Jessie Romoff

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Teaching Our Daughters To Take Up Too Much Space

From the moment we are unwrapped from our mothers arms
the way the first rose blooms from a field of winter:
We are taught the hereditary habit of shrinking.
From as early as I can remember
I had bookshelves spilling with stories of princesses
locked up in towers, plagued with a tail instead of legs, accidentally eating poisonous apples.
All waiting for a man's mouth to make them human again. To kiss the death
out of their poison.To save this poor girl, stitched from tissue and silence.
From a young age, I was taught that to be a woman
was to be rescued by someone else. That my body was not my own,
unless a man made it one.
It is a teaching I do not remember learning
To bum down this childhood house.
When you are around someone long enough, you begin to pick up their habits:
The way my friend would pinch at her stomach.
A woman in a hotel bathroom, criticizing the mirrors
Watching my mother earn 75 cents to a man's dollar
High school girls are terrified of wearing a skirt to school
because their teachers would remind them of how their bodies
were unwanted distractions, because they were hindering their male classmates education
And here is the lineage of shrinking women, sacrificing an 8th grade girl's bony knees
for the sake of excusing another teenage boy.
It is a habit of making our girls hate themselves.
People wonder why girls always say "sorry"
before asking a question.
it is because we are taught that our voices take up too much space
that we are an apology.
But what I should have been told
was how there is nothing more powerful. more dangerous
than a woman who loves herself i
There is nothing more beautiful and violent
than a woman,
working 4 shifts a day, or a mother who runs the household,
who can say I love myself
Instead of giving our daughters stories
of how to be rescued, how to be saved, how to be forgotten
let‘s start reminding our daughters of all the battles we fought, and won
Because we are soldiers in silk
fighting this war on body and mirror
learning to plant blossoms in our bruises
to grow gardens in our gashes,
healing wounds from history's grenades
remind her she is not an apology
They say a woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.
So give her bedtime stories of Joan of arc,
a young girl who led the french army into a battle against the English, and won.
give her kisses of Cleopatra,18 years when she became queen of the nile
fill her lungs with the song sacagawea, with a baby on her back
hauling lewis and clark across North america
Sing her lullabies of Malala,15 when she demanded that girls be allowed to receive an
education. A man slithered onto her school bus
shot her in the temple 3 times.3 years later,
with no apologies, she stood in front of the united nations
told them how her country was on fire
We are not here to burn the skin of our sanctuary
we are here to rebuild the ruins of our temple
long ago destroyed
instead of learning to say "I love you"
we could learn to say "I love my self"
the most ruthless battle cry there ever was.

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