Rumor has it that behind every successful man there is a woman. So who exactly is behind every successful woman? Is it her mother, her girlfriends or is it actually another man? A father, brother, best friend or husband. Perhaps it is the same successful man who encouraged and inspired the same woman in his life to be the type of woman who would support him in order to make him as successful as he is.
Confused?
It is true that women are the pillars of society by virtue of being the caretakers of the home and their families and we know that many families make a society. At the same time the women we admire-those who seem to be behind every successful man-were nurtured by someone.
Knowledge passed down from our mothers and their mothers before came from their relationship with their husbands and or fathers, that is the men in their lives at that time. After all it’s only another man who can decipher what another man meant by what he said.
Bearing in mind it may be true to say that behind every successful mans woman is a man and most likely the very man who is successful.
If you don’t believe me picture this. How often do you spend time with the man in your life? It does not have to be physical contact. Even thoughts of him throughout the day, a random phone call, a text, that extra ticket to a sold out event that you begged for and knew who exactly would have loved to go, calling up your girlfriends to ‘decode’ what he meant when he said and why it was said the way it was, impromptu lunch dates…
Or the contrary, we might even spend time with the men who have hurt us in various ways by meditating on every hurtful thing they said and did. Plotting on revenge and vowing never to forget what they did and said. Worse still are the men who were never there for us. Either physical or emotional presence was lacking in our lives and there was no one to protect us while we were still vulnerable.
When we look at the men we admire in society and if we look carefully into their lives we see how they grow together with the women in their lives, only then do we realize that life comes full circle. The successful mans success is not void of mutual understanding and love between the man and the woman. Be it mother and son, wife and husband, daughter and father or brother sister-blood siblings or otherwise.
So as we celebrate our womanhood we should say three cheers to the men in our lives.
The ones who broke our hearts and we vowed never to love again and we did fall in love again. Those who destroyed our hopes and caused turmoil in our lives that in turn strengthened our faith in God. To those who strained our hearts to the point where we forced to find sisters who would shoulder some of the burden with us and we cannot imagine our lives without them.
The men who pampered us silly and we still know that deep down we will always be our daddy’s little girls. To those, who saw the beauty in our brokenness and brought it out of us for the world to see it. To the ones, in our lives, who turned our tears into gladness.
Maybe if it was not for the men in our lives we would still be in Venus…and earth is the only place with oxygen.
