Dear Melania

Dear Melania,

You may not know us. Most of us have ventured through life pretty much beyond the stage lights. You however, have made a series of decisions that have brought you front and center on the world’s stage. To some extent, we know you, millions of us know you. The entire world is watching you. Well, we are first watching your husband (kind of hard to avoid his presence these days) but we women are quietly, knowingly, watching YOU.

We women are watching you in the silence of our living rooms, our bedrooms, our kitchens. We catch you on our gadgets in between errands. Many of us are holding you in our hearts, something we women do for one another when we sense a woman moving into soul crisis.

We are mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts. We are women who have toyed with the same temptations you have been presented with in your life. We have dated powerful men. We have posed in all our nakedness, defiant. We have accepted gifts, laughing at the strings of indebtedness dangling from them. We have rationalized a thousand little compromises to our souls, feigning disregard.

For awhile we kept arsenic at hand, next to the rolling pin. Then we marched. We burned bras. We ‘withheld’. We went back to school. We wandered into the locker rooms, the lecture halls and the board rooms. We dressed up. We dressed down. We studied. We ran with wolves. We slayed wolves. We stared down the ‘red shoes’. Some of us put them on, and danced to our deaths. Some of us just smiled, turned and walked away into the vast unknown, faith clutched firmly in our fists.

We are watching you now Melania and we want you to know something we all have come to know:

Healthy women do not go where they are not wanted.

Healthy women do go where they are recognized for their true worth.

Healthy women go where they are included, respected, regarded.

Healthy women do not tolerate physical objectification.

Healthy women demand unconditional acceptance of their true selves.

Healthy women embrace their own sovereignty in the world.

Healthy women support other women, in thought, in action and in example.

Healthy women support the daughters of other women, in thought, in action and in example.

Healthy women do not need to measure their value though the lens of a man, or any human.

Melania, if you love, we respect that.

But if you do not, lead yourself away. We’ll meet you there.

-Your sisters

©2016 Nancy Kotting   All rights reserved   Reproduction by permission only