Welcome to a new episode of De-Stigma Dialogues! As I said in the last episode, I am making it a practice to start each episode with gratitude. So, thank you for sticking with me on this journey and for those new to the podcast, thank you for taking a chance. Now, we are waist deep in our discourse on Motherhood and I am hoping to come to a place of pause this episode so that we can move on to our next theme. I started saying ‘place of pause' last season because I believe these discourses to be ongoing and they inevitably filter into one another. For instance, many of the stigmas of motherhood are tied to narrative and feminism, themes we explored last season. The same can be said for career and intuition, as you will come to realise when we continue the season and start those conversations.
I’ll be frank with you, last week’s episode was not something that I specifically planned to include in the discourse. I know that sounds weird given that this podcast is all about unveiling and exploring stigmas. But let me explain, see I draft a loose table of contents, if you will, for each season’s theme and their corresponding episodes. This is usually a few lines of initial thoughts, key words and any articles or books etc. that I want to reference in the episode or post to the newsletter. Oftentimes, it is one of these supplemental accoutrements that act as a trigger or a spark to get me writing the actual episode. It is within these episodes that the stigmas come up as an organic part of the discussion and are explored. So for this theme, I had broken the discussion down into three parts, and while I expected to touch on the various stigmas throughout each episode, I didn’t anticipate doing an entire episode on just that. But I believe that when something is organically growing, such as a conversation, then I have to let it bloom and take me on that journey. So this week, I am going to return to my loose plan for this topic and maybe double up on some things so that we can move on to the next theme for this season. Ok so let’s get stuck in then…
Musical Interlude: Thanks for my child by Cheryl Pepsii Riley
This week, I want to explore the actual act of motherhood / mothering. You know everything that happens AFTER you give birth. As you know, I am the very proud Mama to a beautiful young lady. She’s 18 and a half now so I can’t and won’t call her a girl, but she’s my girl. I’m gonna share something with you. My father passed away when I was 17 and for a solid three nights after he died, I had the same dream. In it, I was older and I met my dad sitting on the porch of a house that I didn’t recognize and he was holding this beautiful baby with cocoa skin and a mass of giant curls and the most beautiful bewitching grey eyes. And my father was smiling and the baby was gurgling and I asked him, “Who’s baby is that?” To which he smiled and said “yours!” He then handed me the baby and I instinctively knew he was right. Together we stood laughing and playing with the baby and there was this sense of peace. When I woke up, that peace rose with me along with an ache in my arms. My arm muscles felt like they’d been holding weights. It was a physical manifestation of that action from my dream. I told my mom, and she said, that baby sounds like you… I won’t un-pack that today, but it is something that may come up in the future when we talk about grief and dreams deferred. So we’ll stick a pin on my mom’s inference. Anyway, on the third night, I handed the baby back to my father and he said “I’ll keep him for you until time.” This dream I’d internalized and eventually pushed to the back of my subconscious, though as you can tell all these decades later, I never forgot. So when I discovered I was pregnant, I was convinced it would be this same baby boy I had dreamt of.
As my pregnancy progressed, I would say somewhere around the beginning of my second trimester, that ‘fore-knowledge’ that I believed, changed. I can’t explain it, but I just knew I was having a girl even before the doctor confirmed it.
Now back home in the Caribbean, I was told by almost every older woman that I came across that I was having a boy. “Look at the shape of that belly! That’s a boy belly, you know. Doctors get it wrong all the time you know” etc. etc. And I’ll tell you what, I never waivered. I knew I was having a girl and I was thrilled. I’d watched all the seasons of Gilmore Girls and naively believed that would be me and my daughter. And you know what, now to some extent it is. But like all things in life, anything worth having is worth fighting for and I did and my daughter will always be worth the fight.
Musical Interlude: Wonder by Natalie Merchant
The thing about having a daughter is that it IS sugar and spice and all things nice and it’s ALSO snips and snails and puppy dog tails! We carry this notion that little girls are all smiles and sweetness and then we don’t leave space for them to be more and it is such a disservice to them and to society. Last season within our discourse on narrative, I spoke about the conditioning that we consciously, subconsciously and unconsciously inflict on our daughters. I was certainly a part of that patriarchal machine that dictated behavioural patterns as I went about teaching my daughter the role expected of her from society through the toys I purchased for her, baby dolls and strollers and mini kitchens and cash registers. Even in some of the phrases I used to ‘correct’ her behaviour and create compliance, “little girls are seen and not heard.”, “speak when spoken too”, “don’t be so loud.” All the times, I pulled her legs closed when she sat to make room for the little boy who would then make himself big and infringe on her space. All these subliminal messages I channeled into her to condition her so that she would become the compliant female that will support her male counterpart while diminishing herself. I then counteracted that by using words that told her that she can be ‘whatever’ she wants in this life. I was sure to keep TELLING her that she was strong and intelligent and capable of great things without SHOWING her the fallacies of these words.
