girls

Far Away There In The Sunshine

March 18, 2012

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. – Louisa May Alcott

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Who’s Gonna Ride These Wild Horses?

March 8, 2012

In honor of International Women’s Day, this: a repurposing of an essay that I wrote for Canadian Family a couple of years ago, about my ambitions and frustrations in living up to my own self-assigned feminist mother bona fides. I still struggle with these questions, somewhat. Inasmuch as I don’t struggle anymore it’s because she’s [...]

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There I Was, Rocked Me Like A Hurricane

December 10, 2010

TEDWomen was an idea-hurricane, an inspiration-avalanche, a brainwave tsunami, a tornado of provocation and stimulation, a force of nature – if nature wore high heels – a force to be reckoned with, a thing to make your heart pound and thrum and swell and your head throb from the magnificent pressure of all those ideas, [...]

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All Which Isn’t Singing Is Mere Talking

December 8, 2010

“Every girl in the world deserves the chance to pursue her hopes and dreams.” – Hilary Clinton, TEDWomen, Washington D.C., December 8, 2010 Every girl does deserve that chance. My girl deserves that chance. This girl deserves that chance. All of these girls – and these boys; yes, boys too (our liberation requires their liberation, and [...]

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Through A Glass, Brightly

November 29, 2010

My mother always told me that I was beautiful. “You are a beautiful, beautiful girl, sweetie,” she would say, and I would reply – with much eye-rolling and heavy sighing – “you’re my mother. You have to say that.” I knew that I wasn’t beautiful, not in the way that princesses in fairy tales or [...]

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Little Wing

November 14, 2010

Dear Emilia, Today, you are five. This is both totally extraordinary, and utterly ordinary. Which of these it is varies from minute to minute: in one moment, I look at you and think, when did you become such a big girl? Where did that little baby go? Where has the time gone? HOW IS IT [...]

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This Is What A Feminist Looks Like

August 20, 2010

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop? — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication On The Rights Of Women (Chapter 3) (Photographosophy, Pissy Feminist Edition.)

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Love Is A Many-Splendored And Sometimes Sort Of Exhausting And Anxiety-Provoking Thing

June 7, 2010

A few weeks after I gave birth to Jasper, I wrote this: I do it every night now. When it’s dark, when the rest of the house is asleep, or almost, I untangle my tiny newborn bundle from my arms and lay him down in his nest and ease my birth-battered body from our bed. I make [...]

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