I love my mom. She’s great. When her and my dad split up she moved out, supported herself, and shared custody. She always pushed me to do my best without being a helicopter parent.

However, like a lot of women of her generation, she refuses to let herself be happy. It’s always something. Despite being healthy and enjoying a comfortable retirement she continues to be insanely stressed out.

I was over there the other night at dinner and she was complaining about having an anxiety attack over the weekend. What it was over doesn’t matter. It will always be something with her. She is programmed to be stressed out.

So I told her why.

“You’ve been programmed by popular culture to think that the modern woman should be everything at once. A woman should have a successful career, at the same time still being a great wife and a mother. She should always look fantastic and stay young forever. And she should do all of this without ever being stressed.”

“There is a car commercial for some compact marketed to the modern woman. It shows a woman strutting through all these doors, she walks through one door and she is in her business suit, then she walks through another and she is her stylish yoga outfit holding a latte, then she walks through another and she is in her sleek evening dress on her way to the social event of the season. That is who you are expected to be.”

“It’s a lie. You haven’t been given choices. You’ve had them taken away. You are still expected to be the June Cleaver of the 1950s, but you are also expected to be Mary Tyler Moore with her strident career and ageless beauty, and you are expected to be one of the women from Downton Abbey attending endless balls and cocktail parties. It’s a fiction. An impossibility. And trying to live up to that standard is what is causing most of your stress.”

“Men, on the other hand, are playing the same role we’ve always played. We work. We marry and father children. If that doesn’t leave time for a trip to Starbucks or an evening out we don’t care. It’s enough for us that we have completed our task for the day. And while society does push us to want what we can’t have, more of us see through that lie and don’t let it control out happiness.”

My stepfather just started laughing.

“Yup.” he said, “And women did it to themselves with feminism.”

I get the feeling he had wanted to say that for years.

My mom handled it well, she just sort of smiled and we ate dinner and watched some football.

Then this morning she posted on social media about how important the feminist movement of the 50s and 60s was. How it changed the world and created opportunities for women that weren’t there before.

My mother just couldn’t swallow the red pill. The taste was too bitter. Even in a safe environment with a loving husband and a caring son, where she wasn’t under attack, she was just given some honesty because I care about her and want her to be happy. But I honestly don't blame her. She is of an age where she has ridden the wave of feminism her whole life. It is likely terrifying to hear that around 95% of it was utter bullshit.

TL,DR Spoke frankly about feminism’s negative repercussions towards women with my mother. She wasn’t ready to listen.