I Want None of It

For Strong Women

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe 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 the 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 somehing others are determined
not 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 through 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
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others 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
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

–Marge Piercy

Like many women, I have had a problematic and complex relationship with what it means to be strong. My ancestors were Mormon pioneers, and they kept journals full of strong woman stories. Your children die. Your shoes fall apart. Your handcart fails you. Your health deteriorates. (“It’s only a flesh wound!” in Monty Python terminology…) No matter what happens, the edict remains the same: Keep walking. And the second law is like unto it: Do not whine.

Growing up, my sister Rebecca had a nickname for me: Mister Barlow. I was a very physical kid, with a headstrong contrarian nature. I hated the rank sexism of the task assigned in our large family, so of course I refused the girly jobs inside the house in favor of the heavy lifting outdoors. That proclivity became a habit, and the habit became a personality trait that I had to unlearn later in life, slowly.

Thank you Marge Piercy for such a crazyass poem, one with a message I know all too well.