Upcoming Events:
Weekend Workshops Mothers and Daughters - Learning From Each Other in the Pre-Teen Years (10-12):
August 12-14, 2011 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.
Save the date! Registration not yet available.
October 7-9, 2011 at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.
Save the date! Registration not yet available.
Mothers and Daughters - Meeting in the Middle During the Teen Years (13-15):
April 29, 2011 - May 1, 2011
at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.
Enrollment Limited. Register now at eomega.org!
August 19-21, 2011 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.
Save the date! Registration not yet available.
|
~
A Girl Event: The Song of the Lioness Quartet
By Tamora Pierce
Tamora Pierce was, hands down, Eliza's favorite author in her early teens (with many comforting re-reads lasting into her late teens...).
The Song of the Lioness Quartet (Pierce's first and iconic series) tells the coming of age story of Alanna of Trebond, a young girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to enter training to become a knight.
Set in a fantasy, medieval-esque world, this series will be a dead-on hit for all pre-teen and teen lovers of magic and history, but the books also deal with real world issues such as identity, womanhood, first periods, first crushes, gender norms, and the like... in a refreshing and deeply inspiring way.
Recommended with love, Eliza.
|
~
A Mom Event: The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to Find Her Female Roots
By Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD
Formerly titled Stories from the Motherline (so you can find it used under this title), The Motherline is a wonderfully inspiring book for adult daughters.
Written by a Jungian analyst, it is a book that takes the perspective of the mother who is always also a daughter. It urges a views of the psyche of women that does not sever mother from daughter or feminism from "the feminine". It describes a woman's journey to find her roots in the personal, cultural and archetypal motherline.
Lowinsky writes about how we can find our female roots by paying attention to our real mother's lives and experience. She feels that listening to our mothers' stories is the beginning of understanding our own.
Recommended with love, Sil.
|
A Mother-Daughter Event:
 In early December Sil & Eliza made a mother/daughter trip to the first ever TEDWomen Conference in Washington D.C. TED is an organization that holds global conferences featuring their specially-formatted, essence-centered "TED talks", each between 3-20 minutes presenting "an idea worth spreading". At TEDWomen the theme was... women! Click on the images below to see two of our favorite talks that have been posted so far!  | | Amber Case: Cyborg Anthropologist |
 | | Elizabeth Lesser: Writer and Healer |
The talks from the 3 -day conference will be posted gradually throughout the coming year. Check out other great, short (perfect to watch in a 15-minute break), inspiring videos now!
|
|
Meet a Daughtering Assistant: Corina
|
Meet Corina, one of the handful of Mothering & Daughtering Assistants involved in the Daughtering Mentoring Program. Corina sat down this winter for a quick chat with Eliza...
Eliza: What was your first M&D workshop?
Corina: I was eleven and it was at Omega. I had no idea what to expect, and look at me now...
Eliza: How old are you? And what is one of the activities that defines you?
Corina:Thirteen! Probably my theater summer camp -- The Wayfinder Experience -- it's a huge part of my life. It has an amazingly welcoming community that's so special to me.
Eliza: What is your favorite color? And type of ice cream?
Corina: I used to love the colors red and black. But now I'm not really sure. I definitely like the seeming depth of black still. As for ice cream... that's easy, coffee, or to be more specific, cappuccino!
Eliza: What do you like about being a Daughtering Assistant?
Corina: I love welcoming the girls and helping to create the sense of community and a really trusting and caring environment throughout the weekend. It's so rewarding.
Eliza: If you could say 1 thing to teen daughters that you have learned in your relationship with your mom?
Corina: Always talk about what's bothering you. Keeping it in and thinking about it constantly is not going to help. Sit down and discuss the problem with your mom, whether it be about her or not. Also honesty is a huge deal, it creates trust which is a huge part of any relationship.
|
|
Greetings!
 | | Sil & Eliza |
Welcome to the New Year 2011 edition of our newsletter! We are Sil and Eliza Reynolds, a mother and daughter team who teach weekend workshops for mothers and their 10-15 year old daughters. If you are receiving this email it means that you are on our official mailing list. (Not on our email list yet? Was this forwarded on to you by a friend? Sign up here!) Happy New Year to new and old friends alike! As 2010 closes behind us and 2011 stretches ahead we pause together (sprawled across our living room couch, laptops open) to send you our best wishes for a happy new year, and this newsletter, crafted with a little T.L.C. The work we would have put into a Fall newsletter (sorry to be out of touch), we put into creating our new and expanded website! We bring this newsletter to you now (with some new design elements to match our website) -- in a quality we are truly proud of and are sure you will enjoy! The theme of this issue's featured article is On Daughtering. Yes, "daughtering"! It's a new word and a new idea at the very core of our work with mothers and daughters. We are so excited to share with you what this new word "daughtering" means to us and why we have chosen it to complement the word mothering for our official name and logo. This daughtering conversation is just beginning! Check out our featured article (below) On Daughtering. So, what is new since the Summer? THE BIG WEBSITE LAUNCH IS HERE! 
Check out our new home base at: MotheringandDaughtering.com
Our Book: We have been carving out time for writing and we are enjoying the challenge of putting our experience of teaching into words. We plan to finish our manuscript by September 1st. We are very excited at the prospect of offering a unique book written for mothers and daughters by a mother and a daughter. Our working title remains Mothering & Daughtering: Creating a Deep and Ensuring Relationship Through the Teen Years.
TEDWomen: In early December, we were lucky enough to be able to take some time away from work and school, and practice what we preach: quality mother daughter time together! We joined our beloved workshop assistant Sasha (who many of you know) and her mother, Eileen, for a mother/daughter adventure to Washington D.C. and a fantastic TED conference. See below for more on the conference and links to our favorite talks! Join Us Online! The tech-saavy daughter half of this team has newly established us on Facebook and Twitter. Join us and stay in closer touch! We are regularly posting
 | | CLICK HERE FOR A SPECIAL VIDEO MESSAGE |
super cool links, news and photos!   A Video Message: Click on the image of us on the right to watch a special video message we recorded for you! Welcome to the Mothering & Daughtering conversation.
Sil & Eliza Reynolds
|
Here are some pictures of the wonderful group of mothers and their 10-12 daughters that we were lucky enough to meet this October at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. With our wonderful team of assistants it was 60+ in one lovely warm space! Lots of laughter and beautiful presence. Feel so blessed. Photo Credit to Michael Weisbrot.
  |
|
 
|
   Our new workshops for the coming year are posted! Join us this spring, summer or fall at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY or the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA! See our Upcoming Events for details. ~ Many of the mothers and daughters who have attended our workshops return year after year as a way of staying connected. We welcome repeat participants who come and strengthen our growing community with their wisdom. There is always deeper work to be done and more fun to be had! ~ Dear Mother, have a daughter who is hesitant to join you for a weekend retreat? 1. Explain to her that in fact 50% of the time will be spent with a diverse group of other cool teenage girls from around the country! And a 19 year old teacher... 2. Realize that you must commit to making sacred time for your relationship, whether it takes the form of this weekend retreat or not. In a culture focused on "doing" rather then "being", and one that often encourages teenage daughters to dismiss their mother's role in their lives, modern mothers must swim against the current to demand and hold the needed space for their daughters. We encourage you to use whatever loving coercion you can manage in order to get her there to see for herself: Do you have a birthday coming up? A Mother's day present? She will not be sorry by the end of the weekend, we promise! 3. Email Sil for some strategy advice. |
Featured Article: On Daughtering
|
 | Sil - Eliza - Alden
3 generations together.
Summer 20 |
On Daughtering: The Value of Vision
By Sil Reynolds
In November, I had the privilege of hearing Gloria Steinem deliver a keynote address at a conference. She warned us mostly middle-aged women in the audience to not give more value to the wisdom of our years over the visionary insights of younger generations of women. She argued that age and youth be given equal value for their contributions, in this case, to Feminism. Eliza and I have come to feel the same way about the mother/daughter relationship, and it has been her vision and voice that has helped us to more clearly define what, in fact, an adolescent daughter's role is in her relationship with her mother.
This photograph of the three generations of my living matriline was taken this past summer at a wonderful celebration of my mother's eightieth birthday. When all three of us are together, I am especially aware of my two perspectives at each end of the matriline-as the mother of Eliza and as the adult daughter (and once teenage daughter) of Alden. And as I look at the image of us sitting there together, I realize that we are all daughters. Three daughters (and two mothers) on a bench!
