To be a woman:
To be a woman is to bleed.
From between our legs, as young as nine, when the only worry in our young minds should be about scraped knees from riding bikes and scooters, the visceral meaning of womanhood begins to leak through the soft cotton amour of childhood.
The impending doom of what could be warded off by a child's imagination has cracked and no longer can be repaired.
This is the fate of a woman.
From that day we bleed.
Shoving gauze of soft smiles and politeness into bullet holes bore into our bodies by men.
Anything to stop the bleeding and remain a fragment of the person we once were.
We’re blithe in the presence of grown men that become aroused to the notion of humiliating us.
We try to feign ignorance and keep a straight face in times of turbulence to maintain modesty.
Our nails embedded into our palms, we bleed.
And a storm has formed.
Through the storm we seek the same refugee we watched our mothers seek. Always thinking that the outcome will be different.
This one is not the same.
We’re not our mothers.
Our love is different.
It’s respected.
It’s mutual…
as long as you’re the one doing the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning and you pay your half and you look after the child that you nearly bled out for.
Nurturing, tending, cooking and cleaning and ‘whoops’ watch the knife…
bleeding.
Always bleeding.
It’s equal love though, isn’t it?
It’s what you wanted, right?
When you bore two children and you’re raising three, that’s what you wanted. That’s what you bled for.
That’s what you bled for?
Who has he bled for?
He walks into the kitchen, boots scuffing the linoleum on the way.
Dumping the scrapped leftovers of love you gave him in the early out of the morning into the trash and tossing the containers into the sink.
He pats the heads of the people he pretends make him whole and goes to the shower to rinse off the 10 hour shift of hard labor that didn't involve his family.
You don’t expect a kiss at this point because you learned that asking for what you deserve could come with a broken orbital socket.
So you let your heart bleed.
You bleed it into your kids.
You let them know that they are loved.
You pretend that everything is okay.
You go to work, you come home, you bleed and you bleed and you bleed.
Hopeful that your daughter doesn’t see.