Today's post is basically me working out some thoughts... re: what I'm going to do when I grow up. It is also influenced by a surprisingly strong head cold and how crappy it is to be sick when you are the mom.
So, for my grad program, as previously mentioned, I am supposed to narrow in on what is 'my issue'. What is it that I am so passionate about that I want to get out into the world and try and change things.
I wrote at the end of the last post that I've been thinking women and education, maybe moms going back to school after kids, maybe mentoring young women so they take school more seriously and don't find themselves in the same place as the moms going back to school... and while I do absolutely care about that, I'm worried that it might be that my focus is on that right now because I am going back to school right now.
And really, what gets me so excited about that has been finding and building communities of support. Locating the people who need help, and finding ways we can help each other.
I think my real issue is the lack of support and community for women. Yes, moms for sure, but I definitely want to include all women. We all need each other. We've made great strides in the last 100 years benefiting women, but we've also lost that close support system of a big multi-generational family and the neighborhood they lived in for those generations.
I obviously don't want to go back to the men out in the fields, and the women at home washing clothes together. It's a brave new world, and there are amazing possibilities ahead of us. But we still have a need for the strength that comes with that community.
The last two weeks have been some of the hardest for both myself and my sister. I started grad school, she had a new baby. She lives 5 hours away, and there was really nothing we could do for each other but listen. We both have a mountain of things on our plates, but if we could have put it all together, I believe we would have found that the help we could have offered each other would have added up to much more than our troubles combined.
I know so many of us are struggling. If you aren't right now, I'm sure you have in the past. But really, I bet in some way you ARE struggling. I mean, life itself a struggle! It's all about growing and reaching and striving, and that shit is hard! And just because it's a part of life, that doesn't mean we shouldn't find a way to help each other. (*gets all philosophical here.. sorry)... Maybe that is part of why life is a struggle.. so we can realize that we need each other, and build the connections to make it through. I don't know if there is a why, but I do know that there is a need.
So, this is what I am passionate about. But is that something I can work on? Is this a need I can work to address? And do I even really know what I am talking about? *IS* this a real need, or am I making a big deal out of nothing? Is this just a fact of life everyone figures out a way to deal with? And if it is a real need... what can I do about it? And more practically, as a person racking up student loans.. is this something I could get a job working on?
Currently contemplating a nonprofit that provides postpartum doula type services to moms so they can finally 'call in sick'. Can't imagine why this specific need is at the forefront of my thoughts... Must go now, need to blow my nose, fix the kids a snack, refill my humidifier and find some slightly educational children's programming on the TV to ease the guilt of crawling back in bed.
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