One of my earliest memories is of my mother crying. It was Christmas time, I was six years old, and in my brash, childish haste I had unwrapped one of my Christmas gifts a day early. I had been shaking the same 12 x 8 box for a week, stubbornly assured that beneath the metallic candy-cane covered wrapping paper was the crown jewel of presents: a Barbie doll. For a young girl with an overactive imagination Barbie was the ultimate gift. With her malleable beauty and endless roles Barbie was more then a doll she was a vehicle through which I explored my own identity, and I ripped the wrapping paper off my new present so fast my parents hadn't even made it downstairs yet. I looked quizzically at the Barbie unsure of what to make of her, recognizing the standard Barbie frame but skeptical of her modest exterior. I still remember the muted pink packaging and the short blonde bob on "Lawyer Barbie's" head, but not as vividly as I remember the way my mom looked when she saw my disappointment, and how her voice cracked when she tried to hold back tears.
My mother is a lawyer, and a damn good one. As a lawyer she is nationally recognized for her speaking and writing, she has been quoted in publications such as the New York Times, been interviewed by news outlets like Marketplace Money and On The Media, and has served on a variety of committees and organizations that I still don’t fully understand. She did this all while raising four kids, three of which are triplets. She turned her minivan into a single-family shuttle bus and from that moment on never missed a soccer game, play practice, or art show. She is a mother, and a damn good one. Hoping to impress upon her eldest daughter the joys of having a career she purchased a lawyer Barbie doll, only to watch as I selfishly rejected Lawyer Barbie’s humble exterior in lieu of her typical trappings of glamour and fashion.
22 years and many, many Barbie dolls later I began to understand my mother’s exhaustion, a sentiment I had grown to share. In a culture that worships plastic-limped perfection I spent years struggling with self-esteem, self-respect, and self-empowerment: always trying to be funny, or pretty, or smart, but never all three at once. I pushed Lawyer Barbie far, far away then brought her back out again, and it occurred to me that I had always wondered what I needed to be “good enough” when I was fine just as I was, and always had been. When my mom decided to make the pilgrimage to Washington D.C and be a part of the Women’s March on Washington I watched with pride as my mother and millions of other women came together to represent a new maternal order, and I realized that as a child I envied Barbie’s impossible beauty and supernatural female power all while living under the same roof as a real-life superwoman.
Women are blessed with the remarkable capacity to create life with their bodies; bodies that have inspired art, crumbled empires, and now work to incite revolution. It might not be immediately clear what the political impact of the Women's March will be, if it is enough to awaken the newly elected President to the severity of his bigotry. What is clear, even to those who don't understand the cause, is there are issue's that will not go away quietly, that demand to be heard. Sometimes when I lose my own voice I imagine injustice as a scream without a mouth. Protests like the Women’s March give me hope that these screams will one day find a voice strong to carry them.
Thank you, mom, for showing me through your own example that I have the capacity to change the world. I am a nasty women and I am more then enough.
