Women Teach Me about the World, Part 1: My Mother's Unspoken Wisdom

Part 1 of a series celebrating the women (and their wisdom) in my life for Women's History Month

Men have tried to teach me about the world, but I return again and again to the lessons of women: my mother and sister, my aunts and grandmothers, family friends, teachers, and leaders—countless women who have always been about the work of showing me their take on the world through the way they lived within their own.

One weekend morning, my mother taught me something about men without ever saying a word.

As a child, Saturday mornings held a special tint because it was the one time of the week when breakfast was a meal made all out. We often didn’t eat until 9:00 a.m. with the spread always featuring eggs, some kind of meat, and a sweet. Most weeks we’d have pancakes slathered with peanut butter and topped with my mom’s homemade syrup. Occasionally the pancakes were passed over for French toast or homemade waffles, the latter piled high with the summer’s canned fruit filling and topped with whipped cream. Saturday morning breakfast was an ordeal, a tradition, and we often sat around the table eating and talking long into the morning.

After breakfast, we’d disperse for chores, but occasionally, a drop-in visitor broke up the rhythm. One such morning, my father and uncle sat at the table with cups of coffee while I cleared the dishes around them. My mother stood at the sink, facing away from the table, looking out a window toward the long side lawn, when my uncle said something that nearly choked me.

“PMS—that’s not real.”

I was already of bleeding age, that change having come to me young—barely a middle school whip of a body but already leaking out life every month. I didn’t yet understand all the mechanics of menstruation or how it would matter later in life, but I knew the basics. No, I didn’t just know them; I lived them, and I knew my uncle was wrong.

I stopped gathering the plates, whirled around to look at him, sure that he had misspoken. Perhaps, I thought, he had posed it as a question. Well, if so, I could help him correct his wrongs. I turned toward him but he didn’t turn back. If his statement shocked me, his sure belief in being right shocked me even more. Without any regard for me or my mother as we worked around him, he simply spun his tale about our lived experience and passed it off as truth without making a single inquiry of us.

In the fine hair of that moment, I learned one way of the world. Though I was old enough to bleed, I had not yet met the depths to which men trusted themselves more on the matters of girls and women than the girls and women actually living those matters out. I couldn’t understand that he felt no shame in being so misguided. I couldn’t even understand why PMS was something he was trying to debunk.

I swung my head to my mother to see what she would say. Surely she would say something. She must! He was wrong and we could set him right! But from that turned back, she did not even pass along a single flinch. My uncle didn’t miss a beat and neither did she. She kept washing dishes while he kept talking, and I felt myself abandoned—but only for a moment.

I didn’t know then that both she and I were caught in a power imbalance, a lose-lose situation. I didn’t know to call my uncle’s behavior a blend of misogyny and sexism or how to understand where (and why) both originate for so many men. I only knew that I was caught in something wrong and confusing, but I trusted my mother so I followed her example and kept quiet.

As I picked my chores back up and the men talked on, I felt my mother reach out to me above them. She still had not turned, still had not paused in her work, but I felt her pass an age-old secret toward me: that while men spend hours and then entire lifetimes sitting at tables, spinning tales into fabricated truths for themselves about the people they don’t understand, women keep on living. Her unchanged back and her unfazed demeanor blossomed into a wisdom I have carried with me for years. Nothing a man can say, no matter how confident or convinced of his falsehood, can change the lived reality of the women he fears. So on we go, on with the living while they busy themselves with the construction of realities which we will always work to escape and transcend.