The campfire crackled on the warm July night at our cabin. Laughter filled the air as I sat around it with my family. We began talking about my future. I had just graduated high school a month prior and in a month I would be beginning university. We were discussing how much money a teacher would make and my aunt, a teacher, was telling me what it’s like to be a teacher when my mom out loud said “hopefully you’ll marry a rich man and never have to work”. I felt anger start to build up. Was that all she thought I wanted in life? Was that all she thought women wanted in life? It is such a simple phrase yet I could tell she meant it with one hundred percent honesty which made me so much more angry and frustrated. I countered, unable to properly explain my side and what I wanted in life, that I would still work even if that did happen because I could never sit and do nothing. She replied with “why, you wouldn’t have to?” I could not for the life of me understand her point of view. She did not raise me to rely on anyone else and work hard yet she was telling me to search for a man that could take care of me. It made me sick to think that that’s what my own mother thinks I, as a woman, would want in life and am capable of. I was so sad and annoyed with her but at that moment I realized she wouldn’t have said that if I were male and she would have never said that to my older brothers. At that moment I knew she did not see anything wrong with that advice even as the exasperated look was still blatantly on my face. The warm July night suddenly felt cold. Upset, I got up from that horrible conversation that made me as a woman feel so small, I went to my room bringing the smell of campfire with me and went to bed, hoping in the morning I would feel better than I did at that moment in time.