'Where are the stories of women who have finished actively parenting?'
I’m sitting on the couch, curled up with tea and leafing through some grocery flyers. My son comes out of his room, reaches into the fridge, glances over, stares. “That’s the most adult thing I’ve ever seen you do,” he says.I’m in my late 30s and currently contemplating what that means beyond coming to relative acceptance of all the pretty basic adult things I cannot seem to do. Some celebrate it. Some lie about it, some hide it and some — fewer than most, it seems — embrace it.
While exploring the concept of the disappearing woman in media, writer and activist Gloria Steinem noted that a male-dominant system values women as childbearers, which limits their worth to the time they’re sexually and reproductively active. And so as older men continue to populate the stories that are told, women in the media, well, it seems that when they’ve done their “job” as mothers, they’re just not all that interesting anymore.
But I don’t connect with those stories at all. Even when the women depicted are my age or older, they might be at a completely different life stage from me. And so I have a taste of what many older women must feel once they’ve finished raising their children and turn on the TV. While raising my son, we lived abroad and traveled extensively. By the time he was 15, we’d visited our 50th country.Now that my son is an adult, I straddle two worlds with media misrepresentation. Throughout my lifetime, most media content aroundhas been riddled with stereotypes. God forbid a female-led family be considered complete just as it is.
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