Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I'm a Liar Like Them All.

“Men cheat for pleasure.  Women only cheat for revenge.”

“Women are the enemy. All Women.”

“Only rich girls get to leave.”

My mother not only said those things. She believed them.  And made it her mission to make sure I believed them too.

It’s the collective inheritance of every daughter, the misinformation our mothers pass down to us. We spend our lives extracting fiction from fact, fear from reality, need from want. We bite toenails, get high, eat chips, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, commiserate with girlfriends, make out with guys at bars, fall in love, get married, have kids, breast feed, buy organic -- only to become liars ourselves.

The Mistress Never Wins and Other Lies My Mother Told Me began as a search for certainty.  I wasn’t going to tell my daughter what kind of woman to become.  Instead, I would present her with facts.  If I wasn’t sure I’d Google and let her decide. The problem is this strategy works when we’re talking about teenage pregnancy and she asks,  “How do you even have a baby?” That’s easy, “Well, the sperm fertilizes the egg and..”  It gets a bit more complicated when she follows it up with “So why would someone have sex if they don’t want a baby?”

 I’m not sure how my mother would have answered this question.  She certainly wouldn’t have mentioned the power dynamic within the home, and I don’t think pleasure would have entered the conversation either. There’s no way she’d have said, “For the orgasim Honey.”  I’d ask her, but what she’d tell me today, after divorce, dating and a second marriage would be different than what she would have told me as a little girl.  Which is at the heart of the dilemma. Mothers are asked to give advice on so many things they can’t possibly know the answers to.  Sex at twenty has almost nothing to do with sex at forty.  But you can’t know that until you actually become forty. 

 I’d like to tell you that my responses to my daughter’s questions are more thought out than my mothers, that they are rooted in knowledge and not fear, that the answers I give my daughter are absolute.  But as you know other than birth and death few things in life are binary. My answers are (and I know how sick this is) merely variations on my mother’s -- preconceptions informed by my own limited life experience.  In my quest was to tell the truth to my daughter I too have became a liar. Sadly, in all probability somewhere along the way my little girl will become a liar too. But maybe not.  Maybe if me and you, are able to somehow forge an open dialogue with our girls, to admit that we don’t have all the answers without making them feel insecure -- maybe we can become the mothers they need. 

It’s a tricky time to be a woman.  And sure, it’s always been tricky but with more options come more complications and women have more options now than they’ve ever had. Yes, there’s a glaring inequity in the number of women in positions of power versus men BUT THERE ARE WOMEN IN POSITIONS OF POWER.  My daughter asked me the other day if I thought Michelle Obama would run for president and I smiled to myself because she’s growing up in a world where the position of First Lady isn’t limited to being a social ambassador for America but is rather a stepping stone to the presidency.

But I want to be clear.  This doesn’t mean that my daughter’s not interested in eye shadow.  I grew up in Jersey in the Bon Jovi era of high hair and tight jeans, and let’s just say I’d challenge you to find someone who can wield an eye shadow brush with greater finesse. Other than my daughter, who also knows how to use liquid liner, which is a skill I never came close to mastering.  More importantly unlike teenage me she doesn’t leave the house with four different shades of blue on her eyes.

I learned how to put on makeup by watching my mother. I would sit on top of the toilet seat and watch her apply false eyelashes in awe.  My daughter is being taught how to wear makeup by a YouTube sensation named “Miss Glamorazzi”   And my daughter is equally in awe of Miss Glamorazzi. My daughter knows where Ms. Glamorazzi grew up and who her boyfriend is.  She knows Miss Glamorazzi’s favorite brand of mascara and candle scent. And she knows that the reason Miss Glamorazzi started wearing makeup is because she had bad skin and makeup made her feel more secure.                                                                                A lot of what Miss Glamorazzi teaches my daughter is familiar.  We didn’t have YouTube, we had the makeup experts at “Seventeen Magazine”.  But here’s the difference: The other night when I walked past my daughter’s room, she was lying on her bed waiting for her homemade sugar mask to harden as she listened to the audio book of Sheryl Sanberg’s Leaning In. I smiled and thought: now that’s fucking great.

But this is what I mean when I talk about it being tricky for women. A friend of mine was asked to give a high school graduation commencement last week. The premise of his address was that only in high school are you asked to be good at everything at the same time:  being good at language, math, science, english and history…He commended the graduates on finishing high school, reiterated what a huge achievement it is and declared that from this moment on they wouldn’t be asked to be good at everything at the same time ever again.  It was a really unique perspective and something I had never thought of.   But then I realized that the reason I had never thought of it is because I’m a woman.  He’s a man.  Women never graduate from having to be good at a lot of different things at the same time.                  
You may disagree with me, and that’s fine.  Throw your arms up in the air. Say I’m backwards.  Limited in my belief system.  And fuck.  That may all be true.  You can rattle off the statistics, tell me that there’s a growing number of men staying home to care for their children. That it’s a trend, in fact, and I’ll tell you I think it’s really great and about time.  But there’s no denying the biology. Women simply don’t have as much time to start a family.  It’s perfectly reasonable for a man to work twenty hours a day and then at forty-five decide he wants to settle down and have a kid.  A woman can’t. She has to figure out how to work those same twenty hours even with morning sickness.

So what’s the right thing to do when you’re adult daughter tells you she gave Joe his ring back?  Instead of getting married she’s taking the job offer in Milwaukee. That she’s going to wait just one more year; “I’m this close” she says and smiles the smile that’s been melting you since before she ever had teeth.   Do you remind her that she’s forty-one?  Do you tell her that a good man is hard to find? Do you warn her that being the anchor of a morning news might mean nothing to her if she misses out on having a family?  This is what my mother would have told me.  And the problem is no matter how much I may have wanted to argue it, she would have been right.