Happy International Women's Day

What I know "for sure" about being a woman is unfinished. 

I do know gender impacts your personal safety, how likely you are to live in poverty, what kinds of jobs feel within reach, and whether or not you feel entitled to voice your most passionate perspectives.  We will need International Women's Day for a good long time to come, and we'll need it to do its job for all the genders.  

And I do know I love being a woman, which feels like more of a paradox everyday.  It's like this:

warm body late night  
bath bubbles buzz
lip stick sweet cream 
apricots
hips, hips, hips, 
spinning like tops 
hiding diamonds 
in praise
of flowers and tulle
and the twelve signs
whispering steady streams
of warning and love

These.  

These good things I learned from my mother.  The rest I learned from being a mother. Mothering is the kind of bowl that is bigger than the brain, you know, that can see the wrong things and love the things, and get up every morning hugging and fighting at the same time and not fall apart. 

Which is not to put mothering on a pedestal, but to say that a maternal perspective, one in which one person works on behalf of another less powerful person, or one in in which taking care, not optimizing, maximizing, or winning, is the primary motivation, gives life, encouraging tiny green shoots of goodness to make their way up through the cracks of impossibilities.

Happy International Women's Day.