Elevate Everyday Heroines
In the summer of 2017, I was browsing through a German women’s magazine in a cozy Hamburg café. I was struck by the messages and the impact they had on me. Being the biased and empathizing human that I am, I generalized this for fellow fempreneurs and working moms in the homezone and at the front line. I was thinking out loud, “I am missing raw stories about working mothers in the middle range…”
During the same time, I relocated from Sunny California to Rainy Northern Europe and had the opportunity to rethink the direction of my professional work. I wanted to create fresh content for my portfolio to attract future projects. The moment you say something out loud, it becomes more real, and a commitment. Others use this for smoking cessation. I often use this for getting shit done.
As a mother of two children, both close in age, I had just lived for a decade in a society and country that gives significantly less financial, organizational and emotional support to childbearing and childrearing women and parents. In the US, there is no child support (yet a tax break), full-time childcare started at U$600 (where I had lived), and labor laws normalized 4–6 weeks of maternity leave and 2 weeks of vacation each calendar year in contrast to well over 14 weeks of school vacation. Sure, a small percentage of privileged jobs offer flexibility, and I do not mean Facebook offering to freeze your eggs. Alternatively, you can always put yourself on hold, be a home-stay mom until your kids are in elementary school — do tell me how the job re-entry went, please. And you could time things where a career is established first, and childbearing comes second — tell me how easy conception and parenting is when you are over 35, please. In the midst of this, I felt I was swimming upstream and I am no Canadian salmon.
As a European with the constant cultural comparison in the back of my head, I know that the grass is not greener back home. Paid and unpaid working mothers face certain challenges even when not trying to do it all. With each role - such as being a functional person yourself, a child to your own parents, a partner in a relationship or not, a worker or volunteer with responsibilities and a parent - come expectations, rewards as well as stress.
Yes, I was seeing stories about working mothers seemingly approaching their happy end, or at stretches when they were accomplished in their career, but was that it? Think: a feature story about a woman in a business suit, content about her professional path and struggles, one or two questions at most about her role as a parent, and overall the same tone a la “It’s tough, I made it, you ought to do the same.” In 99% of these stories about working women, they seem to make enough or significant income, and in 99% of these stories, there is no mention about the messy hurt and healing experienced in these successful stories. What about the suffering romantic, relational or sex life? The reduced time with friends? The emotional anguish or dilemma? The health issues? As if no feature story could show too much dissonance else it would not fly.
Similarly, in social media, there are two camps: the one of the homestay mom and the one of the career woman with minimal mention of the home and personal battles. I felt lost in between. I have a personal life, family and friends oriented Instagram account, and a work account where I keep out family content. I’ve become cautious and tried to share as little disfavoring personal topics — such as biological age, desire to have or the fact of having children, or relational status — as possible. I’ve contributed to the problem, played it safe. I did not post content as a working mother and in my mid-way journey. I did not share what money I did not make, and where I was suffering. It does not sell. It would harm me, and still does (like when I heard “You have a husband, right?” in a job interview for an underpaid position). At the same time, it is a catch 22, because it also harms us to not share this reality either.
I am fascinated with the narrative therapy approach and storytelling. It is powerful (and has shortcomings). Its power lies in the process of allowing the client to own her or his story again and to become an agent of change creating direction. Its shortcoming lies in the constraint that each story must match the arch, the hero’s journey. Thus, in storytelling about working mothers, the stories are doomed to have a peak with a (happy) end. You will rarely find a story ending with “I don’t know. I am scared. I am figuring it out.” Since I saw this as the missing content, I am going for that.
In Amsterdam, I met Maria first as a neighbor and mother to a knuffable small child. They say it is harder to make friends as a Non-Dutch person and as an Expat, I shrugged it off. At the same time, it was very easy to become friends with Maria and fall for her Spanish repertoire and storm into her open door. Shortly thereafter, I fell for her photography which depicts bare breasts, negative space that allows for reflection on the photo and her sober style, less cheerful than the SoCal imagery that was perpetuating itself on my mental hard drive. We conceived “Elevate Everyday Heroines” soon thereafter.
We started with four working mothers in our social circle and asked them to partake in our pilot project. We proposed to interview first, and then take photos of realistic home scenes to create a text and image story as a final product within an overall appreciating experience. In the past I had chuckled at these breast pump advertisements, where a White Western woman has her two normal sized breasts cleanly pumped while answering a business call or filling in a Filofax while dressed in a black business suit and white blouse. The breasts were neither engorged nor spilling with cream. Plus the absence of that disturbing loud sound. It is almost a meme. I was hoping for a disheveled mother in an undone shirt, sending a report to her team from the couch while eating gummy bears for dinner at the point beyond exhaustion. That was my guilty preconception.
The first heroine proved me wrong in that she was not mid-way on her professional career path, but already five years beyond a breath-taking climax. I appreciated learning from day 1 and being so blatantly wrong. I assumed she was a struggling working mom figuring it all out, which she still is, yet she is so legit. The photo shoot with her was so telling, she presented her home in her preferred way, and the story and pictures levitate one another. See for yourself. The whole became more than its sum. And check out here the smile it put on her daughter’s face.
Extracts from the stories of the other heroines can be seen on the website. It is too soon to share findings and reflections — instead, visit our recently launched site, enjoy the stories and elevate a heroine of your choice by gifting this whole some experience to her or him or maybe yourself?
Interested to craft your story? Email us at hello@everydayheroines.com
