Thanks for Blazing That Trail, Joan Rivers!

Let me just get this out of the way: I am a gigantic, unabashed, unapologetic Joan River’s fan. Any woman who has so much trouble keeping her mouth shut and saying the right thing that she decided to make a successful career out of it deserves undying devotion.
But as amazing a comedic talent as she was she was even a more amazing because of the trail blazing she did for us working moms. She lived her truth, she did what she loved, and she wasn’t afraid to play in a male dominated arena. She was a high-profile working mom in the sixties when women were still expected to be homemakers or if they were edgy maybe secretaries or teachers. The sixties may have been swinging for some folks but there’s a reason we needed Gloria Steinem to put feminism on the table in the seventies. Joan was before her time and her bravery laid the foundation for us working moms today.

I also love that she didn’t want to be a man she simply wanted to be a mom and a professional who loved what she did for a living. She had the good sense to have a vision of what she wanted and to draw hard boundaries to make that vision a reality. And she did this before there was a road map, before support systems, before resources were a page click away to remind her to hang in there.

There are so many amazing Joan quotes but by far my favorite comes from her 2010 interview with Terry Gross on NPR:

“When I was pregnant, I was sitting with a very famous comedienne and her little girl in the park, and her little girl fell down and cut her knee — and ran to the nanny. And I said right then and there, ‘My child will run to me.’ And I, from the beginning — we stopped everything at 6 p.m. We always had a family dinner even if we went out afterward and had another dinner with friends. Everything stopped at 6. I would take the book and cross off everything that didn’t have to do with Melissa. I was a Brownie Scout mother. And those uniforms. You don’t know what I sacrificed for my daughter. I mean, Terry, please — a Jewish woman in a khaki dress. Not to be believed.”

Timeless. As real a concern today as it was fifty years ago – being an involved mother not the Jewish woman rocking khaki. Thank you Joan, for showing us how to laugh at the crazy, follow our hearts, and never apologize for doing it our way!

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