My best friend Kimmy had a baby girl recently. Baby girls name is Winifred and I love to so much it hurts. I am surrounded by boys in my house with two male dogs, two sons and one husband who is also just a big boy (just ask him about his new chainsaw) so having this little girl so deeply connected to my life, brings out femininity in me I have not had visit before. I have never had a little girl in my life so close that I get to be the backdrop of her childhood. I will watch her grow teeth, learn to walk, speak her first words, make her first decisions, and grow into the little girl who will one day be the seed of the woman she is to become. I often think about the world I want her to be in. Where we are at and where I want us to be. I feel like I want to understand what I have unconsciously digested as my female role, but being so saturated with who I am and what I was taught to be by community, media, and family makes it hard to separate out the colors of me and the colors of coercion. Or are we one?

            Yesterday, I started reading a Naomi Wolf's book called The Beauty Myth. I have stepped from fiction to naked truth without realizing I was going down a road that would carve my experience of being a woman, into caught breath and painful realizations. I just started reading the book and don’t know how far I can go and if I can even finish. It’s not because it’s not interesting or important, I just get full. Filled with enough of what I can see of the picture.

I confess that I am reading this out of desperation.  I feel if I can understand the weight of being woman, I can help my little friend, Winifred understands as she becomes a woman. I bought the story of who me and my vagina were supposed to be and never questioned it, until I had grown so big, the stereotype wouldn’t fit. What if young girls could see the metaphorical dress we try to squeeze women into, and the nakedness of not having to choose? What if Winifred could be a feminist and a mother feel as if the two were in absolute harmony?  What if we could be wildly successful in our careers, incredibly wealthy, and not feel as though we had to slice away aging with surgeon’s scalpels?

Years ago I was at a stop light and a beautiful cream colored Lexus pulled up next to me. It had champagne tinted windows that made the cars occupants look as though they had just stepped out of the warm sun. I looked over through my cracked window, and heard my thoughts above the clatter of my muffler say, “I will have to marry someone really rich to be able to afford a car like that.” I heard it as if someone outside of me said it. I was shocked and after the shock subsided I was left with the aftertaste of realizing what I believed was possible to create for myself. I had adopted the idea that I was destined to continue the cycle of poverty in which I was raised. I didn’t know what to do differently. There was no epiphany. All I did was hear me, and that crack in my thinking became a constant place of picking. It woke me, and try as I might I cannot go back to sleep.

By the way, my first career job, I purchased a cream colored Infinity with champagne tinted windows that made me look as though I had just stepped out of the warm sun. Yes, I bought it myself.