I recently came across a clip from one of Sarah Silverman’s stand up pieces. For those that may not be aware, Sarah Silverman is a comedienne, actress and writer known for her dry and self-effacing humour. Anyway, in the clip (I will post in this week’s newsletter), she said that we should stop telling little girls that they can be anything they want and that gave me pause. See I never grew up hearing that or seeing it, albeit it was a different era. As I grew up, I came to recognise the power of words and how important they are in shaping your identity and self-confidence and I wanted to make sure I built up my daughter’s sense of self. I wasn’t fully encouraged to be ‘anything’ I wanted so I was sure to fill my daughter’s sails with the affirmation that I didn’t, so this phrasing of Silverman’s immediately sent my cockles up. Her reason for saying this ‘blasphemy’ (in my eyes) was this, if we tell our daughters that they can be anything they want, they would never know that they couldn’t be… It would never have occurred to them that there was a limit to what they could achieve, as a girl. And can I just say, light bulb after light bulb after light bulb went on.
Musical Interlude: Suddenly I see by KT Tunstall
I’m sorry if I broke some of you with that last comment. I can hear and understand the uproar. But take a breath and let’s unpack this. Do we ever tell “boys” that they can be anything they want in this life? Do we ever tell them that they can’t have whatever they want? So why do we do that to our daughters? Think about that. We never give boys the message that life will not bend to their will but we let our girls know that there’s a limit to what they will be allowed to achieve. We let them know as a society that they will always be cast in the supporting role and never in the role of main character. We seek to empower them without preparing them for a reality that denies them. And this is only the reality as a female, we mustn’t ignore that for girls of colour that reality is even more diminutive.
Last season’s discussion on feminism touched on the importance of intersectionality and the same applies here. When we raise our daughters, that childhood, that mothering is different based on culture, race, economics. Their response to that mothering and childhood is influenced by the same. When my daughter turned thirteen she seemed to become a different person overnight. It was almost as though she was a changeling, a skinwalker. She looked the same but her behaviour was drastically different. She questioned and probed and raged and sulked and so I responded in kind. I was facing something that filled me with anger and grief and loss and doubt. So, I started talking to people, friends, work colleagues, acquaintances and everyone who had a daughter was saying similar things. Apparently the ages of 13-19 were challenging, no let’s be real, HELLISH was the word most used. The more I talked to other girl parents, the more I thought about why these stories aren’t shared. In fact, before De-Stigma Dialogues, I’d toyed with doing a podcast specifically focused on teen girls and sharing stories and resolutions and letting others who were not yet in the trenches know firstly, what to expect and secondly, that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Thankfully that podcast didn’t come to fruition because I think that would have perpetuated the unfair label/stigma on young women, teen and adolescent girls, that they were problematic.
I can’t say for 100% that things have changed, but it used to be that a girl being born into a family was a disgrace in some cultures. I remember reading about girl babies being euthanized in some Asian cultures. We know about some religions that mistreat and extinguish the identity of their daughters by denying them education, individualism and a voice. The current US Administration is certainly seeking to embrace many of those tenets. Perhaps it is the Eve Paradox, which is a term I coined, in my attempt to understand why the female gender is meant to consistently pay for what? Everything? Knowledge? Identity? Desire? Is that why as a society we fail to protect our girls, to lift them up, to support them unconditionally?
Now that we are on the other side of those “years”, I can honestly say that I believe those are the years when the girl’s brain begins to awaken. The scales drop from her eyes and she starts to see, truly see, the role society expects of her, demands of her. And yeah, she gets mad and she lashes out, as she should. As mothers, we shouldn’t expect anything different. We were once those adolescent girls. Instead of embracing it, we dig our heels in and try to curb it. Do we truly prepare our daughters for the hand that they’ve been dealt? Do we simply expect them to do as we did? It is this clash of reality that fractures so many mother-daughter relationships. I’ve heard many women say, hell even I’ve said it, that they don’t want to ‘break’ their daughter’s spirit, simply bend it. Can we just take a moment to understand the far-reaching and long lasting ramifications of that? We place our daughters in these gilded cages and clip their wings out of fear? Protection? Kindness? Anger? Can we really say?
Musical Interlude: Can’t Hold Us Down by Christina Aguilera and Lil Kim
I recently came across a snippet of a poem on Pinterest by Jessica Jocelyn called Stars At Last that goes like this:
“If you ever have a daughter it will be payback.”
And it absolutely is.
She is all the love I ever tried to give and all the love I should have received.
She is all the magic I lost along the way.
This tiny stanza of the poem summarized everything I’d ever heard about daughters from their mothers. I heard it from mine, as I am sure my mother heard it from hers. “Wait until you have yours” is a phrase often uttered in frustration, but also in hope I think. Being the mother to a girl is scary because this life is scary especially for girls, especially now. They come into this world with promise and potential and it is our job to nurture and protect them but also to teach them how to protect themselves. As their mothers, we get to see their transformation from cherubs to hellfires to powerful beings and yes, wait until you have yours is said in hope that our girls too get to experience that profound journey.
