By Angela Williams Glenn 
Watching our daughters grow into who they’re becoming is beautiful and painful at the same time.
As a mother to teenage daughters, I know these years of discovery are where a woman’s journey of discovering her self-worth begins. I have walked their path, and though they will stumble and question the path as we all have, the beauty is they’re going to find their way so much sooner than I did.
I can see it in the stubborn way they resist some things. I can see it when they speak up in objection. I can see it in the way they hang on to every story I tell, hoping to lead them on their own path.
Because, those words “not good enough”. . . . I know the feeling. I know it too well: rejected, runner up to someone else, second best or second choice, just flat out never gonna be good enough in the eyes of someone else.
I could go through the decades of my life at this point and cast stones at whose judgments of not good enough threatened to bury me under a pile of uncertainty. Sometimes it was a sport or coach, sometimes it was a coworker or boss, sometimes it was a would-be friend, sometimes it was a man.
There was a version of me at one point who put my sense of self-worth in what others thought, and they will too. But somewhere along the path of rejection and not good enough, a woman drops the weight of everyone else’s expectations of her. She sheds it like a dead skin.
She forges ahead, her head held high, knowing her self-worth was never something of theirs to give in the first place. It was always her. As she did the things they said she couldn’t do, as she conquered her own fears and uncertainties, as she failed and saw that yes she could rise again, she saw her self-worth had been and always would be hers and hers alone to give.
It’s not arrogance you see in the woman who strolls amongst you like she knows it all—that’s a woman who knows the most important thing there is for a woman to know herself and all that she’s capable of.
She knows her value, and she has mastered not letting anyone take it from her. For myself and maybe others in my generation, it’s taken me decades to learn this, but I think our daughters will see their self-worth so much sooner than we did, and what a force they will be with it.
In the meantime it’s hard to watch our daughters struggle under the expectations of everyone else, feeling as if their worth is tied up in others’ expectations and opinions of them.
But watch, mommas, they will become this woman, and that’s where the beauty lies—in watching them find her within themselves. They have to walk this path themselves but along the way, they’ll find that woman they never should have doubted in the first place. And she will be something!
by Sherry White 
by Megan Kewaza 
by Amber Kuipers 
