Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,47

depressed and stressed than ever because of phones. It also said we can’t talk to each other as well. I notice those things about myself sometimes lately. I also read that Ed Sheeran gave up his phone.”

“Why do you imagine he did that?”

“He said he wants to create things instead of looking at things other people create, and he wants to see the world through his own eyes instead of through a screen. I think I’d probably be happier without my phone. Sometimes I feel like I have to check it, like it controls me. It’s like a job I don’t want or get paid for or anything. It feels stressful sometimes.”

“Okay,” I said.

Chase and Tish both decided to quit social media and use their phones only for texting. We’re going to wait until high school to get Amma a phone. We do not want to give her a job while she’s so young. We want to give her the gift of boredom so she can discover who she is before she learns what the world wants her to be. We’ve decided that our job as her parents is not to keep her happy. Our job is to keep her human.

This is not a story about phones. This is a story about Knowing.

Brave parenting is listening to the Knowing—ours and our children’s. It’s doing what’s true and beautiful for our child no matter how countercultural it seems. It’s about how when we know what our children need, we don’t pretend not to know.

I have been raising my daughters to be feminists since they were in utero. I knew the world’s training would begin the second they were born, and I wanted them to be ready. Ready meant having an internal narrative about what it means to be a woman that they could weigh against the world’s narrative. I did not have an alternative narrative as a child, so when the world told me that a real girl is small, quiet, pretty, accommodating, and pleasant, I believed that this was the Truth. I breathed in those lies, and they made me very sick. Children are either taught by the adults in their lives to see cages and resist them, or they are trained by our culture to surrender to them. Girls born into a patriarchal society become either shrewd or sick. It’s one or the other.

I wanted my girls to know this: You are a human being, and your birthright is to remain fully human. So you get to be everything: loud quiet bold smart careful impulsive creative joyful big angry curious ravenous ambitious. You are allowed to take up space on this earth with your feelings, your ideas, your body. You do not need to shrink. You do not need to hide any part of yourself, ever.

It’s a lifelong battle for a woman to stay whole and free in a world hell-bent on caging her. I wanted to give my girls whatever they’d need to fight for their full humanity. Truth is the only weapon that can beat the pervasive lies the world will tell them.

So I’d place headphones over my watermelon belly at night and play audiobooks about brave, complicated women. After they were born, I’d rock my daughters to sleep with stories about women who had broken out of their cultures’ cages to live free and offer their gifts to the world. As they grew, we’d go for walks and guess the careers of the women passing by: “I bet she’s an engineer, a CEO, an Olympic athlete!” When another mother jokingly mentioned my daughter’s bossiness, I’d say, “Isn’t it great? She’s a leader.” When my girls lost a game and became furious, I’d say, “It’s okay to be angry.” When they started school and began to consider dimming and shrinking themselves, I’d say, “Keep raising your hand, honey. You can be your bold, brilliant self out there in the world. You can be sure of yourself and still be a girl.”

It worked. As they grew, they’d come home from school and ask why the winner on the four-square court was always called “King.” They’d ask their teachers why all the language in the constitution was He. They insisted that we transfer from their Christian elementary school because the teacher refused to entertain the idea of referring to God as She. When Tish’s soccer jersey was issued to her with “Lady Bruins” on it, she led a revolt, demanding that either the “Lady” be removed from