This Just In — Each time I was pregnant, I was sure my babies were girls. In those days, definitive testing to disclose gender was only done when medically necessary and because I was young and healthy, the “gender reveal” came in the form of the arrival of a crying, slippery little boy celebrating his birthday.
So, yeah, my “intuition” had a 100% failure rate.
Before Brian (#1) arrived, I was reading a delightful and important book – Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s “Growing Up Free.” Pogrebin was a founding editor of Ms. Magazine and the mother of three kids.
At its core, this book challenges us to avoid putting expectations and limits on our kids based on their sex. It was radical at the time, for example, to say that if your child enjoys dressing up and pretending to be a princess, you should let him. If your daughter wants to pretend she’s a lumberjack, that’s great!
On its face this seems easy, but it isn’t. It takes thought and sometimes determination to educate yourself about how to treat children respectfully. It might seem easy to talk to a three year-old girl without mentioning that her hair is beautiful and her sparkling shoes match her dress, but it’s important to avoid commenting first on her appearance. It can be a challenge because it’s the first thing you notice.
My generation of parents was focused on raising daughters (which I didn’t get to do) to be strong, self-reliant and confident. We wanted to empower girls to embrace their abilities in securing higher education and great jobs. Yes, you can be a manager of other workers. Yes, you can be a leader. This is all great, but we (the collective “we”) missed a great big counterpart to this advocacy.
Our society conveys intergenerational knowledge about raising children, cultivating relationships, building trust and community connections (church, healthcare support, neighbors, schools) almost entirely via women. This isn’t a class a school, it’s a deep, cultural expectation.
In emphasizing the movement to support women as full partners and leaders in the public space, the balancing piece has clearly not given boys and men the empowerment that they need to participate fully in “our” spaces.
When we see dysfunctional men who have reached extremes (lashing out criminally) we see people who didn’t know how to form and sustain close friendships, are without empathy and scarcely ever did anything for another person unless they were paid for it. They are transactional people. They lack integrity. They don’t know what to do with their feelings and cannot work through conflict. Friendship, integrity and empathy are the tools of human connection that we all need to grow up and be fully realized humans.
I recently watched the documentary “Chris & Martina” about the long journey to friendship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. It’s complicated and very compelling. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect (outside of their unlikely simultaneous cancer battles) is that these women were extremely competitive, world class athletes. They excelled at the highest levels in 1970’s tennis and struggled mightily with being friends at the same time.
Evert admits that although they liked each other very much and were a great doubles team, she pushed Navratilova away in the interest of keeping her competitive edge in singles. This provided Evert with some big wins in her sport and tremendous loneliness and depression.
This is a difficulty that Venus and Serena Williams never had. They are always going to be sisters, so they could go at it on the tennis court without reservation. It’s interesting to watch the WNBA through this perspective. Many sports writers seem to be focused on personal conflict between Caitlin Clark (a once-in-a-generation talent) and other players and not so much on the game (and its officiating). Women being fiercely competitive must mean they’re in some personal squabble, right? Actually, no. Just no. Nothing like this followed LeBron James’ rise in the NBA.
As with preserving our always-fragile democracy, growing up free and extending that freedom generationally is our life’s work. It’s one day, one game and one election at a time. Let’s keep working.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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