Why Do We Bury Our Authenticity?

Mothering my daughter and myself at the same time

As a grumpy perimenopausal woman who categorically refuses to diet and has run out of money for supplements, I’ve resigned myself to life hacks that are free and my trusty estrogen patch to get me through.

One of these hacks that now holds the 12:30-1:30pm time slot hostage on my calendar is “Lunch and Walk.” I implemented this sacred slot after my Fascinated interview with Maya Miloski where she encouraged a 10-minute walk after meals to “get things moving.” Since this strategy is both free and doubles as an excuse to exercise the dogs who otherwise annoy the crap out of me all day, it’s become one that stuck.

On these walks, I almost exclusively listen to podcasts. I consider it research, since I produce two of my own, and therapy, since most of what I listen to are podcasts from people wiser than me about all of life’s hardest shit - parenting, money, relationships, purpose, the global goat rodeo we find ourselves in, etc.

Enter the “Raising Girls and Boys” podcast from Christian therapists, Sissy Goff and David Thomas. A recommendation from a friend with a similarly anxious child, this podcast sometimes feels like a personal therapy session because what they describe seeing in their work with girls and boys mimics exactly what we are struggling with most at home. Now, more than ever, they report that girls are conflict avoidant, afraid to tell peers how they feel. They sidestep any activity where they have to try out or where there’s competition. They spend most of their energy worried about what they are doing instead of who they are becoming.

On a recent episode with guest, Kari Kampakis, they were talking about how to help girls feel capable in today’s world. Keep in mind that on these walks, I am often juggling leashes, treats, and poop bags, so sometimes I miss a sentence or two, but my ears snapped to attention when I heard the guest say,

“Girls often bury the most authentic parts of themselves.”

I dropped a bag of poop and a leash while I scrambled to get my Notes app open to write that one down.

This is what I have been witnessing with my own daughter, this exhausting tug-of-war to both discover who she is and to determine if who she is is okay with everyone else.

To be clear, this is NOT something I struggle with, or at least, not directly. I have always laughed too loud, talked too much, and been unintentionally abrasive to most people. My authenticity has never been buried, but that is largely because I didn’t know how to dial it down, not because I didn’t want to. My authentic self was successful in school but socially, it often became the subject of whispers that sabotaged my self confidence and led more to confusion than integration. I solved the problem by becoming friends with everyone. When one group seemed less interested in me for a day or a week, I bee-bopped over to another group.

I may not have hid who I was, but that doesn’t mean I was impervious to the whispers. I nurse deep scars from the wounds inflicted by those who didn’t know how to or care to tell me why they turned away. And it is because of those who loved me enough to speak to my face instead of my back that I found a way to soften the edges of my authentic self, to save it for those who were ready to receive it and to, as much as is possible, ensure that its interpretation matches my intention.

I see the same angst in my daughter. Her almost-eight-year-old self is also loud. She likes things her way. She wants to be in charge because control keeps her safe. She demands to listen to the same song over and over, sing the lyrics, incorrectly, out loud, and booty dance to the beat. She will tell you when you’re wrong, when you make a mistake, or when she perceives that your actions don’t match your words. She is never cruel, but her unfiltered honesty can be cutting and her muchness can make you mad. She embodies personality without boundaries, self consciousness, or limitations.

At least, that’s how she starts her day. And then she goes to school.

I watch it happen. The rejected invitation to play tag becomes her doing cartwheels by herself. The compliment on another girl’s hair is met with a cold shoulder and no return acknowledgement. The overly generous hug prompts ridicule instead of reciprocation. By the time the doors open, my girl’s loud, proud energy has been reduced to uncertainty at best, and sadness at worst. She contracts, becoming quiet, small, tucked inside her jacket, turning to me for a kiss and a hug before resolutely walking through the doors.

It’s not like this every day. To be fair, if it was, I would have pulled her out a long time ago. I do know that life is like this, and while my heart tears in the most tender places every time I witness her light being dimmed, I let her go anyway. Because I know she must find her own way of balancing who she is with who the world demands she be.

Some mornings, the righteous rage that builds inside me as I watch these little shits shun my daughter grows to an almost uncontainable level. I struggle to make eye contact with their parents, wanting to scream, “How can you let them be so cruel?!?” right into their oblivious faces. I find myself drawn to the Dads, as I unfairly hold the Moms deeply accountable for the slights of their children. I seem to assume the Dads just don’t notice these things, which is neither right nor reasonable as it is sometimes those same fathers that are the ones to ask me if my daughter is okay.

I know where this anger comes from. It is my default emotion, of course, and triggered anytime my daughter’s face falls. But there’s more to it than that. That anger is hiding my own fear, the little voice that tickles at the inside of my brain. A voice that, while nonjudgmental, reminds me that I have told her she’s too loud. That I have questioned whether it will go over well to wear mismatched knee socks with a skort. That I have refused her aggressive squeezes on days when my nervous system cannot handle the physicality nor the proximity. The anger allows me to direct the problem outwards, to make it about them, when what I am most scared of is that the problem is actually also about me.

