March!

March is a special month for me. It’s my birthday month and it marks the coming of Spring. The promise of Spring brings hope to a wintry world that warm days, new growth, and blooming flowers are ahead.

It’s also the only month that can also be a verb, a call to action: March!

On March 3, girls are celebrated in Japan. Hinamatsuri is dedicated to the happiness and health of girls.

On March 8, we celebrate International Women’s Day.

This combination of action and women seems no accident. Women are marching! We are marching for equality. We want personal safety. We want to stop sexual harassment, domestic violence, an end to the rape culture. We want a lot and we are speaking truth to power. Women are rising and standing up!

In my writing group of four women, I mentioned how girls are not taught to say NO! STOP THAT! GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! HOW DARE YOU TALK TO ME LIKE THAT! We need to rethink how we can raise girls to be both nice and tough, to be fierce and loud when necessary.

Author Barbara Kingsolver writes about empowering girls in The Guardian. In “#MeToo Isn’t Strong Enough: Now Women Need to Get Ugly,” she says:

Let’s be clear: no woman asks to live in a rape culture: we all want it over, yesterday. Mixed signals about female autonomy won’t help bring it down, and neither will asking nicely. Nothing changes until truly powerful offenders start to fall. Feminine instincts for sweetness and apology have no skin in this game. It’s really not possible to overreact to uncountable, consecutive days of being humiliated by men who say our experience isn’t real, or that we like it actually, or are cute when we’re mad. Anger has to go somewhere – if not out then inward, in a psychic thermodynamics that can turn a nation of women into pressure cookers. Watching the election of a predator-in-chief seems to have popped the lid off the can. We’ve found a voice, and now is a good time to use it, in a tone that will not be mistaken for flirtation.

March is also Women’s History Month and I can’t help but think of all the strong, loving, and supportive women in my life. Because of them, I completed my B.A. at the University of Washington and I’m a writer with a completed memoir manuscript and continuing to explore my creativity; these are goals that seemed unreal when I first arrived in Seattle in 1986 and was scrambling for a job and living space and new friends.

So many people come and go in the course of a lifetime, but each person can touch another life in profound ways. This has been especially true for me in regard to my community of women friends and colleagues, past and present. I have been able to grow and blossom as a strong and creative woman because of them. YAY, WOMEN!