Sometimes my daughters need to see me in my impatient space. Sometimes I can’t plead for their understanding — I have to inspire that shit through raw emotion and honest, unfiltered, non-violent expression. That’s my truth. The reality is that any person I love, including my daughters, can deeply hurt my feelings. Does this mean that I hold my daughters to the same level of emotional accountability as my husband or my best friend? Nope, but it for damn sure doesn’t mean that I morph into some feeling-less version of myself because I’m a mother, either. I refuse to hold myself accountable to some ridiculous standard of motherhood, and I refuse to see my daughters as people devoid of the capacity to use feelings and logic to decide how they want to be. They are not empty buckets made of impulses and giggles. As such, I hold them accountable, and I show them real-life responses to their real-life choices. As a matter of fact, I told three things to my dismissive daughter that day — not exactly in these words, but very much so in this energy… Listen to the essay.
