ABOUT
The sacred art of daughtering is a place to share stories from daughters about the complexity and reality of caring for parents and elders. It is a place to come to visit at 11 p.m. when your brain is dead and your mom is finally comfortable and you want to hear from someone else who "gets it." It's for when you just needed to get out of the house for 7 minutes so you don't scream. It is a place for those of us who did not find it all beautiful and serene. It is for those of us who are wading through baggage and shortcomings. And yet, we are accepting reality in its nakedness and we are not looking away. We are wading on through the chaos. And somehow through the messiness, this path is honing our strength and clarity and purpose. It is refining or relationships, with our family and with reality. This is a place to share our stories, and to collectively claim the narrative of daughtering.
It started with a walk on the beach and a hastily written email...
The Invitation
My dear friends!
Supporting my mom through Warren’s decline and crossing over, and now supporting my dad through his worsening MS, I have been mulling over the sacred art of daughtering.
It’s so complex. It’s hard. There’s sacrifice. It’s beautiful. It’s sad. We lose our patience. It’s messy. We try so damn hard to find grace. We reach down deep. There is frustration that others assume we will just do it. There is the realization that I am someone who will just do it. There is yelling (at least in my case). There is crying. There are the most real conversations. And maybe…just maybe… we are cracking that generation’s false belief in independence. It is a test of trying (in a very messy way) to live the values of community and family that we tell ourselves we want.
But I feel like so many times, the narrative is flattened to the daughter’s sacrifice and victimhood, and how they then take themselves out of the game professionally. We are a side character that folks feel bad for but don’t really think much about. Or even, we are a tolerable sacrifice; lauded as unsophisticated martyrs, but not valued for the wisdom, strength, and perspective the choice takes and then cultivates (through throwing hard, hard shit at us). And there is an unspoken assumption that anyone could have/would have done it. And we become the human shield for their sense self-importance, or perhaps their overwhelming fear, or unwillingness to be intimately uncomfortable.
And yet, you, my friend, have been engaged in the sacred art of daughtering (for a mom, a dad, perhaps an aunt or dear friend) and it is so much more. There is so much choice and empowerment and wisdom about ourselves and the world. (And messy and frustrating, and hard and all the other things).
So, I bought the domain sacredartofdaughtering.com and I invite us all to offer it a story. It can be light, it can be heavy, it can be insightful, it can be simple, it can be messy. I know I would benefit from reading others, and I think the world would benefit from a re-frame of this very unique role that we have each stepped into.
So, tell me a story!
Love you!
Erin
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