Summer Read – Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing up Female

Another great “summer reading list” book that I just read is titled, “Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female,” by Willa Shalit. This book has short chapters written by over thirty different women who reflected on their experience of growing up as a female and becoming a woman. Authors write about everything from funny childhood memories to moving personal reflections about suffering, and explore topics like family, work, beauty, sex, race, and power. Reading this book while sipping a cup of tea is sort of like sitting down with a good friend and listening and learning, maybe like you would with a mentor or an aunt, or a high school chica you love to trade stories with. Each entry is varied and thought provoking and comes from creative women from all ages - some are singers, actors, poets, politicians, mothers, wives, sisters, daughters – and friends.   

My favorite chapter in this book is the opening entry, written by poet Maya Angelou (one of my favorite authors). Here are a few short excerpts from Maya on what it means to her to grow up female and to become a woman:  

      

“Becoming a woman is exciting, but it’s hard. It’s onerous, but it’s honorable. It’s satisfying, because people know a woman. When a woman is in a room she doesn’t have to talk loudly. She doesn’t have to carry a six-gun. But people feel safe around her, all sorts of people, people she doesn’t even look like. People whose color may be different and who may call God by different names. People from all generations feel comfortable around a woman. To grow up female with the determination to become a woman is to earn all the plaudits, all the accolades, all the respect that this society has to give. I believe you can’t do it alone. I believe you have to have the ideals of women who went before you. …(p.1)

I believe that very few people grow up. Most people grow older, but growing up is challenging. Many people get older, honor their credit cards, matriculate into and graduate out of schools, get married and have children. They call that growing up, maturing. It’s not. It is simply growing old. One has to assume responsibility for the time one takes up and the space one occupies. To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents. To grow up is to care not only about one’s own self but about somebody else’s, somebody yet to come. To grow up is to be in a constant state of forgiving. Forgiving yourself for not knowing better, or for knowing better and not doing better, and then releasing people from your own anger and angst. You must stop carrying them around in their ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, giving them purchase on your back, and always having them to pole and pinch and carry blame… (p.3-4)

No matter what the world is saying around you, imagine yourself with power. Try to see yourself with power. Not power so that you can get even with anybody else. Power so that you can become even with your vision (p.5).”