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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us June 21, 2006 GABRIELLE SMITH-DLUHA spends quality time with her daughter Olivia Dluha. Julie Gelien | Daily Tidings By Vickie Aldous Ashland Daily Tidings When a little girl worships her two older brothers, it’s not unusual for her to act like a tomboy. But that knowledge didn’t make things any easier for Ashland mom Gabrielle Smith-Dluha as she weighed how to support her daughter’s love of wrestling, rapping and spitting while also teaching her she should be proud to be a girl. She recounts her experiences in “It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters.” The recently published anthology features writers from across the United States and Canada, including three in Ashland — Smith-Dluha, Emily Alexander Strong and Tidings columnist Jennifer Margulis. For many of the writers, raising a daughter brings up old questions about what it is to be a girl and a woman, while also reawakening long-buried issues from childhood. Several of the moms grew up struggling for equality and now — faced with the influence of Barbie and pink, frilly clothes — wonder if their daughters are acting too “girlie.” Not Smith-Dluha. Emily Strong, left, Gabrielle Smith-Dluha , center, and Jennifer Margulis, right, show the book they have written about raising daughters. “I wonder if I should be more actively encouraging Olivia’s girlish side,” she writes. “Should I be telling her, ‘Olivia, quit wrestling honey. It’s time to paint your nails?’” It’s not that Smith-Dluha is opposed to her daughter’s boyish behavior, but rather that Olivia doesn’t seem to value being a girl and even says she doesn’t want to be a woman when she grows up, Smith-Dluha writes. Raising a daughter made Smith-Dluha rethink her stereotypes not only about girls, but the standard she has in her mind about the ideal woman, that impossibly perfect person who is always kind, gentle, wise and self-sacrificing while also being pretty, slender and sexy. “I didn’t really start thinking about my stereotypes until my daughter was not living up to my notions of womanhood,” she said in a recent interview alongside Strong and Margulis. “I’m learning from her to break up this myth in my mind. It’s exciting to be with a girl and have her teach me about womanhood.” Some mothers struggle for years with those impossible standards. Joyce Maynard, who lives in California and Guatemala, suffered through anorexia and bulimia as a girl. After becoming a mother, she got silicone implants because of her drooping breasts and felt disgust over her soft stomach. Yet when hair begins to grow on the legs and upper lip of her beautiful girl, Maynard feels regret and then shame at her own feelings. “I was a woman who should have known as well as anyone the pain that women go through trying to replicate a certain accepted image of female beauty and present it to the world,” she writes. “And in spite of knowing the cost of living that way, I was ready to see my treasured only daughter experience the same kind of pain I had gone through — and the same inevitable disappointment at falling short of the ideal.” Like Maynard, Canadian writer Ann Douglas has struggled with body image and weight issues all her life. Then she was launched on an emotional rollercoaster when she found a container of vomit in her eighth grade-daughter’s closet. Her daughter began treatment at a clinic and Douglas discovered a parent’s nightmare — Internet sites that offer tips on how to maintain and hide an eating disorder. “My trip to the eating disorder underworld helped me to understand the thought processes that may have led my daughter to conclude that an in-room vomitorium worked much better than making treks to upchuck in the family bathroom upstairs (put on some music, close the door, and voila, no one can hear you puke),” Douglas writes. Raising a daughter also reawakened issues from Strong’s childhood. Although she was an extremely sensitive child, she learned to wear a facade of strength and confidence as an adult. But she feels exposed when her daughter Eliza, a sensitive child herself, “seems to insist on wearing my heart on her sleeve.” Strong said having a sensitive child actually has helped her understand her own mother. When Strong was upset as a girl, she would feel hurt when her mother would tell her to just forget about what was bothering her and stop worrying. Now she realizes her mother didn’t want her to experience pain. Having a girl is what helped Seattle writer Martha Brockenbrough finally get over her lifelong disappointment that she was not born a boy. As a child in the mid-1970s, she remembered watching her brother play baseball from the sidelines since no leagues for girls existed then. Brockenbrough gained prominence in the corporate world, and then gave it up to become a writer so that she could spend more time with her daughter. “And so this is my life now,” she writes. “Becoming a mother, having a girl, has helped me love the girl I am. I may no longer have the prestige, the power, or the money that comes from succeeding in the boys’ world. But I am a mother. A mother of daughters. And this is more.” Staff writer Vickie Aldous can be reached at 479-8199 or [email protected]. 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