When we ask women about their top five most influential women, quite often their Mother or Grandmother makes their list.
This might come as no surprise since we spend an incredible amount of time with our Mother. We learn so much about life, our cultural context, and how things are done, like the family version of spaghetti bolognese and how to apply mascara from our Mums.
We can look quite easily at tangible things like making our beds, opening bank accounts, and choosing matching clothes and see the influence of our Mother in how tidy we keep our rooms and where we bank. We learn, just by being present on trips to the grocery store or markets how to buy food. We learn by being included in the kitchen how to cook. And we learn through observation how to wear heels and jewellery.
The environment we grow up in becomes our ‘normal’ and what we subconsciously recreate. This goes much further than these tangible things like whether we make our bed or not. It includes how we understand ourselves in our broader cultural context, and how we see or even experience ourselves as women.
If I asked you to tell me one thing you’ve learnt from your Mum you’d probably tell me some kind of life advice, something like “Never underestimate the power of a hand-written thank you note” or maybe “Never give up, there’s always another way” – something I often say to my own children. And maybe you’d bring up a quality like being kind.
If we look at social media, there is an emphasis on perfection. The perfection of both our appearance and our life. If we, as women are to understand ourselves and what we are supposed to be like to fit in from an arena like this we would get a particular idea. From a magazine we might get a different idea of what it is to be a woman, though it might overlap with social media. And similarly if we look at movies there might be a stereotype for woman operating there that reinforces what we’re learning about women from other areas.
So what are these things you might have learnt from your Mother about being a woman?
Consider the following points and how they’ve influenced your view of yourself and other women:
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What were her opinions about herself and her body? Did you hear and thereby learn self-loving ways to view yourself and your body, or self-loathing ones? Or perhaps nothing?
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What were her opinions and/or judgements about other women? How did she talk about other women? And about men?
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What was her role in your household? Was there an even split of household tasks between all members of the house? Or did she do most of the work? If yes to this latter point was this something she spoke up about, felt like a victim over, or did she love being a ‘homemaker’?
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Did she ‘dress up’ to go out or to work? How was her hair and makeup done? And what was her intention in doing that? Was this done out of love for herself, or because that’s just the way things are done these days, or something in between?
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What was her stance on body hair removal and why?
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How did she respond to conflict, especially with her coparent or spouse?
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How were her needs expressed to you? Did you observe her doing self-care? How has this influenced your capacity to ask for what you need and make gentle or slow time for yourself?
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What did she share with you about your ‘lady parts’? Are your lady parts and your menstrual cycle sacred and special, or are they an unspoken part of you or even something to be ‘careful’ about in case they get you ‘in trouble’?
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What did you observe and learn from her about physical intimacy with others?
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Was she always available to help others, even to the detriment of herself?
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Was your Mother confident about who she was/is and what she offers the world, or has her value been determined by other factors, like a tidy house, body image, success in the workplace or perhaps how available she is for other people?
As you consider these, it’s important to keep in perspective that we’ve all learnt layers of things from the people around us and that we live in a broader cultural context that holds certain behaviours and activities as ‘normal’. As an example, a current social norm for women in the society that I live in includes the removal of body hair. What this means is that when we see women who aren’t doing these that difference may be obvious and uncomfortable to us.
Consider what this might have been in the 1950’s in a western culture: Women were homemakers and it was understood to be good to have dinner on the table for your husband when he came home, and for you to look good while you did it. Imagine how different the messages about being a woman you would have learned then would have been.
With our changing society, women experience an increasingly broad number of rights and choices and we are choosing uniqueness in a range of different ways. Sometimes the things we have learnt about being a woman affect not only our opinions and feelings about ourselves, but also about others. So consider, not only the impact on how you as a woman understand yourself from what you learnt from your Mother, but how does that impact the way you see other women and interact with them.
We will have learnt things that are both hugely helpful and things that may feel restrictive or limiting. Remember that by looking at what we’ve learnt, what our ideas are, we can then choose to see things a different way, or even realise that the way we see or feel about something is actually not our in line with our own values.
In other words, we can choose to rewrite any element of our story about being a woman that isn’t working for you and keep the parts we love.