I found this poem, For Strong Women by Marge Piercy, and I wept when I read it. It got right to the heart of my whole life experience. I am a strong woman, and I’m proud of my strength, but so many people react to me as if I never need help, never get weary, never pay a price. To those people I always shake my head and ask, “Have you read my blog?” I don’t know if it’s possible to talk more about the cost of everything I do and yet so many people only see what they want to see. They put people like me in a special “strong” category so that they can have some comfort that maybe our troubles won’t befall them. I get really mad at this because when I do need help and ask for it, people don’t hear. Or when I am just killing it they dismiss it as some innate character trait instead of giving me credit for what I’m slogging through every day. Each of us wants to be seen as a whole person and this poem dug into my heart at how it expressed that true strength comes from proceeding DESPITE the fear, not without it.
So I took this poem that meant so much to me, and I wrote it on my pants so that every time I wore them this message would walk with me.
by Marge Piercy
A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tip toe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of her eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet,why
aren’t you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not to be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way though a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry,you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say,and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
sucking her young. Strength is not in her,but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is other’s loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain,the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.
Originally published at Reese Dixon
DIY Dyed Poetry Pants
Reese Dixon - Motherhood and other creative adventures