The Personal is Political: Our Mothers’ Unrealized Dreams

I was talking to an insightful friend the other day about my work, and how much of it revolves around actualizing the ideas of older feminists (or certainly has, historically), and he said, “It’s amazing how much of life is lived in pursuit of reparations.” It took my breath away.
I’ve frequently thought about the unfinished business of my mother and grandmothers, and the ways in which my life is so influenced by what they weren’t able to do in theirs. My paternal grandmother (pictured) was an aspiring writer who never published a word, though she did work at a publishing company for a short time. Her struggle with bipolar disorder and a mental health system that didn’t understand it, left so many of her deepest desires unfulfilled. My mother’s huge talent was dispersed in many important places, including in co-founding the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, among so much else, but she obviously feels as if her work took a backseat to parenting and my father’s career (despite their best intentions of co-parenting).
My grandmother’s unwritten words, my mother’s lost autonomy, aren’t foremost in my mind as I navigate through my own wonderful, overwhelming life, but when I quiet down and listen to my own motivation, there’s no doubt that I am–in part–trying to live out some of their unlived dreams. I think one of the reasons I’ve been so involved in interegenerational work, as well, is about helping older women actualize feminist projects–a sense that I can help my proverbial grandmothers and mothers live the legacy they deserve to leave.
Some of this, I have to believe, is healthy and wonderful, but taken to the extreme, it sometimes robs me of my own pure agency or sense that I don’t have to finish the unfinish-able. It reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s words: “All revolutions fail because they set their sights heaven-high, but none of them fail to do something, and many increase the amount of liberty, justice, and hope for their heirs.” Each generation, I suppose, keeps building on the next’s beautiful failures.