A plea to WOMEN to honor Mothers to change the world (a letter to Emerging Women)
Dear Chantal Pierrat and Sisters,
I am both impressed and a bit distraught as I search your website and learn about the work you are doing to help women be leaders. I learned about your event from a new friend, LeeAnn Mallorie and wondered as a woman desperately wanting to make an impact on the world if I needed to attend.
I started to look at the bios of the speakers though last night and had this growing sense of myself growing smaller and smaller…. “these women are so darn impressive with their lists of accomplishments. Why isn’t this me? I graduated from Purdue in Biz with honors…and yet, I haven’t been able to make didly squat out of myself yet. At least not in comparison to these women.”
I turned off my phone last night, sad at the reality that I chose to leave a career path that was still unclear to me 10 years ago to stay home and have kids. Even more sad to realize I felt the “comparison” game.
This morning, I found the deep go-getter in me and decided I would hunt down some of these women that work around here and see if I couldn’t get an informational interview. I would research how to get a TED talk and put my all into it.
Then I stopped, and asked myself what was IT that was really turning my smile downwards about this event?
This is what came to me: While I completely understand this approach to help booster and encourage women…it still FEELS really masculine. While I am proud of my sisters for their accomplishments in the masculine world, it is almost impossible to NOT compare myself and feel less than – because that is what the Masculine world has taught us to do, and when a masculine approach is used – well the comparison is there. While I have not been to any of your events, I still see that it is formatted in the masculine way of putting a speaker up front – one person talking at the others – instead of making her part of the circle, an inclusive structure, where collaboration, support and information sharing is honored.
And while you speak of leadership, as my primary role of being a mother I want to scream, “I AM IN LEADERSHIP too!!!” I just don’t get paid, I don’t get the benefit of a manager to help me know what I am doing wrong and to groom me into my best self, I don’t get reviews nor bonuses, nor kuddos, nor any of the other perks the masculine world is so good at giving themselves. And, at the moment, I am struggling to find work so I can even continue to pay the bills and STAY in the bay area to be a mom to my two boys.
I mention all of this because as a woman who has STUDIED Patriarchy and the plight of women in it, and as trained NLP life coach to think of ways of creating my own reality outside of this – I still feel so trapped, beaten down and distraught…and even more so when I look at this event and read the bios.
“Is this really the best we as women can offer each other? To uphold the women who have claimed the corporate ladder with their impressive accomplishments, whether inside or outside the company? Where are the women like Wendy Marie, a mom and ‘missionary’ who went into debt to bring the ECSTATIC DANCE SILICON VALLEY medicine to the most ‘unspiritual’ area of the US, Silicon Valley? Where are the Samantha Sweetwater who created Dancing Freedom facilitator trainings? Where are the “moms” like Devorah Bry who is creating EMBODIMENT of the FEMININE and a network of sisterhood here in NorCal with HoneyRoot: Women. Heart. Soul?
“And mostly, where are the MOMS who left their corporate jobs and cushy paychecks to risk EVERYTHING to lead the next generation…and wake up one day realizing that was seriously a RISKY adventure in our culture that doesn’t support nor value our role?”
Again, my heart is not to demean your accomplishments. Yet, to bring attention to the great divide that still sits among us as women that I am feeling IMMENSELY at that this time:
Until we as women can praise and acknowledge the hard ass life, work and sacrifices mothers make in this country to lead the leaders of the future – we are still competing with men on their terms, in their world. Brining some feminine traits into their world is not going to solve the health crisis we now face. Until women, especially those that haven’t left the working world or who haven’t had children (and I KNOW sometimes this is not by choice, and my heart goes out to all women on this), start showing up and honoring mothers…nothing in this world will change.
Why? Because not honoring Mothers and giving them space and time to discover who they are…well that is how we have gotten so deep into Patriarchy and why our health suffers in the first place. Because good ol’ fashioned MOTHERING is an ancient old art form that we have all lost an appreciation for. It is taken for granted that people know how to do it…or it is demeaned, ignored and belittled. And we have forgotten that it really does take a VILLAGE to be a healthy functioning society…we have put too much burden on the individual – especially the single mother.
Mothering is what Corp America is in desperate need of as our health care costs skyrocket and our health plummets from too many hours behind a computer and not enough social connection. The gov’t now mandates that there are “Wellness” packages…but because the absence of prioritizing MOTHERING in our culture – no one knows how to implement a Wellness program well enough to get people to actually be well. Corp America, and thus America, is heavy on the tyrannical militant Daddy…with no balancing out not just of little tastes of the Feminine, but of the deep nurturing and love of the MOTHER.
I have to be honest as I look at this event I have to cry as a sister in need of help: Please, you are making me feel like less than with your Masculine approach to trying to encourage me. Your list of accomplishments and positions does little for me in my real world. Your talks of encouragement get me all excited, but then where is the daily support to walk alongside of me when I haven’t slept because I have sick kids and no one to stay home with them but me? Please do not leave us mothers, especially us single mothers, behind! We desperately need your help, your recognition, your energy and support and love to tell the world that we matter too. We lead and create things that are not things at all, and that leaves us little time to explore our depths and bring our gifts we are developing to the world. And because we are so busy with the kids, we have little time and little energy to be creative and figure out how to help ourselves.
For the GENUIS of women is that we are not really talkers about our actions like men. No our species has survived because we are the ones that come alongside our sisters, roll up our sleeves and get to work with them. Yet, our society is doing its best to knock this out of women as I can attest to.
Here is where I am coming from:
Since leaving my extremely unhealthy marriage, I have studied how the Patriarch and abuse in all forms as a societal structure came to be from one of the premier women on the subject, Gerda Lerner. Her books are “The Creation of Patriarchy” and “The Creation of a Feminine Consciousness”. I also dove in DEEP into Feminine Mystery type “schools” and had my own walk on “The Dark Side” of the feminine that I am still learning how to integrate. I continue to study our societal structure before Patriarchy in books like Sex at Dawn…and make wild connections as to what is going on in our current day and age as to why it is so hard for women to get on their feet, to say the least.
There are two key points Gerda makes that I think are relevant to what I am asking you to hear from a woman in my shoes:
1) Women were at least co-creators of Patriarchy since we were the tribal leaders at the turn from Matriarchal to Patriarch (I can expand further if you wish)
2) Women were not absent from History (how she denotes ALL of what happened), they were just absent from history (what was popularly shared).
* She contests that because women were busy making babies and caring form them, they were not given the opportunity to have time/energy/space to sit down and think like elite men had had the chance to do…and that this is the #1 reason out of all the “classes” held down/back that it has and continues to take women so long to rise above their subjugation.
* I not only see this as the major divide among us women still, I am living it. Me and so many other moms…single or not.
Lastly, in Sex at Dawn, the authors make this point:
* That when a woman does not have to fear being supported as a mother in her village, not only is her sexuality and expression of that sexuality free and creative and welcomed…the society is one of peace, non-competition, non-violence and free flowing love
I certainly do not have all the answers. Yet I know I have major pieces of the puzzle that I am doing my best to figure out how to get heard and how they fit in with the work that is already out there. I know there must be other women/moms out there like me too.
And I am asking for your gifts to be shared with me, and women like me. To help us all figure it out.
My plea: If you really want to help women in this newage…focus on helping mothers all you can. For when you do, we women can ROCK THIS WORLD.
Won’t you please hear my story and my cry sisters?
