I'm a brand new blogger, so no criticisms about this, please. I'm simply writing as I think...as though this were a journal.
To start, I will give you my reflections, and my opinions as I have seen and lived out a few years. If you have comments to share, please note that I have every intent to provoke thought toward the evaluation of our women of every age, and how we may best contribute to a strong nation. I do not intend to enrage, but I suppose it may be a part of the process!
The American woman is a powerful force in the progression of our nation toward strength or destruction.
I have the background of being raised from a child with a mother who stayed at home to raise all of 5 daughters in a 'his/hers/ours' household. I then married at 18 and raised 5 sons as a stay at home mother, until eventual divorce after 16 years. I made the mistake of marrying again immediately, though I now have a 6th son, who brings laughter to the family after so many heartaches. My second marriage was a failure from the start, lasting now 5+ years of failed attempts to restore. Due to the second separation, I needed to work to provide for myself.
I worked out an arrangement with my youngest son's father to work opposite shifts, and have each of us caring for our son, rather than sending him to a care provider. At least we had this established.
All this to say, I began to think about the impact of a more than half century of working mothers, combined with the equal rights movement, and the effects of such choices by the eventual majority of mothers.
Just a quick list of things I think we are facing as societal breakdowns due to just these two movements:
1. Lonely, disengaged children
2. Overworked mothers, carrying the weight of a job outside or inside the home, as well as a large percentage of the home maintenance.
3. Husbands experiencing discontented, exhausted wives after work, disorganized homes, and added workloads for home maintenance.
There are a myriad of trickle down effects, of course, and as I go, if you will bear with me, I will bring a great many thoughts together into a whole. My hope is in the title of my blog. We are a great influence and power of our own, and we have the ability to steer our nation in whatever ways we want to go. We were children. We are mothers. We are loved wives. We are grandmothers. We are leaders and builders. And we have allowed much of our ability to shape our nation to be lost through the busyness we've engulfed ourselves in, not realizing we've traded our children's only way of building OUR values, for a now much needed income, and the pursuits of education and multiple activities.
It has crept in very slowly over a century, and a new awareness of our strength and natural gifting, and the great gift of influence we have needs to be re-evaluated. We have proven quite well our equality in this world. We must now recognize and ground ourselves in our beautiful womanhood...for we are the only ones who can give this to our men and our children, our nation and our world. And I assure you, men as a whole, would embrace our efforts to truly walk as great women. They certainly do not want to take it from us, and it's not because we are the weaker of the sexes. It is because men simply are not capable of being women. And women, quite frankly, cannot be men, though we have tried so hard to assimilate, and strip them of their strength.
Think of the beauty of a woman...men don't have it. It is part of our greatest gift to our men, our children, our world...and they fully embrace it as gift which raises their eyes to heaven, thanking God for what He has done!
