Shaving...a clip from my Mother-Daughter book

BODIES

Getting clear on how you were parented in regard to your body will help you see whether you’re parenting from habit or from your highest, most conscious choice. In turn your daughter’s inner voice will be able to come through clearly for her, without the static that comes from confusion. Beliefs change over generations. Separating your own inner voice from what your parents and society taught you will be an enlightening, liberating experience. How autonomous were you, as a growing girl?

One summer day when I was 12 I was strolling through the park to my best friend’s house.  I bravely stopped to chat with some older boys, high school boys who worked in the park and had sisters my age.  One of them casually mentioned that I might want to consider shaving my legs.  I disengaged from the conversation as soon as was socially appropriate, continued through the park to my best friend’s house, my leg hairs growing longer with every step, and asked for a razor.  My friend wasn’t even home—I asked her sister Amy.  I sat down then and there on the edge of their tub and unceremoniously shaved my legs.  There was no way I was walking back home through the park—or anywhere--with those gorilla-like leg hairs.  This was not a topic I’d discussed with my mother, so  there was no threat of repercussion for shaving my own legs at the moment I deemed perfect. 

In retrospect, although I had full leg-shaving autonomy in relation to my mother, I had previously given the matter zero consideration, grabbing a razor in response to a boy’s offhand comment, as though I had no choice.

The first time my daughter mentioned leg hair, I told her she had a choice.  I told her first that European women don’t have the same obsession with hairless legs and that it is acceptable not to shave at all, ever, which she found horrifying. 

“Of course I’m going to shave,” she informed me.  “So when can I shave them?” 

She was adamant, so I chose age 13. It was several months away, even though “all” her friends were already shaving, so I had time to campaign for no shaving at all; I was passionate about my point of view: her leg hairs were blonde and sparse (although to her they looked gorilla-like).  She told me how most of her friends had shaved without even asking their mother; they shaved at each other’s houses.  But she was willing to wait per our agreement. After I had had my say (which consisted of an occasional: “Is there anything I can say or do that will get you to consider not shaving your legs?”) I had to let go.  Her verdict, after that first shave: her legs felt heavenly, and she had savored the whole shaving experience. She still does.

Mother-Daughter Book Gets Edgy...

A NEW BELIEF ABOUT PARENTING OUR DAUGHTERS

What if we approach mothering our daughter from a new perspective?  A Divine Feminine perspective, as opposed to the old patriarchal view of obeying whoever is in power.  

What is a Divine Feminine perspective?  We were born into a male-energy way of relating to the world and behaving in the world.  We have become linear, task-oriented, hierarchical, externally led and externally powered. We barely realize it, because it is simply “how things are,” even though people are exhausted, depressed, and centered around having possessions.  

In the Divine Feminine perspective, there is no punishment. There are no power struggles. There is a sense of being receptive to new ideas and an allowance for creative solutions.  There is less striving externally and more intention-setting and believing and sychronicity and ease.  The old way of being has not helped humanity in raising daughters who don’t grow up into insecure, competitive women—if we are secure, unthreatened individuals, it is despite the old programming. The old perspective did not teach girls to listen to their inner voice; it taught us to obey authority.  The old perspective on parenting is a belief system that’s been handed down to us.  What if we could make a shift? For some, this shift will be easy and welcome. For others, there may be some resistance. Some people hold onto beliefs tighter than others. So be patient and loving with yourself—it’s the Divine Feminine way to be!

Here is a belief and its transformation: 

Sex is inherently bad.  Women should not like it.  It is used for babymaking, within wedlock.

From the 60s…out of the ashes…came the idea that sexuality and freedom can coexist. That it could be a pleasure and not inherently or exclusively linked to babymaking. But still a level “naughtiness” is attached to sex, a level of secrecy and discomfort.

 

And now try this leap:

Sex is Divine. It is a union of spirits in bodies. Girls engage with it for the first time when they consciously determine they are ready—with or without a partner. They are in charge of their level of consciousness regarding their bodies. Sex is not about being afraid or manipulated in order to be loved. It is about hearing your inner voice, and making a promise to yourself to honor your body and keeping it.  (And eventually it is also about making babies.)

The above is just a new belief.  Does it rattle you? If you have a preadolescent daughter, now is the time to begin to investigate your own beliefs about sexuality.

