Mom shares important lessons and tips she learned from the women in her life to empower others

Womanhood can be a challenging and complex experience. Women face several issues and obstacles that can make life difficult as they take on multiple roles and responsibilities. Despite these challenges, women have made significant progress in recent decades and achieved many important milestones. When Amanda Ahlenius became a mother to two girls, she realized how valuable the knowledge of the other women in her life is for her. Ahlenious now shares the lessons she learned from the women in her life with people on social media to help them navigate the complexities of life with a little more ease, reports Good Good Good.

In a viral TikTok video posted in February, Ahlenious asked, “How much could we learn from each other if we all shared the random things that the women in our lives taught us?” The post received much attention, and viewers shared advice, tips and tricks they learned from their mothers, grandmothers and mothers-in-law, including using three bags in the trash can to minimize reloading, using dollar bills (which are six inches long) to measure something if you don’t have a ruler or cutting both ends of a tomato paste can and pushing one side all the way through to avoid scraping it out.

"Why be a mother when you can be someone successful?" is the norm many folks live by today. Regardless of the many social constraints laid down by social media, it is worth noting that motherhood does not preclude women from becoming successful women.

Ahenious continues to share pearls of wisdom from her grandmother and other grandmothers on TikTok, compiling the information to help people navigate motherhood. “As a child, my mom, grandmas, aunts, teachers all gave me tidbits of advice I always just brushed off or didn’t pay too much attention to,” she said in a video. “Nowadays, I wish I could go back and listen to the advice they were trying to give me.”

Things like how to get stubborn stains out of clothes, make your house smell divine and manage work and family are all examples of knowledge we believe we lack, but it is always right in front of us. “I realized, we all have tidbits of information from our grandmas or other women in our lives,” said Ahlenious. The mom of two then began crowd-sourcing and even opened a Google Form for viewers to submit tips from their grandmas, which ultimately became the published book “Grandma Knows Everything.” Ahlenious hopes the book becomes a staple in the lives of women and encourages them to pen down secrets and pass them through generations. 

In February, Ahlenius also started a Facebook group where others can share their tricks in real-time. The group currently has about 1.4k members, sharing and embracing the familial knowledge and creating a network of women who don’t take each other for granted.

"After my TikTok went viral I knew there was an opportunity to create a community of women who wanted to share and learn wisdom from previous generations," Ahlenius wrote in the group’s description. "As young girls, we’re taught to compare and compete. It’s not until we’re older and wiser that we realize we have a lot to give each other, starting with the things our grandmas once taught us."