I’ve been looking forward to the debates all election season and even let the kids stay up til 10 to watch. I’m glad I did, too, and not just because they fell asleep the minute we marched upstairs.
I want them to remember this moment in history.
“I like the woman,” Little A said early in the night.
“That’s Hillary,” Big A told her. “I like her too.”
I’m happy you do, my sweet A’s. Hillary is resilient, hard-working, ambitious, self-made, successful, strategic, and incredibly smart. She is a boss bitch, and I believe all women should aspire to boss bitchdom.
Aspire to be President of the United States of America one day. It makes me proud to live in a time when you can set that kind of goal.
One of my favorite fantasies is my time machine one—where I’m the hot, bedazzled Queen of Studio 54, shimmering under the disco ball and inventing the dance moves of the future—but then I remember, no, that was a shitty period for most women; that 2016 is actually the best possible time for our gender, where opportunities abound, and girls can run the world, Beyoncé style.
The night before Leymah Gbowee won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to lead the women’s protests that toppled Liberia’s dictator, she was asked how American women could help those who experienced the horrors and mass rapes of war. Her response: “More women in power.”
This is the Golden Age of the Boss Bitch, and Hillary is proof.
So, yes, I loved the debates. I loved it for the woman on stage and for the message her presence tacitly sent my daughters, but I loved it just as much for the buffoon. Because ironically, it was Trump who made me think of emails. His signature, brute, incoherent snark was immediately reminiscent of my own low-level work nemesis.
I’ll call her Donald. (She’s no Duck). This woman is entitled and unimpressive. She brags endlessly about all the things she did in her last job, though I’m not quite sure what she’s accomplished in her current one. Best of all, she sends rude, incoherent, litigious emails, and then copies half the organization. The first time I got one, I was appalled. But then Ms. Mahogany put it in perspective: Donald may have been insulting me, but she was also putting “her stank out in the open.”
Quoting Maya Angelou, Ms. M added, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
In that respect, Work Donald is not unlike real Donald. She is also the exact opposite of my Work Hillary, henceforth referred to as the Lioness.
Like Hill, the Lioness is resilient, hard-working, ambitious, self-made, successful, strategic, and incredibly smart. I am the Stan to her Eminem; I’ve wanted to write this essay forever, written it a million times in my head, in fact, but never on here out of fear I’ll flub the words.
The Lioness is the Muhammad Ali of prose. She’s smart and talented and funny and kind, and while anyone can be the first two, funny and kind are legit.
My friend Samantha Stevens once said that the Lioness was always the smartest person in the room but never made you feel like it. That description summed her up perfectly. She was the Jon Stewart to the rest of our Stephen Colberts: “All of us who were lucky enough to work with [her]…are better at our jobs because we got to watch [her] do [hers].”
She no longer works at my organization, and in a way, I actually helped her land her new position. She loves it and rocks at it, because of course she does, but she could be doing more. She is such a brilliant speechwriter, I bet even sexy Jon Favreau would Stan her.
She’s beautiful, too, with curly, blonde hair that she usually wears straight, and a gorgeous smile that she’s perfected with the just-right blend of two different shades of lipstick. She has a bellowing laugh that you can’t not love and a hot motorcyclist husband who would be played by the guy who played Sawyer in the movie version of their life.
For a while, I had a work fantasy in which she abandoned her workaholic ways and moved to Hawaii to lounge on the beach. Sawyer would surf and sail the days away, and she’d dream up pithy, poetic slogans to stencil on seashells or carve into surfboards for basic bitches to buy on Etsy. That visual cracks me up.
The Lioness should be VP for communications somewhere, running shit because she’s the kind of boss bitch who leads by example. But that’s not really her thing. “Everyone’s wanted me to go in management,” she once told me, “but I’ve just wanted to write.”
That’s part of why I idolize her so.
I might be a good writer. But I’m no Lioness. If we were singing His Eye is on the Sparrow in church after school, she’d definitely be the Lauryn Hill.
The Lioness should be working for Hillary. Truly. She should be working on “poh-lit-i-cal” campaigns (said with a finger wag and Southern drawl). She is so unbelievably talented that it’s a damn shame the world isn’t hearing her voice. Because it is fucking amazing.
In fact, my new dream job is for her to shape national and global policy through her prose. But I’ll settle for a letter/essay/speech on my site, addressed to my daughters.
Tell them what it means to be a boss bitch. Tell them why you’re voting for Hillary. Tell them why this moment in our history, in their young lives, is so important. Because I’m telling them already. But I know you can say it better.
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(Dammit, I wanted to end this with the “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” Bitmoji, but I can’t seem to find it. We’ll have to settle for this).
Update:
Now, this is pretty fucking cool. I just closed my browser, and my revolving screensaver was on this image.
