I'm obsessed with Shonda Rhimes' Year of Yes. If you don't have this book, get it immediately. She's such a badass working mom. Here is a favorite passage that I read yesterday:
Women are praised for traits that generally render them invisible. The culprit is the language generally used to praise women, especially mothers...She sacrificed everything for her children. She thought about everyone but herself. She gave up everything for us....
Greeting card companies are built on this idea...The message is that moms, you are good because you make yourself smaller, you deny your own needs, you toil tirelessly in the shadows.
Yuck. What the hell kind of message is that? Would anyone praise a man for this? Those are not behaviors that anyone would hope to instill in their daughters, right?
Where is the greeting card that praises the kinds of mothers I know, or better yet, the kind of mother I was raised by. I need a card that says:
Happy Mother's Day to the mom that taught me to be strong, to be powerful, to be independent, to be competitive, to be fiercely myself and fight for what I want... Or Mom, thanks for teaching me to kick ass and take names at work. Get well soon. Or, thank you Mom for teaching me to make money and feel good about doing it. Merry Christmas.
Where are the greeting cards for the mother that I try to be? For the kind of mother I need my kids to see? The kind of mother I want my daughters to one day be.
So today, try to not hide in the shadows. Be a mom fully of, as Shonda puts it, badassery.
Go girl!
