Ening

“You are a reminder of everything she’s losin’. All mothers are envious of their daughters to a certain degree because the daughters are at the beginnin’ of youth while the mothers are losin’ theirs. It’s only natural to feel jealous. That’s all your mother is doin’. Rearin’ her jealous head because as you grow more beautiful, she fears losin’ her own loveliness. If you know your own magnificence, there goes her power. Her tellin’ you you’re no beauty is her bein’ a woman before bein’ a mother.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir