essay
YOU’VE GOT THE POWER Become a woman who paves her own way By Angie Mizzell
M
y mom named me after actress Angie Dickinson. When she was pregnant with me, she was watching an episode of “Police Woman” and liked the way “Angie” looked when it flashed across the television screen. Even then, she knew I was a girl. Even then, she imagined big things for my life. She was 18 years old and recently married. It was also the early 1970s, a time when people were inclined to look away and pretend not to notice the trouble going on behind the scenes. For a while, she felt stuck. Then, a few years later, at 21, my
was a housewife. Considering I had my own daughter at 37, it occurs to me that I’m technically old enough to be her grandmother. But my life turned out differently because my mom and grandmother told me that it would. They believed it, and so I believed it, too. My mom said I would go to college and have a career before marriage and babies. She wanted me to pave my own way. My high school job as a restaurant hostess taught me how to pay for my own gas and extracurricular activities, balance a checkbook and complete a simple tax return. I graduated from college—thanks to affordable in-state tuition and access to student loans—and spent the first decade of my career working in television newsrooms. I met my husband in a journalism class, and we tied the knot at 25. Nineteen years later, we’ve adopted some of the more traditional roles of running a household with three children, but we continue to operate from the same mindset: equal partners, divide and conquer. Still, there came a point when I had to reconcile a question that many Generation X women have faced. We were told that we could have it all and do it all; be anything and everything. But what does that even mean? I’ll never forget the day that I called my mom from work. I was in my late 20s and frustrated about a whole host of things. She listened to me vent and then calmly replied, “Angie, you have more power than you realize.” I sensed that she was sharing this wisdom as she was learning it herself. To really become the kind of woman my mother and grandmother dreamed I would become—a woman who paves her own way—I would have to claim my true, innate sense of worth—regardless of paycheck or employment status.
grandparents gave her money to file for divorce. Now, living on her own as a young, single mom, her divorce attorney helped her get a job as a receptionist at another law firm. My grandmother helped raise me, and it’s important to note that she was also young. She married my grandfather at 17 and
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skirt . | march 2019
CALLIE CRANFORD
“ To really become the kind of woman my mother and grandmother dreamed I would become—a woman who paves her own way—I would have to claim my true, innate sense of worth—regardless of paycheck or employment status.”
