Sometimes it's best to just let the genius speak for herself. From Adrienne Rich's ground breaking 1976 study, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution:
"The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities. For a mother, this means more than contending with the reductive images of females in children's books, movies, television, the schoolroom. It means that the mother herself is trying to expand the limits of her life. To refuse to be a victim: and then to go on from there.
Only when we can wish imaginatively and courageously for ourselves can we wish unfetteredly for our daughters. But finally, a child is not a wish, nor a product of wishing. Women's lives-- in all levels of society-- have been lived too long in both depression and fantasy, while our active energies have been trained and absorbed into caring for others. It is essential, now, to begin breaking that cycle. Anyone who has read the literature in the obstetrician's waiting-room knows the child-care booklets which, at some point, confess that 'you may get a fit of the blues' and suggest 'having your husband take you to dinner in a French restaurant, or going shopping for a new dress.' (The fiction that most women have both husbands and money is forever with us.) But the depressive mother who now and then allows herself a 'vacation' or a 'reward' is merely showing her daughters both that the female condition is depressing, and that there is no real way out.
As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours. We need not to be the vessels of another woman's self-denial and frustration. The quality of the mother's life-- however embattled or unprotected-- is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist." (246-247)
So next time I write something like this, please remind me: when all else fails, pick up something by Adrienne Rich.
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