Glenn Close is an incredible actress. When I was a teenager my father gave me a book called STARS, filled with information about amazing actors and actresses and Glenn Close was one of them. I was studying to become a professional actress at the time so the book was of great gold to me.
Glenn shares some powerful insights into the history of the sublimated woman in her short and to the point speech upon accepting an award for her incredible performance in the movie The Wife { which was very close to the bone in ways to me that watching it made my stomach hurt with knots} speaks of a truth many many women know.
“I’m thinking of my mom, who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life,” Close said, tearing up. “And in her 80s, she said to me, ‘I feel I haven’t accomplished anything.’ And it was so not right, and I feel what I’ve learned through this whole experience is women, we’re nurturers—that’s what’s expected of us. We have our children, our husbands . . . but we have to find personal fulfillment. We have to follow our dreams. We have to say, ‘I can do that. And I should be allowed to do that.’”…….. read more in this Vanity Fair interview ☛
Women get lost in the roles of wife and mother and in the roles of carers for even the extended family and so often give up more than they bargained for. I remember my mother going back to study when I was a little girl, finding it too hard to juggle it all and leaving her studies behind.
These are the women I work with, the ones like me, who have given up too much or even younger women who are at risk of losing too much if they do not take the lessons from women before.
Shelving ourselves does not stop us desiring, it just has us grow withered, confused, bitter, abusing and self-abusing, disappearing into a crooked shape.
This sublimating to our family is a learnt behaviour, handed down through generations of our family of origins, through religious servitude indoctrination and sexist education systems. It is conditioned, familiar and yet we read in books and see in movies and hear in the conversations between women, women screaming and fighting their way out of this box of stifling goodness where putting ourselves on the bottom of the pile is considered a sign of virtue.
In The Wife, Glenn Close expresses this silent screaming through her facial expressions and the way she moves far more than the words. It is the words she does not say for the most part, that show how frozen she has become into a way of being that is suffocating her. Women know this look.
A younger woman asked me if she was a bad mother for wanting to have her child go into care one day a week so she could pursue work that kept her years of study current in a field, she is passionate about. I spoke with her about this lesson I and many women have learnt the long way.
I have learnt this lesson the long way but I am glad that I learnt it and have changed the way I live my life to one that includes my desires and my right to participate in my own creative journey outside of my roles as mother and wife.
I hear women speak of it being too late for them, and it feels that way sometimes as it can be terrifying to take up the space that is there for each of us to take up. But I believe it is never too late to be courageous enough to step out of the shadows and into the light of our own life.
Women Desire…… their own lives fully expressed
❥ Love Lotus
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