Last month I dug up old scripts, journals, half written poems and stories and started to write again after a 4 year hiatus.   Wanting to keep the momentum going, I set a goal of starting a blog and posting every weekend.  These posts were warmly received by strangers from the internet.  Nice push to keep forging ahead.

Then I noticed my trite themes, cringed at my cliche phrases, and worried about violating my daughter's, mother's and grandmother's privacy.  I went back & edited each post, deleted one altogether.

When I sat down friday night to go through old material and compose my weekly post, I couldn't figure out what I had been trying to say all those years of writing.  All I ever really write about is girlhood.  What was the point?  Great, writer's block:  even that is a tired old topic to explore.  I turned off the computer.  What is the point?

This morning I woke up with an answer.  Thank god, alleluia, I remembered why I write.

I spent yesterday at a full-day mother-daughter retreat for girls in 5th grade and their moms.  The topics were puberty, sexuality and mother-daughter communication.  It was a lovely day, although my daughter, who is a full year older than the other girls, seems to be no where near experiencing body changes, caring about boys, etc.  I think she will be a late-bloomer, and believe me, I am fine with that.

One of the exercises was a guided meditation for the moms, remembering back to our own adolescence.  I have long advocated moms fully getting in touch with their own girlhood as their daughters approach the rocky road through the teenage years.  Really get in there and remember the intense longings, humiliations, chasing the next high, feeling invincible, feeling as if you want to die.  Moms who kept journals of those years have a great advantage.  Otherwise, women have a tendency to forget, deny, repress the strongest feelings and then freak out when their own daughters walk in the door with those same  experiences.

I kept journals since I was nine and chronicled the tumultuous journey from girlhood into becoming a woman.  I turned those journals into a one-woman show and struck a nerve with the women in my audiences, many of whom would approach me afterwards in tears and say, "I had forgotten all about that!"  "That could have been my diary."  The show was dark, juxtaposing the innocence of girlhood with the loss of self-respect and self-destructive choices that so often happens with teen girls.

I then made a career of working with adolescent girls and guiding them on their own path.  I always thought I had it tough, but girls today have it so much harder than we did!  Just one example is all the internet porn teen boys watch today.  (we're not talking playboy or even penthouse types of images anymore)  Leading to sexual requests that are often physically painful, humiliating and not at all pleasurable to the teen girls  "But if the girls on-line are enjoying this, then there just must be something wrong with me... "  I'm digressing.

Now after only 4 years of being a mom, I have a daughter on the cusp of puberty.  My expectations for myself are high.  My talent has been remembering my own feelings well enough to better relate to girls.  But after years of performing my experiences, I am now emotionally distanced from them.  All I have is the understanding of how a confident girl can morph into a self-loathing teen. What do I do with that?

Being in a room with 10 other moms of 5th graders who are talking about their own adolescence and their hopes and fears for their daughters was cathartic.  Some of the moms are snooty, some are kind, some over indulge their children, some are too controlling:  But god, how much they each love their daughter!  How deeply they want her to love herself!  We were united in our uncertainty of how to guide our daughters through this stage of life, how to keep her from losing herself along the way.

Don't misunderstand:  The retreat was very positive.  The girls are excited to become teenagers, learning to drive and going to proms.  The moms are amazed at their daughter's insight and confidence, how well-equipped they seem to face the challenges ahead.  But the ominous cloud left behind by the memories of our own adolescence was unmistakeable.

So, I'm reminded of why I write about girls.  Why I'm the one-hit wonder, writing about my own girlhood over and over again.  Telling my story. Why I want every mom to remember her own story, the good, the bad and the ugly, so as to see that the ugliness only happens when we lose sight of our own beauty.  Any monsters in our tale retain their power just as long as they can keep us from seeing we are worthy of happiness and love.  

We are bombarded with messages about what is wrong with us as women. Let's tell our daughters our own stories before she hits that age of not wanting to listen.  Let's make the sought-after, fairy tale ending "and then I realized I deserve to be truly seen and loved for who I really am."   

My kid likes me to put her to bed each night with a story from when I was a girl.  I've been slacking on this, because I had become tired of my own story after performing it for so many strangers.  

I'm going to return to those stories now, post some here, tell some to my daughter when I tuck her in at night, and encourage other women to do the same.