Preparing My Daughter For Rain

by Key Ballah

Your body is a gracious land, show it mercy. Always.

Your body wasn’t made to be loved on occasion. It was made to be loved every night with warm hands.

Don’t be concerned with other women’s beauty. Only admire God’s amazing work and wish them well, this earth was made to bite us in half and grind us to bone, but we were made to be kind.

Be kind to your body. It will speak for you, or against you one day. Remember.

Read the first chapter of your favorite book, if you can’t stop, read until you can.

Fresh air buries sadness.

Touch all of your scars and remember their birthdays, remind yourself how far you’ve come.

Do not allow your body to become a civil war, it is almost impossible to recover.

This body is brave even when I am not. Even when I am a puddle of sadness, this body carries the weight well, and I am no light being.

My body is accustomed to compromise. I learned at a very young age how to negotiate space. How to apologize for the way that my body fills all of the places that it occupies and all of the places it doesn’t. Teaching my body to grow free, and wild, and to not be afraid to exist, has become my life’s work.

You are an entity. An important part of this universe. A thread in a grand tapestry. You are beautiful, you are powerful, you are here.

My body is not a weapon that I was meant to use against myself. It is an intricate garden, who’s flowers remind me of God.

I pray that you never wake up in the morning, with loneliness waiting for you at the foot of your bed.

I pray that you never find yourself kneeling in front of a toilet, with two fingers pressed down into the back of your tongue, trying to paint the toilet bowl in your self-loathing.

Have you ever looked at your body without the lens of your colonized mind?

Hating my stretch marks

Legs that have had to run from people they’ve trusted. Hands that have had to hold themselves,

Your body wasn’t made to be consumed by greedy men, with no understanding of your value. You are worth infinity, do you understand?

I have forgotten, after all of the heartbreak and bad decisions, to thank my heart for not giving up. To thank it for fighting for me, because I know that it’s tired so tired.

When you ask God to save you, but instead he says “swim”.

Remember, that your grandmother survived, she lived through the love, she weathered the thick black of the storm, it took her years, but she did it. And you Queen, were cut from the same cloth.

Sometimes I want to be desecrated in a way that makes me feel alive,

I only ever asked him to love me deeply and earnestly, but he still turned around and said, that I was too heavy, that I was asking too much, that he was only one man. After him I learned, that sometimes, it takes two men to do, the work of one woman.

The bible says, that Eve’s sin was punished by pain in child birth. But the older I get and the more that I see, It has become clear to me that Eve’s punishment wasn’t the pain, her punishment was Adam himself.

When I have a daughter I will tell her You grew between the cracks of my skin, I built you, cell by cell, over nine full moons, a flower grown from blood. Somewhere in your beautiful mind lives the distant memory, of loving only the sound of my voice and the slow hammer of my heart, you trusted me before you knew me. So if you ever question your capability to love fully, remember you have loved before, and you will love again

Once I was an African, but now I am told to run before the word stains my skin.

I tell them about the boat, but never the anchor.

Remember that I learned not to apologize for my fire.

The ache in my back,

If you ever turn around and find that it has been 3 months since you’ve faced Makkah, and your shame is so over whelming that it crashes over you like a tidal wave, DO NOT RUN. Let that disgust wash over you and force you to your Knees. Your guilt is a mercy, accept it, be grateful.

When your soul feels dry, when it is thirsty and cracking. Call a woman that you love, and tell her you love her. Tell her why, Tell her how. Ask her if she needs anything, Ask her how she is feeling. Tell her you appreciate her, Pray for her.