Our daughters need a new paradigm…
(EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK: Dancing With Our Daughters.)
Years ago a group of moms and I formed a mother-daughter group to empower our daughters as they became women. My upcoming book gives mothers of daughters a prescription for keeping their relationship with their daughters vibrantly alive during adolescent and teen years. This excerpt from the book chronicles my journey through career, motherhood, and my newfound delight in being a woman.
From MBA to mom—from Harvard to my heart!
Many of the moms in our Dancing With Our Daughters group came from successful careers and high-profile lives. Prior to embracing the feminine aspects of myself, I worked as a high-flying business executive. I earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and was on a high-roller management path in the telecommunications and computer industry. IBM bought my company and I quickly earned a place in their grooming field for top management. Then I was seduced away from my fast-track management career at IBM to be Director of Marketing at a small start-up company that evolved into the current cellular industry. Life was good for my ego. I competed in a masculine world with masculine ways and succeeded. I had a bet with one of my male Harvard classmates as to who would be on the cover of Fortune Magazine first and I seemed closest to the goal.
In 1990, I left my career when my first child turned three. I loved being a mom and had been struggling to be super mom and super executive. With a strong nudge from my husband, I jumped full-time into motherhood—a tough transition. I had never before even considered being a stay-at-home mom. Giving up the boosts to my ego from my career and being all right with cleaning, cooking, and changing diapers was a major course change. No one thought I would last—not my husband, my mom, my friends, or me. None of us anticipated the unfolding of my own soul as I reclaimed parts of me I had disowned to be powerful in a man’s world. In 1989 and 1990, I cried and lamented the loss of my “power.” In 2007, when my husband and I talked about the potential of my going back to work, leaving the life I had built with the kids– I cried even more.
When I first left the business world, after staying home for a month I was appalled at how “unproductive” my days as a stay-at-home mom felt. I was accustomed to being a corporate executive with agendas and meetings and a secretary and employees and plane flights and more meetings and deadlines and press conferences. It was all very important. I had long lists of to-do’s that I ceremoniously checked off in order to feel good about myself. When I chose to leave all that and stay home with my first child, at the end of the day I could not figure out how I had been so busy since nothing seemed “done.”
In my fit of despair about how useless I was, a good friend told me, “You’re accustomed to being productive. You’re now being fruitful. Productive people can count their worth by what they accomplish each day and week. Fruitful people are like farmers planting an orchard. Trees take tending and bear fruit many, many years later. Only with patience and inner knowing can one take on the task of being fruitful. Your rewards are not today or tomorrow, but oh will they come.” And oh, was she right! The fruit of watching my son and daughters today as they live their chosen lives and being their friend and confidante is the most rewarding gift I have ever received.
I enjoyed both the power of being fully invested in my career and the glory of being fully invested in my family. Each blessed and served me. My path now is to learn how to integrate the gifts I received reclaiming my feminine nature back into a position of strength in the world—not to forsake the feminine to be powerful, but to embrace my true feminine power. That has been my goal for our Dancing With Our Daughters group: to empower our girls to be fully feminine and fully powerful. They no longer need to fade into the background of someone else’s story to be feminine or to hide their femininity to be powerful. The new paradigm our group strove to foster is both—is balance, is bold acceptance, and is empowerment.
Dancing With Our Daughters has been the planting of great trees. The fruit has been in our girls and unexpectedly even in ourselves. Our girls have grown and are growing into women with minds of their own. They have become women who respect themselves, women who can say “I love myself enough to make choices that are kind to me.” Along the way, each of us mothers also grew, recommitted to ourselves, and found new strength in being women.
Our daughters—yours and mine—need new paradigms.
I encourage you to form a group of friends with young daughters—for them and for you. Form it exactly to your liking. Dancing With Our Daughters will give you ideas and inspiration. You will give yourselves your own form and your own path. You will bless your daughters and yourselves, now and in years to come.
The mothers you’ll meet in this book have struggled with issues just like you have. We created a forum to help our daughters find their inner strength as women. We found a way to support our daughters’ and our own exploration. We molded a structure and rhythm that helped our girls traverse the pressures of our culture, their own inner innocence, and their blossoming womanhood.
This book is our gift to you, that you might be inspired to find your own form and process to dance yourself and your own daughters through this uniquely personal journey of being feminine in the twenty-first century. May you find in the process blessings and jewels as bright and deep and profound as we have.