Girlhood

“Girlhood is a rose bush before it blossoms. Summer nights, barefoot runs daytime drawings, dirty hands, we sit on her chalk masterpiece. Freedom. She smiles up at me and I down at her. I braid her hair sitting on gym bleachers. And I wipe her puffy eyes knowing I can’t change what has been done to her. A light rose bud and a tangle of thorns left around a single red rose. I mourn her and she doesn’t know what mourning means yet. Men write women as a flower to be plucked. A pretty thing to fuel their art. Women are born art. I used to wonder when a gardener would come to water me. But gardeners forget about you, they find a prettier flower. They over-water you and move on once you’ve drowned…Gardeners are unreliable creatures.

I think I became a woman when I looked to the sky for watering. Once I could smile up at the sun and the clouds and shared a clever joke. or two. And they taught me how to water myself. Now I am a woman. I water myself. And so I became a garden. And all good gardens have walls. Don’t they?” - adapted from my poem “girlhood” 2019.

This micro collection was inspired by the loss of the “mother goddess” within our culture. As women we mourn the girlhood we once had, we mourn the loss of dignity and the loss of innocence that is so often ripped from our hands by the hands of men. The push of promiscuity onto us and the simultaneous need for a “pure” woman. These pieces represent that push and pull of social expectation and the devilish brand we receive when we take back control.