Being a woman begins with one little chromosome that sets a swirl of miracles in motion.
Being a woman is entering a world that carries you a little gentler, speaks to you a little softer, then throws you into the real world and expects you to succeed.
Being a woman is overcoming that world in stilettos--or sneakers--and a smile.
Being a woman is learning from an early age to hide regular, crushing pain, and still march on in spite of it.
It is learning to love that pain because it gives us the ability to carry new life.
It's having the superpower to grow humans in your belly--and being held responsible for that power every. single. day. of your life.
It's having to defend the choice not to exercise that power.
And it's mourning the emptiness of the loss of that power.
Being a woman is having the ability to create the purest nourishment for your child, both inside the womb and out--and being held responsible for that ability every. single. day.
Being a woman is a life of giving, listening, caring, nurturing. Wiping noses and kissing boo-boos. Stroking sweaty hair and cleaning puked-on toilets--even when you feel like dying yourself. It's giving until you feel you can't possibly give any more, until you look in the mirror and see smeared mascara and a ratty sweatshirt and gray hair and crow's feet and laugh lines and beautiful memories molded into your face.
It's helping your dad on a bedpan. It's giving your mom a bath.
It's watching the woman who taught you to be a woman suffer and die from the very parts that defined her a woman--and knowing that it was worth every magical moment.
Being a woman isn't about rewards for service or bravery or heroism--because that's just what we do.
Being a woman is not now, nor has it ever been, about the sum of the parts you see on the outside. It is the ugly, beautiful, individual, vulnerable, powerful, inimitable, phenomenal creation of God.
It is all of those things. And so much more.
Don't ever let this world tell you differently.
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