I remember what it felt like not to be chosen. And I can look at my daughter in all her mismatched glory and know exactly what choices will cause her to be cast off. My instinct as a parent is to get in front of that, to be the guide I didn’t have to direct her safe passage.

But the only way I seem to know how to do that is to squash the very stuff that makes her uniquely her.

I hate myself when I cannot handle the volume of her voracity. Cringe when I catch myself asking, “Are you sure you want to wear that?” Bite back the urge to correct her in every conversation, or worse, to step in to steer the situation myself. The side of a soccer field is my absolute nemesis, as the desire to direct her behaviors instead of simply exalt her effort is overwhelming.

Instead of guiding her out of the graveyard, I routinely hand her the shovel with which to bury herself.

I want to make this post about society. How we torture little girls into becoming the kind, soft, sweet automatons of a patriarchal autocracy. How we annihilate their voices by turn of phrase - enthusiasm to emotional, competence to cockiness, authentic to adversarial. How we teach women to “go along” instead of to go alone if that’s what’s required to preserve their integrity, dignity, and safety.

All of that is true, and the anger I carry for raising a daughter in that world is pervasive and well placed. But to ignore its impact on me, and how I parent, is to give it purchase in my home. And that, I refuse to do.

My agency starts with ensuring my scars don’t become my daughter’s wounds.

So, I stopped cheering at her soccer games. If she’s on the field, I do my best to stay mute. Even if her actions are exactly what we’ve been urging. I’m trying hard to respect that she needs to play and fail and win and try without any commentary from me.

We get to school early now, which feels counterintuitive to have extra time in which to dampen her spirit, but she’s found a new way to spend that down time. She climbs a tree. It’s a beautiful cherry blossom with limbs that run parallel to the ground, and a trunk whose gnarled base provides the perfect push off. She unwittingly started a trend, and now a dozen kids crowd around the tree in the morning, anxious to sit amidst her canopy. I wonder if these are the kids who trip over themselves in the pack by the front door, but who find their footing on her forgiving branches.

Not the tree at her school, but one just like it.

We play her favorite song one time every time we get in the car. I set a boundary, yes, but I now suffer through the same lyrics and the sometimes ear-searing volume knowing that this is her hype song. She draws courage from the distraction of the music and instead of zoning out, she dials in, confidence growing as she recites each memorized verse.

I ask questions instead of assumptively giving answers. I ask how she feels instead of what she did, what she wants instead of what I want her to have, how she showed up instead of how others treated her. And, in turn, she now asks me questions, most of which I don’t have answers for.

“Why do the boys always tease me even when I ask them to stop?”

“Why does everyone like _____ (insert name of that girl)?”

There’s less, “I don’t want to talk about it” from her and more, “What do you think about that?” from me.

It’s not a solution. But it’s a start.

And, it appears to be working. Over the past few months, my daughter seems somehow less affected by the slights at school. She’s trying out new hair styles, pulling her mismatched socks up even higher, knocking on doors to see if friends can play, and coming home without tears when they can’t or don’t want to.

This past Saturday, she kicked the ball in her soccer game. Multiple times. On purpose! For the last season and a half, she has coveted her position on defense, happy to run parallel to the ball, often times outrunning the offense so much so that she has to stop and turn around, but without ever placing her foot anywhere near said ball. There was a myriad of other things she did on Saturday that were wrong, annoyed the hell out of me, and resulted in the ulcer I now have on my lip from biting it for an hour. BUT, she kicked the damn ball.

And then she smiled.

Now, when I see those mismatched legs and pigtail buns flip upside down in the almost aerial that is her hallmark method of movement, all I can think is “Thank God she never listens to me.”

There is no joy in protecting my daughter’s authenticity. My own insecurities will suffocate what the girls at school don’t gaslight out of her.

My job isn’t to teach her how to not be annoying, not be loud, not be bossy.

My job is to hold space for her to sip some air. To create the environment where her authenticity can breathe, expand, grow, play, and rest.

To manifest joy, not judgment.

I’m trying. And she’s breathing. And for now, that’s enough.

I will be telling my story as a featured writer in the next edition of Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam! The slam is an online feminist storytelling event created and hosted by Nan Tepper of The Next Write Thing and Style YOUR Stack.

I will be joining nine other tremendous storytellers to share our unfiltered take on being mothers and daughters and having mothers and daughters in UNDER FOUR MINUTES! 😬

Buy your ticket by clicking on the button below. If you can’t be there LIVE, not to worry! A ticket will also get you the recorded version which is well worth the price of admission.

Thank you for supporting me and this tremendous effort to highlight women storytellers here on Substack!