An I, an N and a G, turn the word mother into the act of mothering - and I invite you to look at our new website where I have defined mothering. But what about the daughter's role? When we first started teaching workshops together, it occurred to Eliza that adolescent daughters were doing more in their relationship with their mothers than we mothers give them credit for. She wanted the word daughter to become the act of daughtering and she asked the preteen and teen daughters who attend our workshops to help her define it. Here are some of their remarkable definitions:
Daughtering is the act of showing your mother the world with fresh eyes.
Daughtering is the act of loving your mother and then having a daughter and loving her and then her having a daughter and loving her, and so on...
Daughtering is realizing your mom is a person just like you.
Daughtering is honest love.
Daughtering is the job of blossoming, growing, like a flower.
Recently Eliza has penned her own definition (inspired and based on the collective input of the girls in our workshops), and I trust it will continue to evolve. Eliza thought that daughteringcould be the perfect complement to the word mothering, and so this union has become the name for our work together.
Daughtering (daught-er-ing); n. Staying real with your mom and not giving up on her. Creating a relationship where you feel trusted, understood, supported and loved.
At first, I am wowed by this definition. What more could I want from my daughter? Then, I confess, I felt a little threatened. Yikes! Eliza will be keeping our relationship real, which means she'll be putting corrections in about my mothering or bringing up the sometimes painful reality of her growing up and out of the nest (see her article below). Daughters are the truth tellers and the visionaries and my daughter is no exception!
Eliza has been back for the holidays and I have been infused with the spirit of her daughtering. Her vision, her sharp intellect, her generous heart, her commitment to staying real and her desire to change the world, have invigorated me. She helps me to reconnect to the daughter inside of me- a wearier part of me that can get buried by fatigue and cynicism. She helps me to remember the daughter part of me that never gave up on my mother after an incredibly turbulent adolescence, a commitment that guaranteed that I made peace with my mother. Take Eliza's daughtering definition to heart and don't give up on your mother if you have not made peace with her. This will help to heal your matriline and give you more insight into how to mother your daughter well.
More importantly, encourage your daughter to daughter. Don't let her give up on you. Invite her input into your relationship. I have been fortunate to be privy to Eliza's "research" notes after every workshop. She has mined the girls' hearts and minds for their insights and for the most part, the preteen daughters are enthusiastically on board to be active and intentional in their daughtering role. Many of the teen daughters, however, have lost that enthusiasm for daughtering. They have little faith that hanging in their with their mom, as Eliza calls it, will give them the relationship they want with her. It has been my experience that the more I have been willing to give equal value to Eliza's input, the more we have been able to create a relationship where she, the daughter, has felt trusted, understood, supported and loved.
|
 | Dorm room at night. Fall 2010.
|
On Daughtering: Wonder Woman
By Eliza Reynolds
On the morning after Halloween, a Sunday this past year, I took the 9 a.m. train from my college in Providence to New York City, to meet my mom. I had tottered back to bed in my Wonder Woman costume at about 1 a.m. the night before, repeating to my friends for the third time that, yes, I was going to a film screening of a documentary on the Canadian Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, with my mother and my godmother in the morning. And yes, I repeated, I would be catching the nine a.m. train. (And no, I wasn't crazy). Two red pleather boot covers, a spangled body suit, a three-foot lasso, two Velcro gold wristlets... I tugged them all off and chucked them into the corner. Good night!
Frankly I was happy to get out of Providence, and excited to see my mom in a way that I hadn't been all semester. I felt as if I was on the verge of collapse. That wall that I'd put up between my lonely, sometimes desperately confused inner reality and the face I displayed of a stressed, but successfully coping sophomore was beginning to fall apart. I'd never realized how exhausting it really is to wear the "oh, I'm fine" mask (oh gosh not to mention all the other ones that we put on every day). I arrived at the event, made my way through the meet-and-greet (Hi, I'm Eliza Reynolds, Sil Reynolds' daughter) and the film screening that followed; it was at lunch that I bottomed out. I sat down to chicken curry with my godmother, and perched on a high stool opposite me she asked the question that was the beginning of the end: How are you?
The truth came choking out of me, shoulders shaking, eyes streaming: I hadn't felt happy or genuinely enthusiastic about my life for months. I told her that I felt guilty that I wasn't happy, scared that I wasn't happy - I was supposed to be happy.I told her how much I had been struggling to find meaning and direction in my life and that I had decided to take a year off from college.
