This post is written by one of my favorite bloggers, Emily Wierenga. Emily is an accomplished artist, author and speaker and is dedicated to issues surrounding eating disorders. Emily’s work appears all over the Internet
, but she has her own blogs: Imperfect Prose and ED, Chasing Silhouettes. Please visit her at each of her sites to experience her tender and soulful writing. {She also has beautiful artwork and photography at each of these spaces.}
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I blame it on the way my mum hid in the closet when my dad was in the room.
The way she turned the white of her back from his glance, the way she blushed when he touched her and said, “Not in front of the children,” and the way her mother never let her husband see her scars. The scars from the childhood disease, the scars from birthing children, the scars that made her woman and her husband said they made her beautiful.
I blame it on the way they didn’t believe they were beautiful. These women who came before me.
And when I look in the mirror I see them. I see a girl who refused to eat at the age of nine, a girl hypothermic and dying at the age of 13, a girl who blushes now, when her husband touches her and who wears flannel, each night, to bed.
But I am more than my mother. I am the fallen sparrow, all wing broke and loved. I am the one whose hairs he has counted. I am dust, breathed into rib, breathed into garden and I am the one he died for.
“Where are you?” he calls to the Eve inside of me. He asks why I ate the fruit, and I say, because of my mother, and because of her mother.
And he holds up the glass, and I see myself for the daughter I am. I see the daughter of a God who makes no mistakes, and I stand naked, the white of my skin all scarred and holy. And I declare myself beautiful.
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