You scare them.
With your big blue eyes that have
seen so little yet
know so much.
With your wild hair and untamed heart.
You are a game-changer.
A rule-breaker.
You scare them:
The ones who have forgotten how to share.
The ones whose games are quiet
and contained
and mean.
They watch you rise up like a wave
and seek to drown you in the surging seas,
to poison the air you breathe.
You scare them.
They watch you play,
and they suffocate under the worlds of
possibilities you uncover with ease.
They want to put you in a cage:
to tell you white is black and black is white.
And if you fight
against this slow
decline
from
grace
they will tighten the shackles
until you capitulate.
But you do not need to be afraid.
Because they fear us, too
(Maybe even more than you).
We are the mothers and the makers,
The hug-givers and the paradigm-shakers,
The nappy-changers and the risk-takers.
The heiresses of a different truth
carried on the breeze of
midnight feeds and the inconsolable
screams of an indignant infant thrust
from the safety of my womb into
this world.
I will not let it swallow you.
We will not let them shrink your spirit
however hard they try to keep us down –
to distract us with the
daily struggle
of
surviving.
You have shown me a part of myself
that is fierce and raw.
Smashing through
the last remaining remnants
of my prison of pretence,
of penitence,
with your unrepenting innocence.
Rewilding my brain,
strewing mycorrhizal spores
to create an invisible forest
of support.
For years they tried to tether this
matriarchal force
to the kitchen sink.
And when that failed they used
the lure of equality to sever those
bonds that bring us to the brink
of power:
they tore you from our breasts
they convinced us to ignore your cries
until something deep inside
broke
ready to be filled with substitutes
that
line their pockets
and keep us
weak.
My liberation cannot come at the price of your oppression.
They say that we must go
our
separate
ways
so that the world turns as it should.
But know this:
There is not a single promise they can make
that would persuade me
to let go of your hand,
dear one.
You scare them.
But you make me strong.
Hello! I enjoyed reading this. Just what I needed when feeling despair at the state of the world. Thanks, Rebecca. (PS Just shared on FB @mumsreading which celebrates literature about motherhood.)
Thanks so much for sharing! Glad you enjoyed it 😊