Where Dreams Meet Expectation

 

As a mentor to young women and a creative writer, I have always been curious about women and the lives they imagine for themselves.

Perhaps it is because I spend so much time listening. Young women talk about school, work, marriage, family and the futures they hope to build. Sometimes they speak with certainty, as though the road ahead has already been mapped. Other times, there is hesitation, a pause before an answer, a change of subject, a dream mentioned quietly and then tucked away.

I have always wondered about those dreams. What does a girl imagine her life will become before the world begins telling her what it should become?

I was thinking about this one night as I sat working on a certain paper. My laptop was open in front of me, papers were scattered across the table and yes I was supposed to be concentrating on the words on the screen. But my mind had begun to travel somewhere else.

To the women I had met. To the young women I had mentored. To the stories I had heard.

And, eventually, to my own story.

I began thinking about how easily a woman's life can become a negotiation. Between what she wants and what her family wants for her. Between the woman she is becoming and the woman society expects her to be. Between ambition and responsibility. Between the freedom education promises and the expectations that remain long after the Degree has been placed in her hands.

Then a question came to me.

How do women imagine futures beyond the circumstances that surround them?

I stared at the screen for a while. Another question followed.

What happens when the future a woman imagines for herself is different from the future others have imagined for her?

I thought about education.

We often tell girls that education will change their lives. And yes it can and does. Education can open doors that poverty, gender and circumstance might otherwise keep closed. It can give a young woman choices. It can give her a voice, an income, a profession and the confidence to imagine something beyond what she has known. But hey sometimes the door opens onto another set of expectations. She graduates and someone asks when she will marry. She gets a job and someone reminds her that family must come first. She becomes ambitious and someone wonders whether she is becoming too independent. She succeeds and yet she is still measured against ideas of what a woman should be.

I began to wonder whether education changes the boundaries of a woman's life or simply moves them.

That question stayed with me.

It followed me beyond the paper I was writing. It returned when I listened to young women speak about their futures. 

What does a woman give up to become the person others expect her to be? What does she risk when she chooses differently? What does success mean when she is finally allowed to define it for herself? And what happens when she takes back the right to tell her own story?

For a long time, women's lives have been described by others. We have been daughters, wives, mothers, professionals, subjects of research and characters in someone else's narrative. But there is something different about a woman looking back at her own life and saying: This is what happened. This is what I remember. This is what it meant to me.

Perhaps that is where freedom begins not necessarily in leaving everything behind, but in finding the language to name your own experience.

That night, I returned to my paper….oh yes I write much better at night. 

But the question remained!

It had already become something more than a question.

It had become a story.

To be continued…