It's International Women's Day!
I was born in 1953 into a white family living in an upper middle-class neighbourhood in a suburb of Toronto. By 1959, we were a family of five. Dad was seriously outnumbered by four women!
I was never one of the cool kids with lots of friends, never truly a groupie, often watching from the sidelines. While most girls played hopscotch, jumpsie and skipping rope at recess, I could be found with a pocketful of alleys (marbles) or a few chestnuts on strings (conkers) waiting for the boys to let me play.
I knew how to handle a hammer, screwdriver, and wrench but there weren't any school subjects that used those tools until I got to middle school. Of course, "Shop" as it was called then, was not offered to girls. While the guys were making cool stuff out of wood and using power tools, I was struggling with threading a sewing machine in "Home Economics" and serving tea to the boys from shop class!
 |
| The best tool box - my Dad's. |
That that was the 1960's and early '70's and opportunities broadened somewhat after that. Even fifteen years ago my daughter was able to take a carpentry course in high school. I confess to having been all but overcome with envy when she brought home a lovely side table that she had crafted out of pine. Oh, how I would have loved to put my hands to such work in school. Given the chance, I think I would have been a carpenter, or at least developed a huge carpentry habit.
 |
| 1978 - my love and I started building our house |
The key phrase is "given the chance." My role, my responsibility as a white woman of privilege is to use that privilege to lift up others. There are so many more opportunities for women now than were available to me when I was growing up. Yet gender bias and inequality still slam doors in our faces.
As much as life is about being given a chance, it is also about taking a chance; knocking on a closed door, pressing a toe against an unlatched door, challenging a door slammed shut, and then striding through an open one, head held high and with a grateful heart.
On this International Women's Day, I salute all my sisters everywhere.
May you be valued, consulted, and respected.
May you be safe, healthy and loved.
May you be found and remembered.
"Praise to the Women on my Journey" (Rev. Melissa Bowers)
To the women on my journey
Who showed me the ways to go and ways not to go,
Whose strength and compassion held up a torch of light
and beckoned me to follow,
Whose weakness and ignorance darkened the path and
encouraged me to turn another way.
To the women on my journey
Who showed me how to live and how not to live,
Whose grace, success, and gratitude lifted me
into the fullness of surrender to God,
Whose bitterness, envy, and wasted gifts warned me
away from the emptiness of self-will.
To the women on my journey
Who showed me what I am and what I am not,
Whose love, encouragement, and confidence held me
tenderly and nudged me gently,
Whose judgment, disappointment, and lack of faith called
me to deeper levels of commitment and resolve.
To the women on my journey who taught me love by
means of both darkness and light,
To these women I say bless you and thank you from the
depths of my heart, for I have been healed and set free
through your joy and through your sacrifice.
©2021 April Hoeller (excluding M. Bowers poem)
