Raising a Woman Who Means Business

I knew from the time Sherry was small that she was going to be something.

Not in the vague, every-parent-thinks-this way. In the specific, observable, this-child-is-going-to-argue-her-way-through-life-and-win way. She was the kid who needed to understand the reason behind every rule. Not to challenge it — well, sometimes to challenge it — but mostly because she genuinely needed the logic to sit right with her before she could accept it. She had standards. For herself, for the people around her, for the way things ought to work.

She was exhausting in the best possible way.

I say this with complete love and full acknowledgment that I am the reason she is the way she is. Because I raised her to be exactly this. I raised her to ask why. To not accept the answer because I said so as a sufficient answer. To have opinions and voice them and back them up and not apologize for having them in the first place.

I raised her to mean business.

What I didn’t anticipate — what you can’t anticipate, no matter how intentionally you parent — was what that would look like when it got tested in a way I never would have chosen for her.

The diagnosis came and I watched my daughter do the thing I’d always known she was capable of but had never had to call on so completely. She organized herself around the hard thing the way she organizes herself around everything — methodically, stubbornly, with a clear eye on what needed to happen next and an absolute refusal to let the circumstances write the ending.

She decided she was going to be okay before she had any evidence that she was going to be okay.

That’s not denial. That’s she means business applied to the hardest possible situation. That’s the woman who looks at the thing in front of her — even the thing that is genuinely terrifying, even the thing that has the potential to take everything — and decides that her response to it is going to be forward motion.

I watched her do this and I was proud in a way that I don’t have adequate language for. Not because she was tough — I always knew she was tough. Because she was herself. Completely, recognizably, entirely herself even in the middle of the hardest thing she’d ever faced.

That’s the thing about raising a woman who means business: when the business gets serious you find out whether you actually did it. Whether the thing you were trying to build in her — the confidence, the resilience, the unshakeable sense of her own capability — actually took root or was just a fair weather quality that would disappear when the weather turned.

It took root.

She walked across that graduation stage after brain surgery. She enrolled in law school. She’s finishing her final year. She is going to be a lawyer and she is going to be a formidable one and the people who end up across from her in whatever room she walks into are going to find out very quickly what I found out when she was small.

She means business.

She always did. The hard thing didn’t create that. It just confirmed it.

For the mothers reading this — the ones raising daughters who argue at the dinner table and need the reason behind every rule and have opinions about everything and exhaust you in the best possible way — I want to say this:

Keep going. That quality you’re trying to build in her — the one that sometimes makes your life harder because she won’t just accept things the way they are — that’s the thing that will hold her together when the hard thing comes.

And the hard thing will come. For all of them. In ways we can’t predict and wouldn’t choose.

What we can do is raise women who mean business. Women who look at the hard thing and decide — quietly, stubbornly, completely — that their response to it is going to be forward motion.

That’s the whole job.

She’s doing great, actually.

She always was.