The Volcano

For my daughter

Volcano Woodcut, Blue Specs Studio

Happy Tuesday, F Word-ers!

This week, for you, a poem. Something different. Something I wrote for a poetry slam, that felt like it needed to be shared this week.

Love, light, and third degree burns,

Steph

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My daughter is a volcano that explodes on the daily, sometimes often, and I feel her anger in that way that I feel a hot stove that has burned me before

And I am told that we are meant to teach our children to be good and to that I say: fuck you

“goodness” is another word for “smallness” and even though the ways in which she is already so angry at the world at two years old are the same ways I am angry at thirty-three

I sometimes want to cower in the face of her greatness

Motherhood is hard.

When she doesn’t want to be touched she will tell you by yelling “I don’t like that” and I think about the ways we are brave as little girls in our personhood and how the expectations of “Goodness” destroy it

I am told that I should discipline this out of her, this personhood, this birthright to have her space respected as a man’s is respected and never questioned, that when grandma and grandpa go in for a hug it is somehow her responsibility to bear the weight of their hands

And I think of the hundred different hands that have grabbed me, at fourteen the pastor of a friend’s church and in high school a guy on the water polo team and in college the boy who came into my room and the next day when I told my boyfriend he told me to lower my voice because people were listening and I would embarrass the guy who did it

And even when my toddler yells in public and I get the look, the look I used to give before I had a toddler,

I want to say to her:

Little one

Never lose your voice because they will try to take it from you

And I think that by next week I will teach her to say:  get your hands off my fucking uterus

She knows the words clitoris, labia, vagina, vulva, because those words are her power and her power is her one-way ticket to the destination of herself

We are taught that our bodies are dirty because we are made of flesh and hair and sweat

and that our blood is dirty because it comes from a cycle when blood on the battlefield is somehow heroic

And to those soldiers of misogyny I say:

Beware the volcano

You can try to climb her but in the end her depths are places you can never go, her soul runs so hot it will burn you alive