A Simple Valentine From Me To You

This past summer I took a writing course called “The Power of the Pen” focusing on using poems or plays to address a social issue about which we were passionate. You can guess which one I chose!

Our first assignment was to write a short monologue that someone in history who had inspired us might have spoken. I chose Eleanor Roosevelt. Here is what I imagine she might have said about herself, her husband, and Lucy Mercer, the woman she loved:

What is a Woman?

It’s not hard to remember, the gentlest of touches on my hand. I think James or Franklin had done something unspeakable – or maybe just unkind – and she was comforting me with that most gentle of touches. Lucy.

And I let her, knowing I could never do that, knowing my hands were hard, my grip too strong, forceful, forged for pushing people forward or onward or away.

But Lucy had the ability to softly soothe, with her voice, too. Where mine was high-pitched, grating, unmetered, piercing, full of rigid determination and, yes, a certain amount of righteousness, hers was like poetry, the sweetness pulling you in and closing around you, fragrant almost with the lightest kind of passion, the undemanding safe kind.

And her body was rounded and molded, crafted with care, created to be seen and admired and love. Mine was erect, firm. Despite the planing and plumping of childbirth and age, it did not yield easily.

I had not the touch nor the voice nor the body, nor, mercifully, ultimately the inclination to serve him. What is a woman I thought as I turned away, as I looked away. Am I still one when touch and voice and body fail me in pleasing, and I let hardness and firmness and determination and righteousness, with piercing force, turn outward instead?

I send this as a valentine to all of you, to us women and to men, to people of all genders, who, with piercing force – and sometimes even with the gentlest of touches – work to change the world.