As I See It / June 2006
Launch Pad
The strength and achievements of the women who live and work in this state continue to be simply amazing. Month after month, there are new stories of women who have found a way to succeed against the most daunting odds, under the most trying conditions, with the scantiest resources and the least cash.
Education makes the road to success smoother and less exhausting. Education makes the journey more interesting and exponentially increases the options of where a woman can go. Determination gets the woman through the bad times, through long, hard days and cold, dark nights. Intelligence and good sense keep her feet on the ground and her eyes on the future.
Education, determination, intelligence and good sense are common themes in the stories of all the women featured in A Woman’s View. But there is one other theme that runs like a golden thread through the lives of successful women, the steadfast, bedrock of support from one person, who made all the difference.
It isn’t their teacher or their banker. It isn’t their first customer or their last boss. It is their father.
Although women will succeed alone and on their own, women who were fortunate enough to have had a father that gave the full measure of his unconditional love and support do not fail.
Every woman is different, every story is different and women generously credit everyone who ever helped them along the way.
But women with those fathers, the fathers who believed their daughters could do anything, face the world with unshakable confidence. Those daughters climb mountains and walk tightropes with the sure knowledge of a net beneath them. Bulletproof and invincible, women with those fathers, the fathers who praised instead of punished, who shared strength rather than impose it, take what the world throws them wrapped in the ultimate Kevlar.
Those fathers, who inspired their children to be the best of what they already were, didn’t tell their daughters how to live. They simply showed them how full life could be.
Men never know if they will have the tools or the inspiration they need to be a father. And, although fathers are generally pictured as elder statesmen figures, most men become Dads in their early twenties, or before. Few understand from the beginning the enormity of their undertaking, and some never realize it. How many young men would knowingly sign a contract that required them to accept a lifetime of full responsibility for the food, clothing, shelter, health, education, and happiness of another individual regardless of their own ability, needs or wishes? And yet when fathers fail to meet the terms of that invisible contract, the consequences are often terrible- for children, for families, for society.
Girls who grow up with respect and admiration from the most important man in their life know what to expect and require from a man, and they respect themselves. Girls who grow up belittled or ignored, search their entire life for the approval that should have come from their father, vulnerable and uncertain.
It’s true that a man who becomes a father carries pictures where his money used to be. But it’s also true that he carries the key to all the doors his daughter will ever open.
Women can succeed without their father’s love, without their father’s encouragement, without their father’s belief in them. But with it, they will soar.
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers who make life better for women with their hard work, their great example and their enduring love.
Copyright © 2005-2006 A Woman's View. All rights reserved.
Femme Fair 2006
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