Today I’m taking Ainsley out of school to launch TGR Body at an International Women’s Conference in Denver. Tomorrow too.
We launched online last month, which is honestly somewhat anti-climatic. You rush and fret and boom – you’re live and nothing really outwardly changes in your day-to-day life.
But, at the conference, we will get to see real women try our products, spray them, smell them, try them and react to them. In a lot of ways, this is much more exciting. We get to practice our sales skills and Ainsley is just dying to make change from the cashbox.
We have high school standards in this house, but I prefer her to have this kind of Real Life educational experience for a few days, even if she has to miss school.
We’re lucky because we’re bringing my Posse. Two of my very dear friends are accompanying us on this conference and one of them is also checking her daughter out of school for this Real Life experience. Because, come on – it’s not everyday a close family friend launches a skincare company that’s going to turn the beauty industry on its ass by saying, “I hate the messages you have for our daughters about beauty, so I’ve created something better! Something that acknowledges that girls’ bodies are more than clothes hangers and props for whatever you’re selling. Something that acknowledges that what we believe about our bodies impacts how we feel about them. Something that acknowledges that girls possess inherent beauty as their feminine birthright and beauty should be fun and experimental and creative and not this absurd, pressured, media-driven psychosis of gentrification of the female form, that it’s morphed into! Something that has bold feminine imagery that’s worthy of seeing one’s self in, signifying that this is the dawn of a new paradigm for girls – because it is.”
Yes, this is something our daughters must not only witness, but actively participate in.
I walk into my BFF Jenny’s house (Yes, the fabulous Jenny, owner of Ms. Sparrow’s Holistic Cleaning Co.), she turns from the delectable tomato soup she’s stirring for our girls night and says,
You’re rockin’ the vagina today with that necklace and the cowl neck T.S.
I think I love this outfit even more now, but I’ll never be able to wear it again without laughing my ass off and thinking “vagina” every time I speak to someone. Which might be kind of fun, actually.
Yesterday I read my horoscope for 2011 and it said, among other wonderful and exciting things, that I would make a serious change in my working environment on Jan 4.
Sure enough, I woke up this morning and decided that I was done working at home with a four-year-old. It’s . . . under-stimulating, isolating, frustrating and just plain not working for me anymore. I’m glad I did it. But, I don’t want to do it anymore.
I’ve been feeling like this for a while now and coming up with some brainy ideas like putting Zack, my 4.5 year old, in childcare for longer and trying out the new co-working thing at Cohere.
This morning I couldn’t think of one single reason not to try it out TODAY!
I’ve got a lot on my plate with the release of TGR Body, several corporate projects to tie up, and a book I’m trying to do final edits on, not to mention keeping The Girl Revolution updated and growing.
“Mom, come wipe my bum,” is non-conducive to feeling unstressed, productive, centered and focused.
All my life I’ve been very attached to the idea of “working from home.” Since the birth of my first child I’ve been walking the fine line between meaningful work and meaningful motherhood very, very carefully.
It’s hormonal, in my opinion. How many times have you heard the words, “I never thought I’d want to quit my job, but then I had a baby and it kills me to leave everything and go back to work?”
Yeah. Then there’s the equally true and just as emotionally-charged, “Being a stay-at-home mom/work-at-home mom is the hardest job I’ve ever had. I miss my career, I miss people, I miss being validated with a paycheck.”
Yeah. The war rages on – inside of us.
Never under-estimate the power of estrogen.
I think his hormones were tied to mine in an inherent psychic, spiritual and emotional way that was stronger than any of my other desires or ambitions. As it was with my daughter. As it is with children and mothers in general, some more than others. But, as he turned four, I could feel his pull on my hormones lessen. Give a little here and there. My need, my desire to be with him most of the time got weaker. His “pull” on my mind, body and soul weakened, became more flexible.
As our hormonal connection got weaker and weaker, I got more ideas . . . maybe my friend Jenny is right, that co-working is perfect for me. Maybe Zack should be in a school setting. Maybe I can take on this project or that one. Maybe I need to – no, want to – spend more time working and less time mothering. Maybe I really, honestly, truly don’t care what other people think about whether I work, or don’t work, or where I do it from, or where my children spend their time. This is MY life. Our life. We should do what we want. What feels best for us.
The more I thought about these ideas the more I fell in love with them.
So, today, I just did it. And it feels . . . liberating, exciting, calming, relaxing and right.
It’s very powerful to know from whom you come. I met an artist in Denver this weekend, Alissa Hansen, who has found a beautiful and powerful way to keep a girl tethered to her feminine, maternal lineage. I wrote more about why this might matter to girls, how it can help them be more powerful in the world, in Maternal Lineage, several years ago.
Christiane Northrup, in Mother-Daughter Wisdom, writes about an exercise she does with women, asking them to call for the wisdom, power and positive energy of the mothers and grandmothers who came before her. The exercise asks women to call forth the assistance of their maternal lines by name. She says the women find a source of extreme power, guts, courage, and wisdom they never knew they had access to before. These women and their energy, she says, are out there willing us forward, rooting for our wins and giving us a little helping hand, this will become more true a we learn to rely on it and ask for it.
Alissa traced her family line back for six generations through her mother’s genealogy. She found out where the women lived, what kinds of lifestyles they lived, and conceptualized them in a series of Ancestor Portraits.
The details of the art are meaningful. The background is a map of the ancestor’s home. The body of the woman is the page of a book or hymn that the woman loved, or might of have loved, maybe a special page of the Bible which brought her great peace. Alissa then fills in the blanks and paints a portrait based on a portrait you give her, or conjure up with your imagination based on what you can find out.
On the sides of the 3×3 piece, you can’t see it here, are important dates from the woman’s life: birth, death, marriage and date of her daughter’s birth. The pieces are hung vertically on the wall, so the women are hung in order: great-great, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter.
Often there was no photography of the women in Allissa’s own line of grandmothers, so she imagined these farm women from Nebraska had one really fine dress and imagined, based on the fashions from that time period, what that dress might look like. As census information began taking on more color and information – like whether the women were literate, what their incomes and professions were, her pieces took on more color and meaning. She was very excited by little pieces of information she might garner, like that one of the women had red hair.
Alissa only needs to add herself and her wonderful daughter to her collection.
Imagine, as a girl, walking by this beautiful lineage of women, imaging what their lives were like and knowing on some level that these role models have her back when the going gets tough.
Alissa will do Ancestor Portraits on commission, collecting and gathering information from you and making each one unique and honoring to your family line. Each piece costs $75.
Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell literally had to run an ad clarifying, “I am not a witch.”
Which would be hysterical, you know, if women who had the audacity to seek power, spiritually or politically, hadn’t actually been branded witches and been burned at the stake for it for centuries. And if our ancestors in these United States hadn’t, you know, hung women and teenage girls for “being witches” at the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
I’m no big fan of the Tea Party, nor of the Republican Party really. But, I don’t need women to be branded Witches, so I have a reason not to vote for them – their politics is enough.