You know I think that mothers and daughters have a tenuous bond because it is so powerful. As mothers we want our daughters to see us as superheroes, beautiful, powerful, and they do, and then they begin their own journey and they start to see us as human, fallible and they can’t reconcile that so they lash out. Then we as moms can’t reconcile that we are looking into a mirror of all our hopes and dreams and fears and weaknesses and strengths and unrealized potential and doubt and so we respond in kind. Daughters and Mothers both want the other to be strong and beautiful and powerful but there is also the recognition that it may not be possible based on our own biases, doubts, fears, internalised narratives. We both want the other to be infallibly human.
There’s a clip going around social media taken from The Morning Show series where Jennifer Aniston’s character has a moment with her young adult daughter (I’ll link it in the newsletter) and the response from so many is yes, mom life. They aren’t wrong but I wonder if that sentiment would’ve been the same if her daughter was her son. Would the character and all the moms that relate still feel the same way? When our daughters reject us, it is more than deflating, it is crushing and that is why it hurts so much. I believe that our daughters possess the women we could have been, the girls we were, and the women we deny. They hold OUR power and that’s a scary thing for them and for us. I imagine it’s very similar between fathers and sons. At the end of the day, as girl moms the onus is on us to NOT clip their wings.
Musical Interlude: Wings by Little Mix
I recently saw a post on one of the social media platforms that bemoaned that girls can’t just be girls anymore. The author spoke about wanting to keep certain realities hidden from her daughters for as long as possible. She felt that this way, she could keep them innocent and stave off the inevitability of womanhood and all that it entails. I could relate and at the same time I thought about our current society and the messaging that our “girls” receive based on the actions of adults around them.
Then I remembered an article here on Substack last year around the time of the election (it is now behind a paywall so I am unable to link it for you), where a young man with over 75K subscribers, I say young because he’s young to me in age, wrote that he was scared FOR girls and young women today because get this, of social media giving them anxiety and depression. This anxiety and depression he credited to liberalism and girls being given information that empowers them towards wanting equality and acceptance and acknowledgment which is a fallacy. According to him, the reality of the patriarchal society (though he didn’t use those words, it was implied) is what young girls and women should be conditioned to accept and conform to. He was scared for young women and girls because they no longer wanted to accept mistreatment, abuse, and disregard. He was scared for them because they were vocal about being scared of male predators and rape culture and their freedom of choice being stripped from them. He was scared for them because they wouldn’t be able to find a mate. This young man garnered over 2200 likes, from men and women, for this article where he never acknowledged that young women and girls had a right to their fear, anxiety and depression, nor did he acknowledge the role played by the male gender in justifying that fear. He placed ALL the responsibility at the feet of the girls and young women and took zero accountability for the boys and men. He called the fear of young women and girls irrational while not addressing the statistics of rape culture or the rise of ‘incel’ culture and toxic masculinity. His fear wasn’t FOR the girls but FOR the boys that have found themselves surprised at being rejected by girls and young women no longer willing to accept subpar treatment.
So I ask you, should we continue then to shield our girls from our foibles, when as adults we elect into office sexual predators? When we as adult women are silent and refuse to acknowledge our role in Rape Culture and Toxic Masculinity? When we as mothers feed our girls a narrative that denies them their power? When we don’t believe them? When we as a society attach ‘pink tax’ to essentials? Can we continue to truly let little girls BE little girls? As a society are we so far gone that preparation must begin earlier and earlier? Is being a little girl now a luxury that we can no longer afford?
Like I said at the beginning of this discussion, we currently live in a time where girls are being systematically policed, silenced, belittled and disempowered. They are being blamed, labelled, diminished and victimized. Their rights are getting stripped from them before they even know what they are. I know that cultures and religious beliefs differ in their treatment of women and girls and how we as mothers raise those girls or how we are even allowed to raise them. I am aware that I do speak from a certain place of privilege coming from my background and I am aware that it gives me a certain freedom that is not available to everyone. That being said, I do believe that regardless of background, culture or religion, as moms to girls, we owe them the best chance of survival within a patriarchal society that will never fully acknowledge or recognize their power. Their journey will not be ours or one that we dictate or manipulate, but THEIRS and theirs alone. We owe them protection, support, knowledge, and love. We are the ones to tie their shoes and hold their hands when they start their journey and then if we are lucky enough, we get to revel in their power as they come into their own. Our daughters, like our sons, deserve our very best whatever that looks like.
Musical Interlude: Walk On by U2
I was going to try and double up this episode by opening the discourse to the mothering of girls and boys because I KNOW that it is different. But, since writing this episode, I’m not going to do that. I believe that each deserves their own space and it just wouldn't be fair, so I’m gonna stop here because that’s a lot covered today. Next week I will hope to conclude the discourse with Boy Moms and raising allies and changing the patriarchy (I have to believe it can be done). This week’s newsletter will be in your inbox this wednesday so keep an eye out, lots of really thought provoking articles and videos and recommendations so you can continue this discourse wherever you are in the world. As usual, please comment and reach out, share your thoughts, stories, disagreements with what I’ve said and engage. Until next time, be safe, hug your daughters, allow yourself grace and continue to talk out LOUD
Musical Outro: Shout by Tears for Fears
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