Girl Power

Revive Ophelia? Perhaps it's time to bury her. And perhaps it's time to depose the queen bees and all their wanna bees. Let's leave the odd girls out, ditch the mean girls and skip over the entire thirteenth year.
For those of us trying to raise girls to womanhood in turbulent and conflicted times, there is a plethora of reading and viewing to aide and abet. Never mind the weekly headlines of kidnappings and child molestations. Never mind the misogynistic lyrics and videos that a few short years ago would have been relegated to the porn pages. Ignore even the blockbusters that earn post-pubescent girls diva rights as ditzes, damsels and demons.
Turn instead to the clinical pages of the self-help books and purported parenting bibles. Digest the distressing statistics of teen girls reaping the results of perilously low self-esteem. Witness the anecdotal journeys of the girls next door battling bulimia, anorexia and clinical depression. Suffer the stories of incest, rape and teen pregnancies.
Contemporary girlhood under the microscope of the PHD seems fraught with danger and betrayal. Too many pages of these alarming journals set girls as victims from birth, stepping over Sesame Street to the therapist's couch. These well-intentioned and minutely researched texts are earnest attempts to explain the pitfalls that face today's girls. Most of them are heart-felt. Some are heart-wrenching. Too many, however, offer an extreme reality that most of us will thankfully see only on the periphery. Too many of them depict girls and the women in their lives as embattled heroes in their own tragic dramas. If they're not the victims, then they're the back-stabbing witches clawing their way to the Cosmo girl images that shout out from the newsstands.
It is true that most of us can relate our own tales of girl bullies in action. Turning the pages of Odd Girl Out:The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, who doesn't have a sense of déjà vu? Watching the comic rendition of Mean Girls in action, don't we all admit the familiarity? Observing our own girls suffer through the girlhood gauntlet at younger and younger ages is disturbing regardless of its sense of ritual. Those of the double x set can be less than forgiving at times -restless, irrational, moody, impulsive. She may misplace her priorities, suffer petty jealousies and succumb to peer pressure at all ages.
Maybe she is all that. But she's also the one who's stood up for and by you through the implausible and the impossible. She's forgiven your missteps, rationalized your mistakes. She was the one spitting ginger ale through her nose in the backyard tent and performing hairbrush duets in front of the bedroom mirror. She cuddled closest when the Texas Chain Saw rattled your dreams; shouted loudest when your team made finals, cried the hardest when your dog she swore she never liked, died. She made you feel beautiful long before any man did. She's been at your side for the first crush, the first kiss, the first time. You got your ears pierced together. You tried on make-up, bikinis and bras together. You fawned over the same rock stars, liked the same boy, had a crush on the same teacher. She's been there through broken arms, broken promises, broken hearts. She saw you through your parents' divorce. She adopted your family as her own. She was there for the death watch at your father's side. It was she who pulled you through, pregnant and alone, the birth of your son. She kept you sane through the terrible two's of your twins, kept you grounded when the company gave you promotion after promotion. She traveled 3, 000 miles because the lilt in your voice told her that this time you really would leave him. She sat at 2:00 am, letting you squeeze her hand, while the chemo dripped into your veins.
It's true that out there in the world there are mean girls. There always will be. It may even be true that no one will ever hurt you the way a girl can. But our girls hear that enough already. Perhaps it's time we tell them who else they are -who else they can be. We teach our children enough about the people in the world who may harm them. It's time to teach them about the people who will stand by them. It's time to turn them onto the every day heroes in their lives, in themselves. It's time they tune into the girl power they don't see on TV.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com