READ MY WRITINGS ON SUBSTACK

"…we want courageous mothering. The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities. For a mother, this means more than contending with reductive images of females in children’s books, movies, television, the schoolroom. It means that the mother herself is trying to expand the limits of her life. To refuse to be a victim: and then to go on from there.

We must live as if our dreams have been realized. We cannot simply prepare other, younger daughters for strength, pride, courage, beauty. It is worse than useless to tell young women and girls that we have done and been wrong, that we have chosen ill, that we hope they will be more lucky.

The quality of the mother’s life – however, embattled and unprotected – is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist.” - Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born