I believe that this past semester has been difficult for me because I am mourning the end of a phase of my life. A phase called childhood. I believe in cycles of life and this fall I descended away from the sun. And out in that other world, beyond my dorm room's door, my friends chuckled and shook their heads at me, "Whoa Lize, you really are Wonder Woman." I talked big and stayed busy.
But this story is not about what I'm going to do with my life (because I don't know yet and that's perfectly ok) or how I am going to "fix" everything and make myself happy (because sometimes you need to be sad). Nor is this the story of how I learned I can't be Wonder Woman. This is the story of what happened after I was done sobbing in the middle of the restaurant, after I had wiped the snot away from my nose with the last of my godmother's paper napkin. This is the story of what my mom did (like any good mom would). She mothered.
"Lize, you can always come home with me. You don't need to go back to school tonight do you? I'll drive you back up to Providence tomorrow afternoon if you want. Take a break and regroup at home with me and Daddy."
What an image: cozy at home with mommy and daddy, home-cooked breakfast, warm bed, maybe a walk in the morning through the fields by my house. Or... a 4-hour, regional train ride back to my college city, alone, curled up on my coat, a taxi ride, a walk up a hill with my suitcase and in my cold dorm room, if I was lucky, by 1 a.m. again.
Those days are over. I went back to school. It was not about regrouping; it was about walking head-on into my own sadness and inevitably into my own growth.
"No mom," I said, "I need to go back to Providence, I can't run away from this. I can't just go home anymore. If I run away now, I'll never figure this out. I need to be able to deal with this."
This is daughtering. As one 12-year-old girl in a workshop once said to me, clearly and without any confusion about the new word she was defining: Daughtering is the job of blossoming, growing, like a flower. Wow. What if part of my "job" as a daughter is to grow? To actively seek my own blossoming?
I believe that daughtering is about action. I think it is about stepping away from passivity into being an agent of change in your relationship with your mom and in your own life. Daughtering is about not giving up on your mom or on yourself.
Daughtering is when, at 11 p.m., I take a deep breath to calm myself and peer back at my mom in the Skype screen and speak the same directions to her for the umpteenth time, on how she can change her ringtone on her cell phone. Daughtering is blurting out to my mom that I kissed the boy last night (can we be excited about it together??)!!! Daughtering is when I choose my mom's jewelry for the dinner party to highlight her beautiful graying ringlets.
Daughtering is genuinely apologizing for being a snappy grump ALL morning and then trying to explain why without making excuses. Daughtering is telling my mom she's not allowed to talk about my new boyfriend with anyone, not even my dad, and knowing that I can trust her.
For me, daughtering is taking a step away from my mother when I need to and taking care of myself. Daughtering is love. Daughtering is trusting my own voice and learning to speak that voice. Daughtering is about growing, often with shaky steps; it's about empowered action and taking the reins in my own life. I think that daughtering is about having new insights into old patterns of relating, starting with my relationship with my mom and extending to my relationships with my dad, my grandma, my friends and my world. Daughtering is claiming my vision. Now maybe that's action worthy of a super-heroine.
~
INTERESTED IN HAVING A CERTAIN TOPIC DISCUSSED? EMAIL IN YOUR SUGGESTIONS TO eliza@motheringanddaughtering.com
|
|
|
|
|
Sil Reynolds, RN, has been a nurse practitioner for almost thirty years, during which time she has specialized in women's health, eating disorders, and a Jungian approach to psychological and spiritual processes. She is a therapist in private practice in Stone Ridge, New York. Sil has been an ongoing advisor to Omega Institute's Women and Power Conference and a consultant to Eve Ensler's V-Day projects related to body image and eating disorders. For over 10 years, Sil assisted and led Geneen Roth's Breaking Free From Emotional Eating workshops across the country.
Eliza Reynolds is a sophomore at Brown University, where she is studying Psychology, Gender Studies, English, and nonfiction writing. She is a certified Teen Peer Mediator, a counselor at the The Wayfinder Experience summer theater camp, and an SOS Trained Peer Educator for Planned Parenthood. In high school she helped to found Scarlet, a magazine for teenage girls. Eliza recently served as an advisor to Eve Ensler for her newly released set of monologues for girls, I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World.
|
|
|
