The Space Between Our Stories As Daughters + Mothers

I realize as we’ve celebrated women’s history and stories, more often than thinking about my own narrative as a woman I’ve thought about the challenge of rewriting the narrative I was raised in to better fit the narrative of my daughters’ world. 

Every day when my six year old daughter, Eva, leaves for school we hug and kiss and exchange, “I love you’s,” and just as she’s walking out the door she turns back to me and says, “Good luck on your work call, Mom!” She knows that my work matters to me. That I want to contribute to our family and the world through my job and what I do. She knows, from our conversations of highs and lows at dinner, that oftentimes my highs are professional breakthroughs and my lows tend to be times when I’m feeling stuck or inhibited by my own limits. 

I think it’s important to share these experiences with my daughters, age 6 and 11, because I want to teach them about the fortitude and grace they’ll need in order to chase what they want out of life and also contribute meaningfully to the world. I feel it is my obligation as their mother to prepare them for perseverance because they will have an obligation to persist and progress their own women’s story on behalf of all women in the future. 

But there is a gap between what I want to teach my daughters and what I learned as a girl about being a woman when I was growing up. Our mothers’ world was far different from the world we have to raise our daughters in. The women’s narrative I was raised in and the tools I was giving are not enough for the work I must do as a mother to prepare my daughters for their world. Closing that gap is hard work–as any growth work is. I feel I’m always challenging my own thinking and the stories woven into every fiber of my being, trying to be better and playing catch up to a future that has yet to arrive. 

And I wonder, is it like this for every generation of women? Will there always be this uncomfortable transition from the woman’s narrative we were raised in as daughters to the women’s narrative we need to exemplify as mothers to our own daughters? …whether you have daughters by birth, or metaphorically for the daughters of the world–the next generation of adult women. 

As the world continues to evolve, the role of women will too–I hope. And so as we continue to rewrite the story of the future, I think we’ll always be catching up and pushing ourselves beyond the narrative of the present. As we wind down [official] Women’s History Month–with this year’s theme being Celebrating Women Who Tell Stories–I want to honor that struggle of pushing the space between our stories as daughters and mothers.