Once upon a time, I was young. I was a young woman being raised by a strong woman in a family of strong women that came before her, and I went on to raise an even stronger woman, my daughter. This is the cycle of women in my family that I am proud to be a part of. We live, we learn, we love, and we make mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them is the human experience, the point of our existence that I believe few muggles and fewer muggles that are men, realize. Why else would we, as magical individuals delve deep into the mysteries and do our shadow work if not to learn from what life throws at us?
As a young person, I made many mistakes. And like most daughters, I blamed my mother for much of my life’s problems. I saw her parenting to have inadequately prepared me for the horrific events that would befall my youth. Date rape, sexual harassment at work, narcissistic men who gaslight women, domestic violence and assault, etc. I had never been taught how to deal with those things, nor how to deal with the existential crisis I went through when my husband inflicted betrayal trauma on me and I almost didn’t recover.
But, the point is, I did recover. How could my mother have ever adequately prepared me to survive those things? I saw it as her job to have given me an instruction manual on how to handle those events. But in truth, there was no way she could have known what exactly would happen to me, but she did give me skill sets that made me capable of surviving them. I didn’t realize this until I had been to hell and back and got the t-shirt.
As a middle aged woman, I look back on the way she raised me as a strong independent woman who was taught that anything I wanted to do was possible. Anything a man could do, I could do as well. The sky was my limit. She told me I was intelligent and capable. She raised me to question the glass ceiling of the business world that existed for women in her day and does still to this day in most regards. If I could dream it, I could do it. Not only did she teach me that I was capable, she taught me that women could do whatever they chose.
My mother raised me in a time where she was a homemaker and wife, but wanted more for her daughter. She was preparing me for the next generation of women. She stayed home and made my father his meals, kept the home and raised the children but all the while, she was breathing courage into me, ushering me on to do more with my life than she had been able to do with hers. I think she was unhappy with the way she had handled her potential in the world but was happy to raise me to do the things she never did.
When I began raising my daughter, just as my mother said I would, I realized how hard it is to be a parent and how often we screw up with our children. I began to see parenting through her eyes. Its the most difficult thing one can ever take on, but also the most rewarding. I began to make the same mistakes my mother did. I could hear her voice, as I made those mistakes in my head echoing back through the years. And I realized in those moments, I had not given her credit for all she knew, all she taught me, and all she had been through in her life as a woman and her struggles. I had not seen it from her perspective, only my own. She had done more and been better than her mother, and was raising me to do more and be better than her.
I began to become interested in the generations of women that had come before me, and what their world had been like through their eyes, rather than the eyes of hindsight. After all, we cannot judge things accurately in retrospect. I started reading about the generations of women and how they raised their daughters and how those children ended up raising their progeny as a result. A pattern emerges, in looking at it this way. We all have the wound of whatever transpired between our mother and ourselves, and we set out to do it differently than they did with our own daughters. In the end, the struggles our mothers endured, made them raise us to handle that better, yet they still make mistakes. We raise our daughters incorporating the wisdom of what our mothers did right as well as what they did wrong. And in this desire to do better, our daughters have a better opportunity than we did.
As women, our struggle for equality and our struggle for a place in the world of patriarchy, it has been a blessing. Bear with me as I attempt to explain that remark. We struggle, and in that struggle we grow, we learn, and we progress. The shit that happens to a person in their lifetime, that which they must overcome and survive, is the human experience. It is a path to enlightenment. It reminds me of a movie quote that I love from King Author: Legend of the Sword, in which the hero confronts the uncle that tried to find him his whole life to kill him to prevent him from taking the crown from him. The uncle admires him for his strength and courage, and the ability to fight and take him on despite all the attempts to kill him. He asks Arthur who made him into the man he has become, and Arthur answers, “You did!” And he goes on to say, “You make sense of the devil.” In that line, I began to understand what had happened in my life. Not that I believe in a Christian devil, but I believe in the negativity that comes into your life which you can end up almost crippled by.
In regards to that, my mother gave me a very appropriate set of skills to handle what life through my way. She taught me to survive. Survive and go on, no matter what happens. Be better than I was, and go on to raise your own daughter better than yourself. Teach her that life happens, shit happens, and when the going gets tough, the tough get going. She told me to get up and move forward. That’s all you have to do. Keep going. I love the quote by Winston Churchill, “If you find yourself going through hell, keep going.” My favorite thing that my grandmother whom I loved so much used to say was, “this too shall pass.” I almost had it tattooed on the inside of my arm where I could read it everyday as a reminder when I was going through the very darkest part of my life.
However, in that darkness, I found myself. I was so lost, but I found out who I was and what I was made of because as I emerged from that darkness on the other side of it. The truth was the writing on the wall: “You are a survivor. You did it. You made it through. Nothing that comes your way will ever be as bad as that was, and now you know you can survive anything. Nothing else can harm you. You have been in the crucible and are forged by fire. You now know who you are and what matters in life.” This is what my soul learned in that darkness that almost broke me. In fact, it did break me. I died in that fire and emerged as the Phoenix, rising from the ashes.
In truth, many women have to do this. And it is a blessing. The dark Goddess, The Morrigan came to me in that darkness and brought me out of it made whole. If it were not for this struggle, as a woman, as a human being in a life full of suffering at times, would I be this person I am today? Would I have the knowledge and wisdom I have now? Would I have the courage and strength it gave me? Would I know what matters and what doesn’t? Would I be certain of who I truly am and where I am going? I don’t think so.
You can call it a silver lining if you wish, but that implies that there was a cloud. I prefer to look at it as a labyrinth that I was trapped in until I proved myself worry of leaving it on the other side. And in the time that I was in the labyrinth, in finding my way out, I also found my way in, into myself.
What a blessing it has been for me. I propose to you as the reader, that this is the human experience. We struggle, and we overcome when we can, and from that we grow. As women, we are most certainly given our fair share of struggles. As minorities, anyone is. Look how beautiful it is when we survive and come out the other side with our soul not only awakened to the beauty of life, but strengthened and polished and ready for whatever may come our way.
