Birthday Wishes

At 9:30pm on July 15th, 1985, my mother's water broke in the kitchen of my parent's first house. My dad ran in to see it, then ran out and started calling people and screaming, "the bag broke! the bag broke!" Off they went to a hospital, where my mother had a C-section. A couple of hours later, a big full head of black hair breathed its first breath on its own at 1:03am on July 16th, 1985. They named that screaming wrinkled little girl Larissa Daniela Bonfim Dzegar.

Today I went to an intense yoga class to sweat out this past year and make space for a new year in my life and, since I intend to live to be 100, to make space for the next three quarters of my life. It got me thinking about what I've accomplished and seen in the past 25 years and what I'd like to accomplish and see in the next 75. So, mirroring what Gloria Steinem did for her 75th birthday, where she made a wish list for the remaining quarter of her life (she too, intends to live to be 100), but instead of making the wishes about herself, she made them wishes for the world, I'm making a wish list for what I'd like the world to experience while I'm on it for the next 75 years.

In the next 75 Years I'd like...

- To attend many, many legal gay marriages.

- To see actors be treated with respect and dignity. (This is a euphemism for: To see Hollywood and agents and casting directors burn in hell. Make someone else feel like a dog.)

- To see a woman be elected president of the United States.

- To be GIVEN health insurance that covers birth control, birth, gynecological visits, menstrual needs, and abortions.

- To read about how sex education in high schools around the world include lessons on how much sex can be enjoyable.

- To open a fashion magazine and see women of all shapes, sizes, heights, colors, backgrounds, and lifestyles displaying clothing that is affordable and accessible to every woman.

- To talk to women around the world and hear them say "I love my body."

- To teach my daughters and grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters self-respect and self-love rather than skills to find a husband and procreate.

- To see domestic workers being given the same value, benefits, and treatment as investment bankers.

- To read about Hugh Hefner's death.

- To see the government fund the creative arts.

- To give natural birth with a mid-wife and see other women valuing that over hospitals, drugs, and male doctors.

- To learn that every child in the world has access to water, food, an education, a playground, and a park.

- To learn that Fairy Tales such as Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and any other sexist illusion-selling brain-washing story has been banned.

- To see fathers staying at home taking care of their kids as much as mothers.

- To see higher academia become a right rather than a luxury.

- To see "beauty" parlors close down and in their place open libraries and health centers for women.

- To turn on the TV late at night and see women talk-show hosts who do not feel the need to talk and act like men in order to keep their position.

- To see Brazil win 10 more world cups. (I just had to put that in there...)

- To see the distribution of weapons be discontinued.

- To walk past the "women's interest" magazine section at Barnes & Nobles and not find a single magazine that says, "How to get your man to propose" or "How to win the battle against cellulite."

- To eat ice-cream and not feel guilty after.

- To go to a yoga class in manhattan and see a room full of people of color.

- To see men who want to be single fathers pursue and be given that right.

- To hear my daughter ask me, "What is love?" and be able to answer, "It's the greatest gift in this life, and I have known it so many times."

Happy Birthday to Me!