January 19, 2020

This weekend, as women all over the nation march in solidarity and celebration of women’s rights, I remember the time my best friend and I marched in Washington, D.C., with her then-infant son.  

At the start of the march, her very expensive stroller broke and we were forced to carry her son — all 25 pounds of him — along with the stroller and his diaper bag for the entire route. 

In addition to all that stuff, we carried a ton of metaphorical baggage with us that day.

But think about how much actual baggage a woman has to carry all her life, and how a simple bag, purse, pocketbook or as I call it, the “black hole I carry on my shoulder,” can affect how women feel about themselves throughout their lives.

As a young woman, I traveled light. All I needed to carry was my lipstick and my ID in a tiny purse slung across my body. Moving on to young adulthood, I was proud to purchase my very first briefcase. Leather, of course.  

As my workload grew, that briefcase got heavier and heavier, filled with papers that beckoned to me every night with the guilt-ridden message: “Get back to work.”

Then came motherhood and the required diaper bag, which, thankfully, was also carried by my husband. But it was always my responsibility to ensure that it was filled with everything we might need for our little one. More often than not, at any fateful moment, the one thing we needed wasn’t in the diaper bag, which meant I had failed miserably.

Later, my small children required my bag be both a center of entertainment and a life-saving storage container for all manner of possible health crises. I could never predict what was needed because my kids were no longer predictable, so my purse was a disorganized, enormous satchel filled with all the wrong things at all the wrong times.

You know those women who, if you ask if they have something in their purse — a Band-Aid, medication of any kind, chewing gum — they’ve got it and they find it instantly? Yea, well, I’m not one of them. 

I was never the Mary Poppins mom who could anticipate whatever my child might need and then have it miraculously appear from the deep recesses of my bag. Mostly my bag was filled with dried old food, leaky pens, and tons of cards that had fallen out of my overstuffed wallet.

As an empty nester, my purse now has to have room, not for my kid’s needs but my phone’s needs: extra chargers, different headphones for different plug-ins, and screen cleaners. Given our needy phones, who has room for drugs or Band-Aids?

Even my husband takes advantage of my extra baggage. Inevitably, as we walk into an event, he’ll ask me to stuff his wallet and very large phone in it. Hey buddy, get your own bag.

Perhaps that’s why there’s a fashionable trend towards women buying enormous bags that cost as much as a car, so we can continue to be the repository of any possible need at a moment’s notice.  Yes, it’s nice to be needed, but I’ve got to say, my shoulder is killing me.

Instead, I’d like to celebrate the power that comes when women can finally afford to buy the bag they want to carry and know that it’s not the size of the purse that proves their power or even what’s inside it, but the choice to carry it with confidence for who you are and what’s inside of you.   

As women all over the nation march for their rights, may they march baggage-free so they can raise their arms together and celebrate their power in the world. 

As first published in the Democrat + Chronicle and on the USA Today Network