On HER Own Terms

For five decades, I’ve witnessed the role, expectation and reputation of women evolve. I might mention however, that it’s a story that played out in my periphery, rather than front and centre. When it came to the manuscript for us Misses you see,?I never followed my lines per se. I was the girl that stuffed tennis balls in my jeans after all, not my t-shirt, as other girls my age did. And “girl,” by my standards, was essentially whatever I wanted it to be.?

Fortunately, I feel like we’re collectively making our way back to that type of feminine freedom.?A freedom where being a girl doesn’t have to mean gracious, or soft, or clean, or tidy. It can be the complete opposite of all of these things, and it can be downright messy.?

We seem to be living at a time when more and more women are doing this little thing called?“unbecoming.” (Sorry, Michelle). We’re unraveling a little. Not because we’re falling apart. Quite the contrary in fact, it’s because we’re learning to piece ourselves together, on our own terms. We’re becoming comfortable doing something that I like to refer to as “sit in the shit.”?

A nicer way to describe it perhaps, is that we’re getting good at experiencing the “in- between time.” Almost a complete 180 from the grind many of us faced as we climbed our way up the lumpy, testicular rope to equality. Katherine Woodward Thomas describes the in-between time as a “must have” if you want to move ahead (not necessarily up). “If you want to create something wonderful in your life, if you truly want to make a big change, you’ve got to learn to tolerate the in-between time. The period in which we let go of who we know ourselves to be in order to allow the possibility of who we might become.”?

Some of us arrived at the in-between time on our own accord, but quite a few of us were pushed there by the gust of a pandemic. Noreen Malone, wrote in The New York Times that even before March 2020, women were exhausted, but the additional weight many of us carried as a result of school and daycare closures, took it to another level. The end result was a new “B” word spewing from our mouths, and this time it seemed without shame or embarrassment -?burnout - which a McKinsey study from last year demonstrated that 42% of women were feeling - up 10% from 2020.?

It wasn’t long after the pandemic started, the global workforce lost over 3.5 million mothers. It’s shocking, but not really, since more often than not, we were the partner in the relationship and/or the member of the family that sacrificed the altitude and momentum we achieved as a gender, to deal with the remnants of collapsing boundaries between work, school and home. One can only tolerate so much friction and fraying between the pulling forces of self-preservation and societal expectations before they break.?

It’s not by any stretch of the imagination therefore, that a great deal of women are raising their middle finger to it all. And as misery tends to love company, we are finding solace and comfort in the characters we watch on our screens, as the single girl persona has shifted from Mary Tyler Moore, to Murphy Brown, to Mindy Lahiri, to Hannah Horvath (Girls), Sam (Somebody, Somewhere), Anonymous/ Phoebe(Fleabag), and Bridgette Bird (SMILF).?

Associate Professors at the University of Colorado, Denver and authors of “The New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television,” noted that a primary difference in modern day "sheroes" from their predecessors, is a motivation that isn’t rooted in an underlying lust for upward corporate mobility, a corner office, or status. (Increasingly, it seems that the younger generation workforce is valuing solidarity with colleagues more than passing them on the corporate ladder anyway).?The commitment to her career today, has seemingly become more analogous to that of her gym membership, where she no longer pays per year, but rather per class, with a lightness and laissez-faire that doesn’t get clouded by the uncertainty of tomorrow.

She’s a new female figure who reflects a quiet acceptance (maybe even gratitude) for a post recessionary culture where the math doesn’t quite add up anymore; ambition + tenacity no longer = success (so why bother killing yourself trying?)?She doesn’t mind challenging the status quo, risking her likability or even settling for less conventional priorities. The greatest reward at the end of the day after all, is friendship in a “community of like minded misfits.” (Cheers to that!)

And so as women we seem to be taking our unraveling with a grain of salt, and learning to trust in the impermanence of it all. In the spirit of Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron I’d even go so far as to say that as our pandemic tainted lives start to settle, we are witnessing first hand, that “things falling apart is not only a kind of testing, but also a kind of healing. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Proving yet again, that women are perhaps one of the most resilient, adaptable creatures on the planet, we are continuing to step into ourselves. Sometimes it’s a subtle shuffle, other times a giant leap. Nonetheless, it’s very much aligned with the sentiment of feminist scholar Susan Fraiman, author of Unbecoming Women.?Fraiman shares, “I would like to imagine the way to womanhood not as a single path to a clear destination but as the endless negotiation of crossroads. She lives her gender as a continuous movement in contradictory directions. Becoming a woman [is] an incessant project, a daily act of reconstruction and interpretation. It is a lifelong act continuing past any discrete season…. and it involves a struggle among diverse narratives. And the apprenticeship for womanhood is painfully confusing.” Yes, it sounds exhausting, depleting and mind-numbing. But we all know who's up to the task. Happy International Women’s Day.?