It Takes A Village To Raise A Child
“Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)
It takes a village to raise a child, and in many ways, my village was predominantly that of women. My grandmothers, my aunts, and my mother all had dreams about who I would become. As a child, I was fed these aspirations like warm broth: Plan ahead, be independent, be happy, be strong, be fearless, be cautious, be successful. The implication was not to be “better” than my matriarchs, but to build on their achievements, to find more for myself than they may have, or to learn from their own struggles.
Sometimes, their dreams were a storm of conflict inside of me whose foamy surf I had to navigate as I grew and encountered my own struggles and crafted an identity independent of the safety or comfort of childhood and home. Sometimes, these waters calmed, and I could sit with their hopes, letting their hands help build dreams of my own in the turbulence of the modern world. How does a young woman balance her past self: an amalgam of many generations working to provide her raw potential with an opportunity to be shaped into some as-yet-unfinished thing?
I’m still learning.
Young women carry far more than their own vision of the future. We carry with us the whispered desires of generations of women who wanted more for themselves. More freedom, more opportunities, more equality, the acknowledgment that we exist as human beings and not objects. Even now, my sisters work until they drop, fighting for a now and a future that recognizes womanhood for its deepest, strongest, most telling complexities. The future is a distant land of promise, a sometimes elusive safe harbor towards which we have been trained to set sail.
From an early age, I was taught to build a plan for my life, which unquestioningly included college as a goal. None of the other women in my family had completed a four-year education until much later in life, often secondary to the duties of wife and mother. Though now a ubiquitous desire for so many around the world, the women championing my higher education wanted it for me with a hunger I did not yet have myself.
“I wanted you to learn something other than being a wife, or a mother.” — Mother
“You may never be a wife or a mother, and I’m not so sure that is a bad thing.” — Grandmother
In some ways, I think that they wanted me to have a plan as a means toward independence. Proper planning for education, career, financial stability and a family — and in the proper order — has been the dominant narrative for so many women of my generation. As our grandmothers reflected on a not-so-distant past where women were still largely subject to the whims of the men exerting control over their lives as fathers and husbands, and as our mothers accepted mandates of intensive childrearing dominating the later part of the 1900s and early 2000s, they envisioned teaching their daughters to hunger for other paths. This is not because being a wife or a mother is unfulfilling, unfeminist, or weak in any way, but because a world with more choice was part of their secret hope for us.
Education was a means for a better career, which could grant me fulfillment as well as financial stability and by extension more dominion over my relationships. Their secret hope was that I would be saved from saddling myself with a man strictly because he was a provider. And doesn’t that help men too? This was not only practical; this was a matter of survival. I was young when I learned of the pernicious, insidious violence and abuse that can happen behind closed doors. When a child asks a family member “Why?” and the answer is “Because there are no other options,” the connection between independence and safety is sharply underscored. To be happy — indeed, to be able to survive — means always being able to take care of yourself.
This was long before the practicalities of the cost of higher education were of much concern, before the recession, and before I graduated with my student loan debt. But at least the U.S. government has a decent interest rate and a repayment program that may yet be shorter than the average mortgage (but not the average marriage). I may have achieved financial independence from another human being, but not without its own burden. All things considered, I still have my agency.
It is my signature on my promissory notes, and I take responsibility for my debt. I regret neither my undergraduate nor graduate education. I wanted them. The dreams of my forebears became my own. Once I was in the thick of them, I was hungry for more knowledge and skills to navigate this complex ocean of desires, identities, femininities, and politics. The promise of self-reliance only grew stronger as the intense romances of my early twenties consumed themselves, leaving me raw and with a slew of half-dreamt futures with other people that would never be. I always had my independence, though.
“I wanted you to find a way to be a leader that did not involve doing things as men do.” — Mother
I think a lot of the aspirations on my behalf centered around reinventing the role of a woman in the modern era as it relates to family, relationships, career, and fulfillment because these were the things that frustrated the ambitions of the multitude of strong women in my life. An aunt in engineering struggled with the glass ceiling and sexism in N.A.S.A, my grandmother reinvented herself in her 60s after a bitter divorce that challenged her ideas of love and marriage, my mother wrestled with her priorities in education and work as her children grew, and was no longer her “full-time” job. What to do, when women have always filled certain roles? How do we prevent those we love from repeating our own struggles? You envision what might have helped you along the way, and then you aim to provide it as a framework for the next generation.
But not everyone agreed on the same grand vision of my future.
As a child, I was pugnacious: loud, opinionated, and uncontrollably wild. Where my mother sought to cultivate this brash independent streak within me, my paternal grandmother saw a garden of unruly weeds. She often reminded me that I should be seen and not heard, that I should be a proper lady in skirts and that I should be feminine and diminutive. I often wondered why a “proper” lady was not the one wearing whatever she wanted (sometimes skirts) doing whatever she wanted, so long as she was the one who wanted to be doing it. When I was younger, I took her words as a criticism of my personality and lifestyle. Her life was colored by a world, a belief system, and an unquestioned adherence to an outdated gender role. Even now, having done so many of the things in my life at the wrong time, and in the wrong order for her: There is a love and an understanding between us. Our dreams are divided by an expanse of years greater than either of us can stretch across.
“I wanted you to be happy.” — Grandmother
I am still learning how to hold my own hopes close to me, carrying those of the women who have made me around me like a shawl. I am learning how to separate their specific hopes for me from the work we have before us all as women. I fail. Sometimes, I fear I have disappointed them. I know when I have disappointed myself that I will have certainly failed them too. It is not an easy thing to carry other people’s dreams and hold onto your own identity, too. The quiet, stunningly calm place where you can be both yourself and fulfill the dreams of your mothers is elusive: stay your course and you will find it.
I do not have a daughter, but I do have a younger sister. I hope that she finds the voice she needs to speak her heart’s peace, to learn to ask for what she wants despite how loud everyone else’s voices can be, to trust herself in a word that discredits and discourages women from the pursuit of their passions unless they fit in a narrow margin of acceptability. I hope that the world she lives in and moves through has better pay, provides access to quality heath care and does not try to regulate her body, I hope that the feminism she cultivates is rich and diverse, and the dreams she shares for herself and her peers are as endless and vast as mine, and as all those of the women before me.
