Yesterday I wrote a post straight from the heart. A post born out of sheer frustration that I realized later was less of a post and more of a prayer. It was deep. It was real.
And apparently it offended a few women.
If you missed it, the post was an invitation to men to rise up, do the work, be vulnerable, go deeper. And I concluded the message with this:
“PS. Girls- do the same or stop complaining.“
Well…apparently referring to women as girls is about one of the worst things you can do. Who knew?
“You diminish women by calling them girls.”
“Way to set women back 50 years!”
Here’s how I feel about that-
This is a pic of me as a little girl and a pic of me as a grown woman.
What kind of message does it send to little girls if the word “girl” is downright offensive? How would my daughter feel if she overheard me telling someone, “Don’t you DARE call me a girl.”
I am a girl. I am a woman. I am a mother. A daughter. A friend. A leader. A mother-f*cking goddess on a good day and a vulnerable train wreck on a bad one. I am all the things.
The little girl is an archetype that lives in me and did not disappear when the woman formed.
When I’m smart, I tend to that little girl.
When I’m really smart, I allow her needs to inform me.
That little girl that I still let live and breathe in me is the reason I can still play and hope and dream and believe in magic.
She’s as vital and as real as the woman in me who can quite competently raise a family and lead a company and kiss a man.
In most cases, a word is neutral.
Hell, a knife is neutral. It can save a life, or it can take a life.
What matters is the intention behind it.
So no, I won’t be texting my friends to tell them the title of “girls night” is officially changed to “women’s night” or I’m out.
I won’t be telling my daughter that it’s ok that she’s a girl but only until she’s 18 and then being a girl is very very bad.
What I will be doing is teaching her to trust her own instincts and check in with the intention behind the words that come her way.
I’ll be teaching her to discern between a compliment given genuinely and a cat call given disrespectfully and to accept the compliment with grace. (Shout out to the guy who whistled at me yesterday and left it at that. You made a tired mom’s day. THANK YOU!)
That said, can we please just go back to 1991? We had dial up and car phones and no one was offended when we weren’t offended enough by things we didn’t know were offensive?
And thank you to the people who read the ENTIRE post yesterday and who understood that it was NOT a man-bashing, women-offending rant…
but rather an invitation for BOTH men and women to heal together, to meet at the edges, to bring one another home. 