Lana feels

I don't want to fit your mold. But I don't really want to break it. I just want to do my own thing, live my own life, without your interference. I don't want to spend it fighting. I don't want to end up like my mother. Bitter, angry, resentful of mankind for an eternity of wrongs done to an eternity of women. But, my daddy didn't do that. And she still resents him for being a man. Simply because his father did a little, and his father before him more than that. And even more so, because her father did. But my daddy, he never did, except by happenstance. Never did my father think a woman was less than him simply for being a woman. But my mother has often thought a man less than her simply for being a man, for being born with better opportunities in the 50's when they were children. And she wants me, too, to believe that men are evil oppressors. Some of them are. But so are some women, though fewer. I believed her, in elementary school. Now, I think for myself. I'll never fit the mold envisioned for me by my mother's mother. The girl she would have me be is domestic, pretty, catholic, straight. But I will never be what my mother wants me to be either. She would have me be her, but stronger, smarter, more able, and would have me spend my life fighting against the mold, trying to break it. But I don't want to do that either. Someday I want a family, and I never want to be extremely powerful. I don't want to go to law school, don't want to be an ultra-feminist politician, don't want to break the mold. I want a bookstore, I want to go clubbing at night, I want boyfriends and girlfriends, I want to be taken seriously but I want to be able to make a joke. I want to bake cookies for my kids and talk to them, raise them myself but with the help of my spouse, whosoever that may be. I just want to be a girl, and then a woman, in the world that I live in. I want to be my own person, with all the variety that comes with it. Some parts will be what my mother wants, some will be what her mother wants, and all of it will be me. I will define me. And that definition will change, again and again. Because more than I'm a woman, I'm Alana. Lani. Lanalae, even. I'm just me, and I don't have a mold. So leave me be.