I was very innocently watching Good Morning America this morning when they decided to cover Maria Shriver’s “The Women’s Conference” held in Long Beach, CA. This is an event that she has hosted every year for the past five years and is intended to empower women in all walks of life. The roster of speakers is always impressive and covers a wide range that includes celebrities to entrepreneurs. I generally will follow the conference but have never been motivated to attend. I don’t like CA and tend to avoid the place.
GMA ran a clip from a speech from Jennifer Lopez. Up until this morning, my personal jury was out on Ms. Lopez. I don’t care for her music so she wasn’t going to get me that way. The clothing line that she “designs” is not intended for the forty something audience so that wasn’t going to pull me in. Her acting seems wooden and contrived to me so I probably wouldn’t be supporting her there. The only real place where she would appeal to me at all would be if she had something going on between her ears. She blew that one big time this morning.
One of her comments at the convention was that women who are mothers are the height of womanhood. I damn near spit coffee on the television screen when I heard that.
My parents were both fugitives from the Fifties. They were the ultimate Ozzie and Harriet in every conceivable way. Mother didn’t work outside the home- which was the way my father wanted it. They had five kids and my Dad had some strong beliefs about who was responsible for raising his children. He felt and still feels that being a “home maker” is a 24 hour job and that he got a break in that he worked outside the home. When I was a kid, he told me that a successful woman was a good wife and mother. I believed him.
Years later when it was apparent that I would never be able to have children of my own, he was able to amend his earlier statement. Boy was I glad for that because it caused me no end of personal grief- the thought that I could NOT be a wholly successful woman because I could not bear my own children.
I have had to do no end of soul searching over this tiny issue for well over twenty years. It hasn’t been a fun journey- especially with the onset of menopause several years ago. While it is likely that I might not have chosen to have children, I wanted to have the CHOICE. I never had that. I recognize that there have been opportunities that I had BECAUSE I didn’t have children but I never had the opportunity to make a decision about which I would have preferred. But because the question is moot, I have had to find peace with all that. Mostly, I have.
When Ms. Lopez opened her mouth, she alienated every woman like me on the planet. Every woman who has spent countless hours in the doctor’s office trying to figure out why they can’t get pregnant. Every woman who has looked at herself in the mirror and saw failure- failure at the one thing that we women are all, theoretically, supposed to be able to do. Every woman that has been forced to find acceptance of that so that they can live with themselves. Oddly enough, I thought that the whole idea of the conference was to empower, not shame.
So I’m ranting about this because I can’t do much else about it. I would love to hear from you on the subject. What defines a successful woman? Is a woman somehow less a woman because she can’t have children? Is the whole reproduction thing less about emotion and more about an innate need to reproduce and provide for survival of the species? What are your thoughts?