This is one of a series of blogs that I am going to write on Loving our Girls. Hoping you will read, reflect and make a difference to the girl in your life.
Talking with our Grade 12s in a motivational campaign, I have called upon girls to aim for THREE targets: The highest form of education that they can get; the best health for themselves in all its dimensions and the largest finance they can put together. And then it occurred to me that they can only do that if you as parents and grand-parents truly, deeply, sincerely love them.
Love your girls with commitment and devotion such that they should gather a huge basket full of beautiful childhood experiences, happy, satisfied, learning and growing strong, bright and brilliantly smart and strong to face this ugly world dominated by obscene realities today.
Love your girls daily in their detailed emotional, physical and intellectual care such that they move towards discovering and realising their own potential, not a copy of mum and dad, not a copy of some traditional and religious entrapments but their own person. As they do so, here is the great bargain – YOU will realise your potential for love, for nurturing, for influencing and shaping a life into a worthy citizen that will be carried into the next generation. It is the ultimate win-win.
Love your girls – make time to listen, to comfort, to know who they really are; what scares, what worries, what fears, what nightmares churn them inside out. They should feel secure, enveloped into comfort and able to make mistakes but be loved, always. They need never look for anyone else to receive that false comfort called sex. With such love around them, they will learn to figure out the differences themselves.
Two incidents have churned me inside out these last four weeks. One is about the alleged rape of an 11 year old by 17 men in India. The mind goes into a spin and I have vomited non-stop for days unable to swallow a morsel of food necessary for my basic survival. How does this “rape” work? How does the mind of a man watching this rape work? How does a man participate over a period of time in this heinous crime? How does a man repeat the act into the broken body of an 11 year old repeatedly? And then I am watching Panorama and Mr. Trump comes on. A nation bestows the highest authority, the highest respect and the largest privileges on a man who many in the world are questioning as a “sex pest”? Mr, Trump simply says that he did nothing wrong. 66% of his party, composed of men and women believe that he is telling the truth. He says: you will be pleased to know that your president did nothing wrong. And many buy it?
Are human beings losing their mind? Will it return any day soon? Or are we moving towards a catastrophe of the most monumental proportions?
