A prompt & a pearl: Week 8
A writing prompt and bit of writing advice/insight once a week in 2024
This week’s prompt is inspired by and created in honor of Women’s History Month (March) and International Women’s Day (March 8th).
The Prompt
I learned the words feminism and womanism in school, but I learned what they meant and what they looked like from the women in my family.
Bad ass women like my grandmother who left everything she knew and loved to make her way alone, without family or friends, to a new world—first Puerto Rico then NYC.
My mother who got her GED in 1985, already a grown woman with three children, and went on to work in the NYC Public School System as a para-professional for 30+ years.
My Titi, the first in our family to attend college in the states, who raised her four children on her own and in her 50s bought a home in the burbs.
My Abuelita Tinita who never learned to read or write, but made sure her children did. A woman who was born and raised in destitute poverty in Honduras and somehow made a life for herself and her children and grandchildren. I don’t know much about her or her story, but my mother’s writings have revealed a woman who didn’t let the unfairness of the world harden or break her. Her tenderness and love helped my mother survive, gave my mother something to lean on to and rely on, which in turn, is giving me strength as I write these new stories…
These women taught me to be the unfuckwithable woman I am, who is sometimes (often?) scared but doesn’t let it paralyze her. A woman who has done it her way, sin pena ni remordimiento.
Who are the women who inspired you to be the person you are?
The Pearl
Remember what your ancestors endured, what they sacrificed so you could have the life, the opportunities you have today. Remember that and honor them by never stopping, never quitting, keep going. Poco a poco. Día a día.
Los quiero mucho,
V
You're so lucky. The women in my family have been so negative that it's taken me till I was 57 to find two that I could be inspired by. Crazy. They were the outliers of the family, and therefore not liked. Now that I've learned about them, and gotten to know the only one who's still alive between them, I'm not even sure anyone in the family other than me admires them. I guess that's why I feel I have to write about them.