Broken Bloom

Every baby girl born will have far to go.  She doesn’t know this, of course, as she lies in her cradle and makes her first speech with sweet coos and babbles.  And she will start at her beginning, like all baby girls.  She will make mistakes as she tries to find her own direction, which will pull at her throughout her whole life until she discovers what her course is and then takes charge of it. 

Because she is a girl, her potential will get crushed early on.  Someone will tell her that she doesn’t have the right or authority to reach the same potential as a boy.  And she will come to believe this so deeply and thoroughly that this limitation will become part of her personality. This belief will be the ink stain on her white blouse, the deep crease in a linen dress, and so woven into the fabric of her being that she’ll likely never distinguish between the nuances of her unlimited character and the poison that tells her that she is a lesser human being.

This is why it takes women decades to figure out what has held them back for the majority of their lives. They feel ashamed of being subordinated for so long, and so deeply shackled.

Based on this belief in her lack of power, she will make decisions.  For example, she may decide that when she can’t find love, she is unlovable.  When she feels unlovable, she will lose her self esteem in running the rest of her life since love, after all, determines self-worth.  She will shake when she meets a new person at a party, or she will decide not to go to the party at all.  No one would want to meet her anyway.  At her job, she will perform like someone who is not important because how could she be important if she is not worthy of love?  Accordingly, she will not be promoted and will be overlooked for more challenging positions.

When she graduates from high school, she may think that she has to choose either motherhood or college, not both.  If she already has a child and she is not married to the father, she’ll struggle to support this child without a higher education, guaranteeing her a life of struggle and poverty.  The fact that she had a child so early will make her feel like victim or a loser, some one who has no control over her life.  So, she won’t ever have control over herself.

The woman who chooses motherhood, but is unlucky enough to be infertile, will break into a thousand pieces of sorrow and unresolved anguish. Not only is she not powerful enough to get a higher education, provide the income for a family, or lead a corporation, she also lacks the one power that a woman has traditionally called her own–the power to grow a child inside her, a potential so profound that inequality, discrimination, or misogyny have all failed to steal this role away from women. When a woman doesn’t even have this ability, she will feel as if she has nothing at all.

When a man treats her as only a sex object or demeans her sexually in any way, she will believe that she essentially plays the role of a prostitute, and that this is her major role in society.  Even without labeling herself, unconsciously, she will treat herself as a trollop anyway.  This belief will determine how she dresses, styles her hair, wears make up, and walks down the street.  She will use her sexuality more than her intelligence to attract a man. 

She will come to understand that she does not deserve to be paid as high as a man because she will agree that hiring her is risky since she may take time off to have a baby, showing her lack of commitment to her job.  If she is a soccer player on the national professional soccer team, she will settle for lower prize money since women’s sports don’t bring in as much advertisement as men’s sports.  After all, prize money must be determined by profits. Right?

And when she is spending all her time being the limited person that she has been told she is, she won’t get any closer to the woman that she can really become.  She won’t figure out that she is a naturally gifted teacher who can transform or even save the lives of her students. She won’t dare to invent a drug that cures leukemia or challenge the male-dominated glass ceiling of corporations.  She won’t recognize that she is a gifted artist who can paint philosophical lessons into her images to help her community heal from prejudice or other sins of society. 

She’ll miss opportunities for better jobs, healthy relationships, and fulfilling activities.  She’ll be blind to her full potential, and, if she never finds her power, she will live like a subordinated human being her whole life–never truly finding happiness, a joy that she could achieve by living her glorious, powerful, fully-blooming life.