Thoughts on Feminism, Masculine-ism (Is there such a word?), and Parenting…
We are in a conversation about feminism. We are watching women step into the light. We just awarded a 16-year old girl the Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous survival of wounded masculine shooting a gun at her head. A couple weeks ago, I asked the cofounder of her fund what they will do now that Malala has won, Shiza said, “Well, first of all, she will stay in school.” This is the bounty of this moment in feminism. The feminine heroic is rising from the underground where she has been touring the dregs and now she is stepping into the light of day with wounds intact, more aware of the world than ever, and more responsible for it than ever.
I am the mother of a daughter. My son has shown me the tenderness of a male psyche. My husband is sensitive, an artist, he needs me to be softer with him. It makes him no less a man, but shows me the responsibility I have to raise my daughter to know the heart and mind of both the male and female—to respect them both, to cherish the sacred in each, and to balance the two within herself. This is the definition of balance now. Not about family and career, but about the energies of male, female and finally non-duality in all.
As I explain the world to her, I also explain it to myself, she’s my second chance at understanding the heart of a girl, she has illuminated the mysteries of my own youth and given me my first chance to be the mother of a daughter. I pray for grace as I rush to the airport, she cries for me not to leave her at school, but I must. To miss the plane would be to miss my dreams too. Without my dreams I cannot give her her own.
Mia is sensitive. We all are. She’s fierce too, going to school in a blue velvet cape, wild hair and eyes that see with ferocity and wonder. As my son pulls away from me, asking for more freedom, thinking high school is the end of my job, he’s mistaken. He needs me more than ever in the art of becoming an adult. To share with him is to open him up for his dreams, but he wants less time from me, so I have to be succinct, eloquent, and speak a language he wants to understand. But Mia wants a lot of words, none are wrong, she is hungry for more, I take the words Sage rejects and turn them toward my little one, for her vocabulary is a landscape of possibility. As she works on her sentence structure, moving words around her mouth like a butterscotch candy, Sage cuts and edits his own language, aiming it away from me and into his social future. I jump from kindergarten books to conversations about atheism, from goldfish crackers to software engineering; it’s My Little Pony one minute, Silicon Valley the next. Watching Sage struggle with becoming a man gives me compassion for all men. Watching Mia leap from the couch with a toy sword in hand gives me faith in her strength to one day fly a plane, perform a lifesaving surgery or build a business. They are both all things at once.
I want both of my kids to understand feminism in the way it will heal and change the world. But, they know it better than I do. I am used to a fight. They are used to equality. I don’t want to take away their knowingness that male and female are in perfect balance. They don’t know anything but balance. I pray Mia won’t get asked how she “balances it all” just as I hope Sage’s conversations are more fruitful than trying to answer this question. He’s seen no classic idea of balance in my life; he sees me happy, busy, laughing, struggling, crying, grateful, sad, hopeful, and human in my expression of feminine and masculine. Mia sees a strong woman, we read books about anger and meditation, Dr. Seuss and Clarissa Pinkola Estes….while she practices mudras and art, Sage discovers the wonder of girls, his love poems in the form of texts.
Sacred, all. Life, the feminine, the masculine, the balance of doing and being amidst changing roles, shifts in focus, the rise and fall of energy like breath. My hope is that Mia will never make less than Sage for the same work. My dream is that Sage will never be wounded and lash out toward a woman. My vision is that Malala’s light brightens the dark edges of the world so there will be no more dangerous alleyways and scary boogeymen afraid of the power held in a woman’s heart. As we all dance between the lines, my request is that we continue to honor the divinity in each of us, and in turn brighten the path for all, male and female, one.
