by Von Rupert
Women are beautiful. Without makeup. Without pretense. Without
covering their mouths when they laugh.
Without a man, without children, without hurting other women.
Women are beautiful. With breasts that are big and breasts that
are small, with breasts that don’t match (because really they do), with breasts
that have been rebuilt.
Women are beautiful. With wrinkles, and pimples, and scars. With all three. With glasses, with braces, with wheelchairs. With brown hair and gray hair, with straight hair and curly hair, coarse hair and fine. With no hair.
Women are my tribe.
Lotions won’t make you beautiful. A diet won’t make you
beautiful. A pair of jeans won’t make you beautiful. All those companies with their flashy ads won’t
make you beautiful. For ten bucks they’ll steal your confidence and sell you a
bottle of crap and swear it’s the fountain of youth.
None of their models look like you. None of them look like me. I’m not that skinny or that blond or that tan
or that black or that curvy or that anything.
My smile isn’t that perfect, my lashes aren’t that long, my skin isn’t that
smooth.
I wasn’t conceived in a computer—photoshopped, cropped, and
whitened--and neither were you. Enough!
Enough of their ifs. If you
wear this bra, you’re beautiful. If you buy this cream, you’re beautiful. If
you starve yourself, you’re beautiful .
You ARE beautiful.
Your beauty flows from your mind and your heart as it swims
with your soul. Your beauty whispers and
shouts through your outlook, your deeds, and your passion. Beauty throbs
outward and inward through our tribe like heartbeats, like drumbeats. Like thunder.
Women, it’s time. Lift our tribe up. We’re connected, all of us, like those paper
dolls we used to cut out, the ones with hands touching. What you say to one, you say to us all. Don’t be so quick to criticize. Don’t be so fast to slap one of our own
against the bathroom wall. Don’t poison
our tribe to be cool, to be loved, to be bigger. Be a
woman who lifts us up and doesn’t shred us down.
I am woman; hear me roar for other women. I am smart. I am beautiful. I am the shared heart
of us all. Women are my tribe. They are my midwives. They are my doctors. They are my teachers and scientists. They are my comedians and my mentors. They are
soft arms holding me, fierce legs guiding me, sweet words lifting me.
I am their breasts and they are mine, and we need to nurse
each other until we’re all bursting with the knowledge that we are strong and
beautiful and more than enough to save this world.
I am Rehtaeh Parsons. I am Sojourner
Truth—“ain’t I a woman!” I am Marissa
Mayer. I am Dr. Vandana Shiva. I am J.K. Rowling. They are my mothers and my sisters and my
daughters. I AM and they ARE and you ARE. We are
ONE, and we are a tribe.
And we’re beautiful.
Von Rupert is a wife, mother,
writer, and podcast producer for DJ Grandpa's Crib. She mentors
other writers at Bob Hembree’s free writing course, http://writersvillage.com/f2k/
You can find her blog at http://wheretheshadowsmeetthelight.blogspot.com/
and her flash fiction stories at http://www.everydayfiction.com/.
