The Woman I Raised Is Teaching Me How to Be One

I didn’t grow up believing I could be anything I wanted.

My daughter did, and now she’s showing me what that actually looks like…

♀️The Woman I Raised Is Teaching Me How to Be One

My daughter is in Ghana this week, working on a human rights project with her law school, helping support constitutional reforms.

✈️This is the same girl who, at sixteen, left her passport on a connecting flight—the very first leg of her trip to a summer program in Ecuador. I’d even bought her one of those neck passport holders because I thought something like that might happen. And it did.

Now she’s a second-year law student at Penn. A solo traveler who has worked with indigenous communities and spent last summer in Hawaii protecting Native Hawaiian land rights.

✨She’s everything I admire about a woman coming into her own.

Independence wasn’t something I was taught; it was something I had to learn.

When I went back to school pregnant with Loren, I wanted her to see me building something for myself. I knew if I wanted her to live freely, she needed to see me doing the same.

When she was younger, she didn’t know her direction. She was curious, bright, emotionally intelligent… but unsure.

So I let her go find out what she was capable of.

Mexico City, exploring to see if she could build a life outside the U.S.

Peru with a host family and a nonprofit, discovering whether she could be of service to communities that needed her skills.

She wasn’t just traveling. She was testing whether she had something real to offer the world.

And she did.

Over the holidays, she told me she was going to London.

Then her brother mentioned she was actually in the Middle East.

Jordan. Oman. Turkey. Dubai. Saudi Arabia, where she drove a car in a country that only recently granted women that right.

When I realized Loren was traveling alone through these places, my first instinct was to call constantly, to somehow protect her from thousands of miles away.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I did what my mother does: I prayed for her and protected her with an invisible hand.

♥️I had to trust that my love—not my fear—was enough to keep her safe.

A week later, we spoke.

She told me where she stayed, what she learned, who she met.

And I realized: I wasn’t just raising a strong daughter. She was teaching me fearlessness.

This is what International Women’s Day means to me.

It’s not just about celebrating strong women, but about the ways we shape each other across generations.

I gave Loren the freedom I had to create for myself. She didn’t just find herself; she found her calling.

And she’s revealing what becomes possible when you give a girl permission from the start.

Happy International Women’s Day to the women who raised us, and to the ones we’re raising who are teaching us how to grow.