âwhen i have a daughter, i will shower her in poetry. all of the best poets of my generation, and the ones before and after it. i will present to her the most emotional writers i have ever read, both male and female; sara teasdale, langston hughes, maya angelou, ernest hemingway. nayirrah waheed, rupi kaur, rudy francisco, neil hilborn. i will educate her on modern poetry, the rights and the wrongs of it, how for some, it has morphed into more social media aesthetic than actual emotion, how short poetry can be beautiful, how there is more to it behind the stereotype and stigma. she will learn from them. she will learn the art behind healing, the power of her own beauty, the weight of her own worth. she will read these poets and she will grow into and beyond herself. and because of that, i will not be showing her yours. why? because you will pin her wings to the ground. rip her leaves from her branches. you write about brokenness like its a pretty lipstick color, like it brings out the color of her eyes. as if getting crushed is what will make her lovable to others. i will not let my daughter think that being broken, being small, being quiet, is the way to find somebody who will love you. i will not let her be convinced that crying in the shower and barely eating is the only path to the right person. i will not allow her to read about what types of women deserve respect and what she has to be to have value. i will not let her internalize competition against other women. she will learn that she is respectable and valuable because she exists. she will learn that being loud is okay, that being angry is okay, that being strong is okay. why? because that is how i was raised. loud, angry, and strong. my mother, and all the women in my family, are larger than life. they are filled with command and power. my mother can grab the attention of a room in seconds. she can get them to do whatever she needs them to do without protest. she bows to no one. people see her and know she is somebody to respect. it is not in her looks, but in her stature. in her eyes burns a fire that canât be put out no matter how hard somebody may try. she never once told me to be afraid of my volume. she taught me to be loud, and to never apologize for how my voice captures a crowd. my mother is the first to protest an injustice in this world. she will do what she can to fight back. she did not shelter me from all the violence and evil on our planet. ânow is not the time to be complacent,â she told me, âdonât listen to anybody who says otherwise.â she believes in fighting. she believes in change, in revolution. she instilled in me the same inferno you can see in her eyes. she gave me the courage to speak out about anything and everything wrong, and to never regret doing so. my mother went through toxicity. she had her battle with abusive lovers. and she came out of it by herself. she did not rely on somebody else to save her. she glued her own pieces back together. when my first heartbreak came barreling into me, she wiped my tears, held me, and hauled me back to my feet. i fell after that, again and again, but soon, i was able to get back up on my own. i used poetry as a crutch and limped my way back to wholeness. and it is because she did not let me bleed out. she trained me to be resilient. so i will give that to my daughter. i will give her an earth-shattering voice, a burning desire to fight, a suit of armor. i will teach her that pain does not make her more beautiful, that being too much for some people to handle is not a crime. that wanting to grab attention does not make her less worthy than those who seek to avoid it. she will grow up knowing that she is not more or less than any other woman, and that women are not to be her competitors or her enemies. she will learn that she is not a tally of cracks and missing pieces, and she will know how to pick herself off the ground. there is nothing feminist about saying what types of women are worth something. all of us are valuable, and what is bronze to you is shining gold to another. there is nothing feminist about comparing us to addictions. we are not contraband, we are not a sin. we are not something you can use to take the weight off of your shoulders after a long day. there is nothing feminist about claiming a broken girl as your trophy. our sadness is not a prize to be won. if you try and fix us just to add our name to your victory list, you are no better than the one who made us this way in the first place. there is nothing feminist about making money off of our experiences. stop writing about us. write about yourself. we are not here to be your muses. we can tell our own stories. being a feminist is more than just writing about girls. itâs more than calling us pretty. if youâre lifting some women up but putting down others, if youâre romanticizing our struggles, if youâre reducing us to prizes and alcoholic beverages and cigarettes, itâs all a moot point. you may as well not bother writing about us at all. so no, i wonât show my daughter your poetry. and i hope others wonât show their daughters it, either.â
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