Womanhood is an unmistakable display of tenacity, compromise, and resilience – a perfect blend of these things in fact. My grandmother, more than any other woman in my life, has modeled this type of womanhood. From a young age, she learned to navigate the challenges of being a poor woman of color living in the Jim Crow South. She was the oldest of 13 children, and she eventually dropped out of high school to help care for her younger siblings; one of her earliest jobs saw her picking cotton in the dead of the Louisiana heat.
She became pregnant with her oldest child at just 16 and moved to Chicago with her first husband. There she faced challenges as well. She dealt with years of domestic abuse and poverty that sometimes left her family without essentials such as hot water or electricity.
And you know? I would never have known any of her stories had she not shared these parts of herself with me. Despite all of these things that she endured, she only ever had love to give to everyone around. She truly had a heart of gold – and not just a gold-plated heart, but a heart of solid gold. It was, simply put, the heart of a woman.