Women Who Dared = Every Single One

Dear Amelia,

Hi!  It's been approximately I-can't-do-math since you wrote about Cheryl Strayed's wiz-bang Oprah talk.  Holy shnikes, do I love that talk as well as Cheryl Strayed herself. 

Your catalogue of areas in your life that could benefit from surrendering to a little mediocrity moved me.  It also impressed me, as I came out of the womb having given up on making delicious and interesting dinners.  The fact that you still have designs on delicious meals right now, as you mother a newby son and his wizened older brother, pretty much blows my lid. 

That part where you wrote about needing to shower and eat while your baby naps, despite your great desire to write, really struck a chord with me.  And frankly, that chord has been ringing ever since Samantha grew tall enough to climb on the dining room chairs, reach across the table and take my pen out of my hand.  (Her next move is usually to write, herself, all over my open pages.  It is a testament to the insanity of parenting that I find this amusing.) 

Your Do-I-care-for-my-body-or-Do-I-care-for-my-artistic-soul? dilemma makes me think about a book of postcards I own and kinda hate.  It's called Women Who Dared, and it's full of striking black and white pictures of mostly-famous women who did awesome things, people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and Marie Curie.  These women are amazing in their own right, but I have never really connected to most of them.  I mean, in terms of women who inspire me to be the biggest and best versions of myself, the models fall way closer to home. 

Some of these women are writers, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Zora Neal Hurston - about whom, it's true, I once wrote a college entrance essay. Others are just plain remarkable human beings, like Abigail Adams, Rosa Parks, Dian Fossey, and Rachel Carson. 

So I'd like to say here and now: it isn't the women in this book that bother me.  The book itself bothers me, suggesting as its title does that the lives of non-famous women are themselves non-daring.  I take umbrage with this because overemphasizing any kind of achievement can be dangerous for the soul, and also because sometimes it takes a whole lot of guts to put your head down and just take care of sh*t that's never going to get you into history books but may go a long way to healing your life.

Case in point: I just finished Porcelain, a memoir by Moby about his original obscurity making music while living in poverty in suburban Connecticut.  The book then moves on to early DJing days in New York City and records his breakout experience and the start of his travels around the world, and ends just before Play comes out.  I'm not saying you should run out and read this book - there's a looooot of debaucherous exploration in the latter half especially - but I do appreciate almost any look at an artist's early days and I especially appreciate the author's willingness to talk about his panic attacks, his loneliness, and his confusion when it came to relationships. 

I know celebrity memoirs are made of these cliches, but it doesn't mean they also aren't true, that what can be seen on the outside, and what is celebrated about our lives, doesn't always line up with the internal experience of it.  I'm sure all the women in my dumb book of postcards had great days and bad days, and part of the fun of memoir and biography for me anyway is hearing people explore their times of doubt.   

Maybe what I object to most about Women Who Dared is that it asks me to make these people who did amazing things into heroes - or heroines? - while I believe that heroes are subjective by nature.  I also don't think it's healthy to define courage as That Which Will Earn You A Side Bar In a Seventh Grade History Book, and I'm tired of the limited definition of that word. 

This is probably why I like novels so much, because you can read about someone folding socks while ruminating on their disastrous marriage.  Folding socks isn't such a hot topic, unless you're embracing the zen-like peace of cleaning or something, but hearing about inner lives is one of the hottest things in the world to me. 

We happen to be able to listen to Cheryl Strayed because after she embraced her own mediocrity she also got to work fulfilling her life's dreams.  But the wisdom came not from her success, it came from her utter failure.

But who am I and what do I know?  The answer to those questions keeps expanding, and I'm starting to care less and less about being visible or even celebrated, and more and more about what it means to be a woman, and a mom.  I know how to braid my hair.  I know that when I press my fingers to one place on Samantha's ribs, she erupts into laughter.  I also know how to make salad dressing and I try to do so once a week because these things matter to me, and I believe they should matter to our culture.  I don't know how to fly an airplane and I'm definitely okay with that.  If that excludes me from a list of People Who Dare, that's a list I don't want to be on anyway.  

With love and eternal crankiness,
Kara    

P.S. I listened to three episodes of The Longest Shortest Time and loved hearing about Trystan and John/Bif's relationship, their courage in the face of adoption anxieties, and their senses of humor through it all. 

And one of my greatest memories from becoming a mother is my mom bringing me piping hot, cream-filled coffee as I nursed Samantha in bed. 

**Insert floating hearts and/or coffee emoji here**