Fabulous Females

Hey everyone, Mother's Day weekend is always a busy time for me. There are a number of yearly event that take place and this year I had some great Mary Kay events also to take part in. Friday night I was able to take part in a "Ladies Night Out" event at Batavia Downs. I also help out at a craft show during the Mother's Day Luncheon on Sunday. This year because of my schedule I sadly could not make it to my Church's annual Mother's Day May crowning and breakfast, however I did attend the Fabulous Females Luncheon for the YWCA. I have attended this event for over five years and love it so much. This year I was honor to sit on the committee to help plan this event. I was a little nervous however, when a week before the event I was thrown in to speech at the event also!!!!! Below you will see what I said at the event:

Blessed is the heart that finds joy in the journey. While this statement is true, sometimes the road you take is filled with bumps, detours and missed exits making it not always a smooth ride. However it is the love, and support of family that gets a person through and truly adds joy to the journey.

I stand here today to speak on behalf my family; really it’s the family that we all belong to, the family of women. Family cannot it easily be defined because family is much more and reaches farther than our front doors.

Family is the support network, the community that is all around us. I would like you to take a moment and look around the room today; we are a room filled with fabulous females. I would also wager that as you look around the room you will find a lot of women who have served as your cheerleaders, role models and support throughout your life. That’s because we are all part of a network, a community, a family really of fabulous females.

I cannot emphasize enough from my own life, how important it is for women to support one another. I can tell you when I look around this room, I can see the faces of those who encouraged, praised and loved me into the women I am today. If it wasn’t for that family of a few good men and a city full of women that wholeheartedly embraced me, I would be a completely different person.

Sometimes the journey is not always easy, there is an old sixties song, that says “sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” This phase has stuck with me for a number of reasons. First because I was that child, at the age of ten I lost my mom. But also because it speaks to the importance and emotional connection youth have with their mother and mother figures. The influence of women have a lasting impact on us as we grow up, I now pass on the amazing knowledge and example that was set for me to everyone I come in contact with. We truly pass everything on forward.

I love the paper doll chains that are found on your tables, they are so symbolic of our family. You will notices that they are held together really because they are holding each other’s hands. This is something that as women we do, we hold one another’s hands and support each other along the journey of life.

The YWCA has as part of its mission to empower women, and this event serves as recognition of those fabulous females who have blazed trails and held out their hands to others. I have been lucky as all of us have been to grow up in this community and while we come together today to applaud the work of these recipients today it’s important to remember that the work of a family is never done. Because we are all women of influence, we all have the ability to enrich the lives of all those we come in contact with and it starts by following the example of the dolls on your table and taking the hands of those around you.

It’s important to have support at all stages in life; it is the support of the family that adds the joy to our journey. Throughout our lives we have milestones that are much more manageable or joyful with our family. As women we give so much, it is vitally important that we have this wonderful family to come back to recharge our batteries with and refill our cup. There was a time where women stood together in a bond of sisterhood, women supporting women. It is only natural that the pendulum swings out of balance for a while so that we may have the experience of what we do not want. It is up to women to bring the pendulum back into balance and bring back the sacred sisterhood we yearn for at our core.

Our family is much like a bee hive, we venture out in crazy world, every day different from the next. We gain something when we are out in the world, lessons and wisdom and then we come back together and make something sweeter from what we share with each other. But most important we are each like a bee. Many years ago engineers discovered that when you calculate the weight of the bee’s bodies mass and the span of its wings, it should not be able to fly. It’s a good thing no one every told the bee that, because then we would never have honey! Every day we are each like a bee, achieve amazing things and reaching to greater highs, doing the impossible.

No one part is stronger then the whole and this is true for our family. We are each successful but become stronger because of all the other members of our family. We stand together a strong community because of the work of those that came before us and while we help along the next generation to their next great height. We are all connected just like those dolls on the chain, connected and united as one family.

**My next blog will go a backwards in time and look at my cousin Sarah's wedding and my cousin Anna Maria's Baby Shower