Last year was a year of powerful women. My network of feminine was loud and strong and full of driving energy. We were exploring our feminism through the firm knowledge that we could do it alone, together out of love and want but not necessarily out of necessity. It was a year of independence and autonomy and needing no one. We celebrated the women who spoke out, who held their heads high, who accomplished the large. We were validating and we were loving, but mostly we were strong. This year is a year of powerful women, too. But this is a softer power, one that celebrates the nurturing sides of the feminine. This year is about a mother and her new child, about the embrace between a girl and her grandmother in Moana, about grace and unconditional love. The fire has not gone out, but it is simply a warm, life-giving one now, not one that rages and destroys. This fire is about flowers and holding hands and quiet tears. It is about long nights discussing the intricacies of our deepest desires, about seeking the most good. It is about Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s Mother’s Milk, and seeking a connection with our Heavenly Mother. It is about finding the divine feminine in each of us, about embracing and unlocking our purest energies of love and acceptance and sisterhood. It is still brave and it is still strong, but it is also gentle. This kind of female power is about the Mother’s Milk poem that says "Where's da mama in this story?” an earnest seeking for the mother who has always been there to hold me. My mother is a strong woman. She has a professional degree and a perfect verbal GRE score. She has spent years upon years making things with her hands and her imagination, delicate and determined. She has done remarkable things in order to keep all of her children alive, and sacrificed so much for other people’s happiness. Pregnant and with another daughter dying in the hospital, she took a week away so she could be with me on my tenth birthday. She spent summers teaching me about the parts of flowers, hours painstakingly helping me sew, and drove far with me just so I could fill my own soul. I don’t appreciate my mother nearly enough. It is about the thankless and painful years Eliza from the musical Hamilton put into raising children, about how she intentionally made herself quiet in the eyes of history and, in the final song, when she sings, “I put myself back in the narrative.” It is about the girls in my apartment who have pain in their hearts and about the times we’ve sat together to try and ease it. It is about the children who have looked up to me at summer camps when I didn’t deserve it. It is about the times we are nothing but kind. It is about the little girls who bring you bandaids and kisses when they think you’re hurt and it’s about the child life specialists at hospitals who gave me presents when I wasn’t even the patient. It's about hand-picked flower bouquets in little vases on kitchen tables. It is about the quiet days spent with my grandmother making fudge and the long nights when a baby is sick. Women are icons of self-sacrifice and love, and I am eternally and continually thankful to know so many of them. I still appreciate those loudly powerful women. They have a very important place in the world and in my own heart, and I have every intention of being a part of them again. They are the ones who incite change, who create generational legacies. The young women in Florida right now are saving the world, and I love them for it. We should never forget those who speak out and stand up. The world would be terrible without them. But in the past year I have grown to appreciate the gentle strength even more. It is beautiful without trying, simply because it is trying, and it is honest, and it is brave. It is brave because it is raw. Embracing the delicate, gentle, graceful parts of femininity is setting yourself up for pain, but in the most holy of ways. In my incredibly limited experience of womanhood, I have seen and felt that amazing female magic permeate my soul and the souls around me, a beautiful network of the purest power. Unlocking that within myself is equally innate and insane, hard to grasp and yet so comfortingly natural once I do. The ingrained unity between a group of women is more powerful than anything else I have experienced, and I intend to experience it again and again and again. These strengths are not mutually exclusive. One can be both loud and quiet, and it is in that oxymoron that the power of womanhood resides. It is in the quiet examples that I most find what it means to be a woman. It is in the loud examples that I most find how to show it. It is in the quiet examples again that I most find how to use it.
poems by Rachel Hunt Steenblik
2 Comments
vfg
2/23/2018 01:38:42 pm
You keep surprising me with your insight, and it’s all delight. Please keep writing.
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Natalie Eames
3/4/2018 10:56:08 pm
Oh, how I love this! So much of what you wrote is what I have been trying to find the words for what I feel.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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