 

Here are some other beliefs I heard growing up:

Money:  Money doesn’t grow on trees.  The love of money is the root of all evil. 

Religion:   God’ll getcha for that.  Catholicism is the one true religion.

Bodies:   You can never be too rich or too thin.

Food:  You don’t live to eat, you eat to live.  You don’t have to like it to eat it.  

Jobs:  Security versus pleasure--not both in one job!

Make your own list from your past.

 

1. Money

2. Sex

3. Religion

4. Bodies

5. Food

6. Jobs

Which beliefs still operate in your life?  How have your beliefs evolved? 

Consider, for each item above, that it’s “just” a belief.  Examine why it was important to you or your parents.  What is the opposite of this belief?  What if your daughter believed the opposite? Can you imagine letting go of any belief that is not utterly and truly joyful?  Consider whether there are any beliefs you would like to evolve deliberately.

Tiny Mother-Daughter Book Bite

A GENTLE CLASH OF BELIEFS

When she was nine, Lily lost her hat.  She had others, but I loved that adorable butterfly hat and was reluctant to see it go.  Weeks went by.  It was definitely not in our house.  She informed her classmates that I was offering a $5 reward for the hat, and within minutes it was found at school.  That night, the finder’s mother called me.  “Please don’t give Cole $5,” she said.  “He was just helping out a friend, and he’d gladly do it for free.” 

“I insist,” I said.

“Please don’t,” she said. “I’d like him to learn that there is value in being a good friend.”

“I know,” I said. “I get it. That makes sense. But,” I countered, “I would like him to learn that simply being himself will reap rewards out in the world.”

No one was right or wrong; it was a clash of beliefs.  My friend was willing to let go. I had already offered the reward, and wanted to keep my word.

“If you must,” she said. I sent the money to school for him the next day.  It made me feel so good—to have the hat back, and to reward Lily’s friend for being himself.  Life can be easy; work can be playful. Those are beliefs. Speaking of which, I believe that, like Cole, we can be rewarded for being ourselves, for following our inner guidance.

Mother-Daughter book: BREASTS

How can we absorb and accept the primary spiritual premise that everything happens at the right time? First we need to trust it in ourselves, in our own lives, then we can help our daughters to trust—otherwise they will grow up living outside of the moment.

One of the biggest and most exposed areas of trust and timing centers around our daughter’s breasts. Although she may pretend it’s not an issue, breast development takes up lots of space in the preadolescent girl’s consciousness. How can we guide girls’ breast-consciousness in a positive direction? Plus, for those of us with a family history of breast cancer, how can we transform the fear—based on statistics--that at any moment, we may be next?

Honoring our breasts now—mothers and daughters alike--is best way we have of maintaining healthy breast tissue and feeling the sense of empowerment that actually leads to good health. It is the one form of “cancer prevention” that we as a community of women, we as a medical community, have not yet tried. Although churches have a system of honoring God that lasts through generations, these institutions don't teach us to honor our God-given bodies—least of all women’s breasts! If they did, we would have been doing this for generations and breast health might perhaps today be thriving. But in our current society, that which gives life—the physical form of woman--is not being honored. Churches aren’t honoring breasts as a spiritual symbol, as a connector of generations—but we (owners of breasts) can.  We must.

It’s up to us.

We need a place where breasts can be healed. There is no western medical entity that I know of that is actually healing breasts. There are those who have uninspiring statistics for cutting into them, cutting them off, and addressing them with chemicals and radiation. Those us of us with a really strong will, or incredible grace, live through it, but do we ever really feel healed? Do we ever really know that our strong will or our incredible grace pulled us through? Or do we credit the medical industry? Can we strengthen our will to live, and nurture it in our daughters, without having to go through breast cancer to develop it?

(“Develop.” Get it?)

If we honored our breasts from the moment they developed—the minute girls become self-conscious about them--instead of when they are about to be medically altered, aren’t we instilling them into our daughters’ minds as sacred? Aren’t we teaching them that this body is a sacred place? Won’t the act of honoring be inherently healing? When a girl is worried that her breasts are not developing soon enough, or when she is self-conscious about them developing sooner than she wants, she is inherently not trusting Divine timing. And she is sending that sense of being out of sync directly to her breasts.

