Women Like Us
An elderly woman came to my gate
with her daughter beside her.
And there, standing inside the yard,
was a version of me
slightly older than the woman I am now.
The gate stood wide open
like something in me
had already surrendered.
She remained outside.
I stood within the yard.
Yet somehow
I was standing on both sides.
She told me
she knew about her husband.
No screaming.
No spectacle.
Only two women
holding the unbearable knowledge
of what loneliness can make sacred.
“In biblical times,” she said,
“women like us would have been stoned.”
Women like us.
Not you.
Not me.
Us.
I asked if we had come
to destroy one another now.
But instead
she came bearing peace.
I brought her a cake I had baked
with my own hands,
soft as apology.
And she offered something too —
I cannot remember what —
only that it did not wound.
Then her daughter became mine.
Or maybe
she had always been mine:
the younger self
still certain about womanhood,
still believing womanhood
could be lived without contradiction.
And as the older woman,
I apologised to my daughter.
For embarrassing her.
For bringing shame to our home.
For failing to be
the kind of woman daughters
are taught to admire:
faithful, devoted,
incapable of becoming complicated,
a woman so good
she never wounds another woman.
I apologised
for becoming human
in front of her.
But she looked at me
with more sadness than anger.
She wondered
what sort of sorrow
must live inside a marriage
for another woman
to mistake being wanted
for being loved.
And the older woman —
who was also me —
spoke of the younger woman
she once had been.
Melancholic.
Lonely.
Foolish in the tender way
young women often are.
Certain that desire
was proof of worth.
Certain that being chosen
could quiet the ache
of invisibility.
There was grief there.
But no cruelty.
Only mercy.
And standing there between
the open gate,
the daughter,
the shame,
the cake cooling between us
like an offering to God,
it no longer felt
like two women
facing one another.
The daughter belonged to both of us.
Or perhaps
she was both of us.
And suddenly
the open gate
no longer felt like a border.
The women standing
on either side of it
and the girl between them
collapsed into one body.
It felt like one woman
finally meeting herself.
