An Open Letter to the Women I Have Been.

To you:

The poet, the scientist, the mischievous turd, the cynic, the painfully anxious, the mewlingly broken hearted, the activist, the daring, the fearful, the introvert, the extrovert, the girl who broke the rules, the girl who fumbled the important things and lost badly, the girl who couldn't lose, the dropout, the scholar, the giggling fool, the insecure, the certain, the drunk, the farmer, the builder, the actress, the nurse, the nanny, the server, the loner, the one who was crushed, and the one who stood up, the artist, the self-lover, and the self-loather, the couch potato, the mountain climber, the girl who hates pudding, the one is afraid of heights but won't miss the view, the girl who jumped in a frozen creek naked at the stroke of midnight in the woods with her best friends, the mother who will tell her son many of these stories.

There have been days when it feels as though to have been one of you is a betrayal to the ones who came before. A betrayal to the one who survived the lack of love, to have ever been the one who begged for it.

I watched the girl who wanted to be president lose her keys, her shoes, her dignity in the pursuit of fun.

Countless times, when craving flirtation and prettiness, I felt the scorn of the 8 year old girl who spent hours formatting and writing for her "Girl's Only Magazine" Her tiny blue eyes watched me put on too much blush, and then wash it off again.

I have crucified you for your incongruencies, for your inability to keep it together. For your inability to take only forward steps. But for all that, this one has that one's nose, and she of the peaceless days long slumbers has the eyelashes of she who faded reluctantly into rest with the stars dripping quicksilver meteors down all around her at nearly the breaking of morning. And bit by bit I can see the way her cheekbones are present thirty pounds in either direction. For all of my shame, I can and must claim you all.

I can see the same mouth that once spilled its pain as hate after having too long been told of its deficiencies has in it's time laid a kiss which brought a man to it's knees, a kiss which brought a mother peace, and gave a child rest.

I can see the family resemblance, that each of us has needed the other, will need the next, and generations of myself will have to push forth from this long and varied life and though they will take with them the hereditary "me," I can ask nothing of you who have been and will be but to be yourselves. To take the tiny cellular blocks of memory and happenstance and make what you can of them. You have all been so very resourceful.

So in the dark morning with the heater churning and the sweet shuffling morning sounds of the man I love murmuring through the house, I choked on my gratitude.

Because one morning soon, I will wake up and the air will have changed around me. Will have changed within me, and this season of uncertainty will be simply that; a season. One small lifetime to be lived out, without complaint or resistance, until I am restructured, resurrected by change.

So thank you.