In my religious upbringing, not only were bodies not honored, but a sense of shame surrounded issues of bodies and sexuality. Breasts were certainly not honored—what does that even mean? Can you rise above, or burst out, of any early programming and imagine creating a sacred space for bodies, for breasts? Is there lingering shame or judgement in you that you don’t want to pass on to your daughter? Do you truly love your breasts? Can you see them as perfect, even if they are too big or too small or two different sizes? How can we create sacred space for breasts? What does that even look like?

That sacred place is within ourselves – that place where breasts can be healed. It is within us. Do I promise to love and honor and obey my sacred breasts? As long as they both shall live?

Breasts deliver life. They link the generations physically, intimately, like no other part of our bodies. We have lost awareness of that sacred link as a culture and our breasts are sending us the message—through lumps--that something needs to change. We have a choice: we can hear this message or not. We can heed this message or not. We can try something different—something pioneering—or not. I believe some day we WILL live in a world without breast cancer, or fear of breast cancer, and if we hear the message to open up the spiritual channel NOW, I envision us altering this reality in our lifetime.

We don’t need to have everyone in the world united in this new vision. We only need to tip the balance of beliefs, to change cultural reality. Only 51% of us need to unite in a desire to significantly reduce breast illness for it to happen. If we are holding the highest good of all concerned in mind, and honoring our breasts, we can change the world.

We get to choose. Only embrace this invitation if you wish to embrace it. This is an invitation to be specifically conscious of your breasts – not just conscious of, but honoring of them, reverent toward them…yours and everyone’s, as a sacred life-giving link between generations.

How many breasts are touched by surgeries in one year, both elective and illness-related, literally how many breasts are touched by a surgeon’s scalpel every year? The number is in the hundreds of thousands. How many have breasts been touched with loving, reverent, nonsexual hands? What if that number were in the hundreds of thousands? With conscious touch, we can change the world.

So much time and money have gone into a search to cure or prevent cancer. Because medicine has not found a cure or the prevention, I have been tempted to look outside the confines of medicine for solutions, and I have narrowed down that search, for the purposes of my mother-daughter groups, to breast cancer. What CAN we do?

Breasts are what link the generations. Breasts are what link the generations to their mothers. Repairing the tears in the fabric of mother-daughter relationships will have an effect on breast cancer. Daughters not pushing mothers away, mothers truly seeing their daughters as they are, and not as they wish them to be, will have a positive effect on breast cancer. Consciously honoring our breasts as the life-sustaining link that they are – more than just objects of arousal – will help to heal the epidemic that is breast cancer. Western medicine has searched, and has not made the level of impact one would expect from millions of dollars and the best medical minds. As conscious mothers we must empower ourselves, take back our own power to heal, and teach our daughters from minute one that their breast development is graced with Divine timing.

Mother-Daughter Book Bite

LETTING GO OF OUR WILLS …to get our way

                   

This works—if we let go of our scripts.  Here’s a translation of a common script:

 

Daughter:  I have to fight with all my might, right now, and resist my mother’s control! 

Mother:  And I have to teach this girl a life lesson, right now! 

Sometimes in that script we don’t even see each other; we just see our own agenda—that feeling of now can grip us, rather than a feeling of holding the moment in calm hands.  Our girls, of course, can’t let us win!  That would be a blow to their burgeoning will.  So they dig in. And it’s not pretty. And due to the sheer ugliness of it, I have to teach that girl that lesson, right now!—right?  Well, no. Finally I’ve learned to see that I actually don’t even want to win, in the traditional sense, with my daughter.  I don’t want to try to teach her a lesson right when our dynamics are most heated.

Finally, I’ve become willing to take that old script and whip it into the wind--which sucks, sometimes, because holding the old script can be comforting. But we are both now willing to write a new one, to write a new one that feels mutually empowering and fun. Because Lily doesn’t want to do it, if it’s not going to be fun.)

I have gradually given up the power that had taken ten years to accrue.  I practiced letting go of needing to be right, needing to have the last word.  I invented ways of smoothly releasing my power in a way that felt comfortable to both of us. I let go of thinking I needed to teach her a critical life lesson during the hectic five minutes before leaving for school.  I was motivated by my observation that…it’s working! Somehow, magically, after our mutual willingness to let go in that moment, magically, we would have a moment later that evening during which she or I could say, can we talk about it?  How can we do it differently next time? 

