This is a letter that every woman should read on Mother’s Day

This is an ode to all women. To all the mothers, sisters, daughters and girlfriends. This is an ode to the stripes on our bellies, the lumps on our thighs. To our lioness power. To the fantastic beings we are. 

Dear woman,

Our softness, our skin that gives in a little – that’s where I see our beauty.

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The stripes on our bellies, the lumps on our thighs, sometimes move me because they are so human.

And oh, how we don’t learn to handle the glances at our bodies – judging, inspecting, longing – until these glances have become rarities.

I love our bellies when we’re pregnant. Subtly puffing up at first, then big and round and powerful, showing the fire in our bosoms that belongs to anyone but ourselves.

I love our capacity to feel deeply, to sense and empathise, and how carefully we cherish and show it.

How we can suddenly become furious like Electra, with a lionesses power that may have been slumbering, but that was at our disposal the whole time.

I see us in the tops of my mother’s fingers, rough as they are from working hard and caring.

And in my friends’ bursts of laughter, their generous arms that are so good at comforting waving highly in the sky when we dance.

In the silent looks of my girl child, as she’s looking for places tob ring her love – all the love that flows freely and unsuspectingly, because no one has stolen any of it yet.

See how we want to guard our sons and protect our daughters, and still choose to embrace them with arms open.

How we’ve been belittled for centuries, used or put on pedestals way too high, and how it taught us to get up again after we fall.

How we’ve learned to endure tough power systems, because we knew that ‘the soft powers will win in the end’.

Here we are, as daughters in a long line of grandmothers and mothers, as neighbours, doctors, dancers and presidents.

Would you see how all of us are born as perfect creatures, but some of us have gotten convinced of the contrary?

I thank all of you, my sisters, for every helping hand, supporting wink, understanding glance and kind word. Never forget how magnificent we are.

With love and high regard for all that you are,

Susan Smit

Photo: Ana Gabriel