My Inner Feminist

My husband is driving home as we speak. I can remember as a child how upset I always was that I was continuously being fed the message that women are inferior to men. Women's brains don't work as well because we are ruled by emotion and not reason. Our opinions are not valid because we just don't understand the way the world works. We are to be tolerated. We get all riled up over silly little things and therefore our being upset is not worthy of acknowledgment. I guess this is why I was upset that Lily said that boys mow the lawn and not girls.

In the ninth grade we were given a comprehensive test which had to be passed before we could graduate from high school. One component of the test was we had to write a proper paragraph. I of course failed because my topic sentence was about one thing and my paragraph was about another, see above paragraph. It makes sense to me. Hopefully it will make sense to you too. I am sure they would fail me on my paragraph writing skills again if they had a chance to read my blog. The following year I purposely conformed and passed the test, since then I have been completely off topic. I am sorry to all my literary friends.

The very next day, after Lily told me that boys mow lawns, we were at the store and happened upon a toy lawn mower. She begged me to buy it for her, I never buy her toys at the store, to avoid the whole fit in stores thing, anyways this time I gave in and bought her a toy lawn mower. She has been mowing ever since. I guess I should someday realize that the world my girls inhabit is very different than the one that I grew up in. It was only an observation. I have indeed mowed the lawn, twice in Lily's lifetime, once when she was probably too small to remember. Perhaps she was saying that girls are too important to soil themselves with men's work? I don't know it just rubbed me the wrong way, but now she seems to have forgotten about the boys mow because she is mowing herself everyday. Or maybe she thinks she is a boy?

So here I sit, the hardened feminist that I am, I sit and wait for my husband to finally come home. Life without the man around the house is not at all fun. Perhaps I will wear pearls like June Cleaver in honor of his arrival. In many ways the person that I was is still inside of me, like the way I react to perceived anti-woman sentiment, and in many ways I am everything that I never wanted to be, yet I love who I am. I can't seem to wrap my mind around the feminist stay at home mother who profoundly depends on her husband.