It’s kind of a miracle.

I have an emotional, talkative, and occasionally offensive teenager. We are allowed to be mad at each other, but we’re not allowed to blame each other or intend to hurt each other. We do heat up at times. Recently I was so inflamed that I seized her hand, accidentally scraping it—and I had fresh flesh under my fingernails as evidence! It was a horrifying moment in which the Universe was truly putting me under arrest--oh, shit, what if I’m a child abuser?--and after we had inspected the depth of the clawprint and I had expressed my apology, I said, “The only thing that’ll make me feel better about this is if I  kiss that knuckle every time you ask me, for the rest of your life.”

She loved this. And I knew she’d treat my vow with reverence and respect.

A bizarre new script, but we were both thrilled with it and now it’s even funny, when I voluntarily kiss that still slightly scarred knuckle, before she can even request—or protest. Blame is all my family has ever known, so disowning that old script has been liberating.

But letting go meant disengaging my will—right when Lily was starting to grow hers. It was almost counterintuitive. But that’s because the old script says when the other team gets stronger, you fight even harder. (Look where where that’s led the world.)

We have practiced—and practiced—during times of conflict, letting go.  It turns out that it is much more difficult for me than for her, because I have been practicing, for 40-something years, the art of holding on! Of digging in!  Look—there are fingernail marks to prove it! Deep ones! I like to get my way!  I have a habit of holding on to an argument—especially because I’m RIGHT!  Lily has inherited her share of RIGHT-ness as well, but she is more willing, in the heat and drama and attachment and escalation and resistance, to be the one to say, “Mom, let’s not do this.”  And she never feels like she’s giving up power, or giving in. She does it because it’s fun for her to do it a different way.

We know that the only way anyone actually wins is if we both let go, if we both let go of that ancient and undesirable feeling of digging in, of getting my way. 

Power over her, or the urge to shape her behavior, is less and less enticing to me. It used to feel great, and now it barely rates. In Lily’s striving for independence and autonomy, we both experience the thrill of surrender, of surrendering to the desire for Peace and connection, which is a more fulfilling reward than winning a battle of wills.

Now we are in a new stage:  recognizing that moment of potential conflict escalation, because we know—from experience--it is summoning us to surrender to the beauty of the moment, to the joy.  We don’t dig our heels in, we are not gearing up to win—we know we are both going to win.  Before it even begins. In an ironic twist, that moment of potential conflict brings a quick surrender to delight—the delight of surrender.  And it can happen with a glance in a crowded supermarket, or with a high five in our own kitchen.

On a larger scale, if there can’t be that kind of surrender to Peace in a mother-daughter relationship, how can there be Peace on Earth?  What would the world be like, in the future, if today’s kids learned to enjoy the peaceful art of surrender--if they learned that true power lies in mutual empowerment?

DC Texting

Lily is on vacation with my mother and her husband.  They create a very different world around them than what Lily is used to.  She is used to "Life is Good," and she is immersed in...the opposite.  In between nights full of snoring.  Periodically she touches base with me via text.


Although texting is currently my preferred mode of communication, I held back all day, to give her some space; on day two, Lily sent me only three reports about my mom, including "Your mom doesn't like you."  And: "She's very racist." (Personally I think she's only a little bit racist, but she's probably the most racist person Lily knows.)


Finally, "She won't let me get earplugs, because she's afraid they might get stuck in my ears."


To the first two texts, I replied: "I realize."


After the third, evidence that my mom was actively searching for something to fear, knowing also that she won't let Lily out of her sight due to potential kidnappers, feeling like it was time to step in and offer some advice, my thumbs reacted:


"So you just have to take charge.  Just say, 'Bobbie, I've lived in the city all my life.  I can find my way from the C Terminal to baggage claim before my mom can even figure out how to meet me at the gate. My friends are having SEX! So please back off because I'm all grown up.  And if you want to live in a world where bad things happen, you can.  But in my world everything is great, because I believe everything is great.  And that's why I'm so happy.'"


My mom has always said I'm too blunt. Maybe Lily thinks so too.


She texted back:


"Haha no, it's ok."