I had been born into transitional times. Women were not supposed to want to make the care of children their full time job. They were supposed to want “fulfillment.” Stay-at-home moms had become the butt of jokes on late night TV — the only women who could possibly want to spend their time with their kids must be too foolish or too stupid to do anything else.

Meanwhile, women who chose to stay home with their families were reviled by feminists as traitors to “the cause.” How could we possibly reconcile it with our consciences to turn our backs on the achievements of our “sisters”, when there was still so much more to be done? How could we allow ourselves to be brainwashed into living the ’50’s stereotypes that gave women-bashers their ammunition? How could we set such a poor example for our daughters?

That last accusation was a toughie. The jokes were easily dismissed; anyone who truly believed that caring for small children did not require the use of intellect had obviously never been called upon to do it. The remonstrances of feminists were as easy for me to ignore; I have always believed that freedom meant the existence of options, and I was not prepared to exchange one form of slavery to societal expectations for another. But it was not so easy for me to shrug off the notion that, by choosing to be a stay-at-home mom, I was somehow failing my daughters.

That, I thought, is one of the things that makes being a WAHM or mompreneur so special. It gives us the chance to be there for our children, to experience the uniquely feminine sort of fulfillment that comes of nurturing and supporting our little people until they are ready for us to set them free and let them fly. It gives us the chance to be there for ourselves, as well, to experience the satisfaction of knowing that we are making real contributions to the material comfort of our families, and the power and freedom inherent in earning money of our own. And, equally importantly, it means we don’t need a day to “take our daughters to work”; it gives us a chance to demonstrate that we can be, and are, more than “just mom.”

But at this point, I had to pause and ponder. More than “just moms?” Is there any such animal as “just” mom? Surely, there is nothing “mere” about being a mother, an experience so indescribably profound that it at once unifies women from all around the world, across every race, nationality, creed, religion, culture, class and language, into a universal sisterhood. There is nothing so vast or so vastly unifying in the whole of human existence. Once you have become a mother, what more could you possibly have to prove — to yourself or anyone else?

My daughter, now only nine, has a much more balanced attitude about the whole thing. She was born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, and is young enough to take the concept of “having it all” for granted. She fully intends to marry and have children, as her mother has done. She intends to homeschool them, as she has been homeschooled. She intends to tend and defend her home, as she has seen her mother do.

She has been watching me, this girl child of mine. She watched me last year, when I wrote the novel that I am still marketing. She has watched me over the last several weeks as I built my online business web site and she has watched me piece together [my newsletter]. Her little sister, a sprightly four year old, has been watching, too.

They both want to get married and have babies.

The little one wants to write stories on the computer.

The elder one wants to start her own business.

So much for setting a bad example, huh?

Things are a lot different now. At 16, my “little one” isn’t so little anymore. She started writing stories on the computer some time ago and she’s gotten pretty good at it, too. She has lost interest in doing it for a living … but then, I’m not sure she ever did want to do it for a living, now that I think about it …

“The elder one” is a 21-year-old woman now, an athletic training major and pre-med at Ithaca College. She’s not talking about starting her own business anymore but she is talking about having her own practice someday — which is essentially the same thing.

And I … I have just divorced their father.

I cannot even begin to describe how tremendous they have both been to me through this ordeal.

They have watched, furious, again and again, while I have been emotionally battered and bruised — and fairly often defending me when the Clueless Culprit had no idea that anything was wrong and I was just too exhausted to bother.

They have witnessed all of my follies and my weaknesses, and never passed any judgments on me. They are unswervingly supportive, having a great deal more faith in me than I have in myself … in much the same way that I have more faith in both of them than either of them has in themselves.

In fact, their love for me has been as unconditional as mine has been for them.

Healing will take some time, I suspect. Now the divorce is final, I am left looking around at the shambles of my emotional, psychological and material life, knowing that I need to pick up the pieces and wondering where to start.

It seems like a gargantuan effort, at my age almost more trouble that it’s worth. But I know that I will put forth that effort. I could say (and have said) that the best revenge is a well-lived life but that’s not even it.

Once I have left here and shaken the dust of this relationship from my shoes, I could care less about revenge or anything else having to do with Him.

No, instead, I am left thanking my Goddess for my daughters. As special as my sons are to me, my girls have made it their business to buoy up my life right now.

It is for them and because of them that I know I’ll be okay.

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I AM A WOMAN ON THE VERGE

Healing – Woman to Woman is our theme for February. Please join in the conversation by joining WomenontheVerge.net, on Twitter @WomenontheVerge, on Facebook or by listening and chatting on our monthly radio show where I am a panelist. Join us for a fun and intriguing conversation on our monthly theme on February 16th from noon-1pm ET on BlogTalkRadio.com/womenontheverge.