My Mum Is Just a Girl

I know how I usually have a corner for the media that changed me, but I've looked forward to watching this movie since last year. My apologies, but my goodness, it's a lot.

On Saturday, I finally went to watch Barbie with my roommate and her friends. I had spent the entire couple of weeks avoiding spoilers so I didn't really know what was going on, and I'm grateful because I really got to experience it. I cried very deeply and was consumed by a strong need to call my mother and apologize, so I did. I called her, told her how sorry I am for being so unnecessarily mean and acknowledging that she did all she does because she loves me. She might not go about it the right way, but the intent behind every action has been love.

Would I want her to listen to me more? Absolutely. A lot of mother-daughter relationships is projection. She projects herself unto me and I project my anger at life unto her when she's really just trying her best. She wants to protect me from the world because she's seen how wicked it is. She wants me to be safe and happy and for her it means asking me to abide by certain roles that'll never workout for me, but it's how she knows. It's how she feels she was able to survive, but I don't want to just survive. I want to be happy and happy doesn't look the same to both of us.

Every time I look at my mother, I see how a lot of me is an evolution of her and the women that came before her. I took that which she had and built on it. I can trace the fundamentals of my beliefs to her. You expand upon which your mothers give you and what their mothers gave them. It's a long line of women who have passed the baton to one another in the hopes that the person after will be greater than the person before. It is beautiful and my goodness, does it make being a woman a lot easier and a lot more complicated at the same time.

Watching Barbie really helped me see that at the core, my mother is just a girl. She likes to dress up and do things that make her smile, she doesn't always get it right and “oopsies” her way out of a lot of situations. She occasionally takes a colorful drink and watches reality TV with me. She's just like me and I'm just like her with a little minor modifications, but at our core, we're just just two girls trying to survive this trashy patriarchal society.