. On Raising Girls .

Let's teach our daughters less about glass slippers and more about glass ceilings. Less about makeup and more about waking up. Less about about hair flipping and more about hustling. 

Teach her more about standing firm in her beliefs and her love and her own sacred truth than standing for nothing at all. Teach her about grace under pressure and you teach her about pressure. 

Because she'll feel it every single day. 

Pressure to fit in, pressure to wear certain things, pressure to drink that drink, smoke that cigarette, or to open her legs. 

And you teach her that no is a complete sentence. 

Teach her that life is hard, and long, and some days will daze her with difficulty. You teach her that she's tougher. Teach her that a bad decision doesn't make a bad life, and teach her how to rise, rise, rise like the sun that she is, and you teach her to 

shine.

Teach her to shine so hard that even on the broken days, even when it feels like everything - and I do mean everything - has veered off track - 

you teach her that the light of her reach will brighten even the darkest of roads. 

Call her a game changer, a catalyst, a societal-habit-breaker, a spark. Teach her to be a giver and a liver and a never, not-one-time-stopper. Fill her cup so full that she has enough to fill the cups of others. 

Teach her that the blood running through her veins is the result of every other woman that has come before - the ones that marched for the right to vote in 1913, and the ones that marched for equal rights in 1978. You tell her that she is the result of the love of thousands and that, if at any time she's just not quite sure of herself, you tell her to stand tall 

square her shoulders

and think about Maya Angelou, Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Queen Elizabeth I, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen of Troy, Anne Frank, Glennon Doyle, 

or Mother Friggin' Teresa because 

women handle it. 

Historically speaking? You teach her that we handle it 

well.

xoxo, B.