"Ours is a Family Run by Women"

The title quote came from my cousin recently while we were in San Antonio celebrating my grandmother's 88th birthday (or, grandmapalooza, as it was officially christened). It is QUITE rare that we all get together, even for Thanksgiving or Christmas, because I have one fabulous sister who lives in LA (who if you've not met by now, you need to) and a cousin who is generally galavanting around the world.

Even more rare are moments when the women in our family get together to laugh and tell stories. I was struck one morning when we gathered in my grandmother's enclosed patio: the glorious matriarch and all her ladies - my mother, my step-aunt, my sisters, my niece, and me. We truly are a family of mostly women...my grandfather passed away nearly 10 years ago, leaving my uncle, my step-uncle, my brother and my cousin. But oh, what a lush, eclectic, glamorous bunch of women I have as role models!

It's funny, then, that I am also doing Beth Moore's "Esther" Bible study and the very first week was all about the fact that "it's tough being a woman in another woman's shadow." This of course made me think about all the wonderful women in my life who have influenced me in one way or another. I know that I am now myself emerging from the shadows of influence - not that they were necessarily oppressive in any way, but as the youngest for a very, very long time, one can find herself struggling to find her own independence in a family of influential women.

So anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks as I have slowly started realizing my own strengths and deep passions, that have all been crafted over the course of my life and led me to who I am. This has all been a product of finishing graduate school and suddenly hitting the wall of WHAT'S NEXT!? and being generally floundery in any sort of decision forward. But this morning, the last line of week 1's study was this: "it's tough being a woman in another's shadow, but sometimes, there in the hiddenness, God builds a woman she'd never otherwise become."

Huh.