When she was a little girl
they told her she was beautiful
but it had no meaning
in her world of bicycles
and pigtails
and adventures in make-believe.

Later, she hoped she was beautiful
as boys started taking notice
of her friends
and phones rang for
Saturday night dates.

She felt beautiful on her wedding day,
hopeful with her
new life partner by her side
but, later,
when her children called
her beautiful,
she was often exhausted,
her hair messily tied back,
no make up,
wide in the waist
where it used to be narrow;
she just couldn’t take it in.

Over the years, as she tried,
in fits and starts,
to look beautiful,
she found other things
to take priority,
like bills
and meals,
as she and her life partner
worked hard
to make a family,
to make ends meet,
to make children into adults,
to make a life.

Now,
she sat.
Alone.
Her children grown,
her partner flown,
and she couldn’t remember
the last time
she was called beautiful.

But she was.
It was in every line on her face,
in the strength of her arthritic hands,
the ampleness that had
a million hugs imprinted
on its very skin,
and in the jiggly thighs and
thickened ankles
that had run her race for her.

She had lived her life with a loving
and generous heart,
had wrapped her arms
around so many to
to give them comfort and peace.

Her ears had
heard both terrible news
and lovely songs,
and her eyes
had brimmed with,
oh, so many tears,
they were now bright
even as they dimmed.

She had lived and she was.
And because she was,
she was made beautiful.

Author: Suzanne Reynolds, © 2019
Photo credit: Nina Djerff
Model: Marit Rannveig Haslestad

I think many women have to be braver and smarter to survive in a world full of brutish men. Not all of us are but enough have yet to see the light that makes it tough for the fairer sex.

She wasn’t supposed to be there of course. She was meant to be in relative safety, sitting on a transport barge in the English channel with all the other journalists. But the previous evening, Martha Gellhorn had boldly boarded a hospital barge with her press credentials and the story that she was there to interview nurses. It was a sham, of course, but it got her onboard, where she found a bathroom and locked herself in. She spent a miserable night, horribly seasick, but when she crept out of her hiding place the next morning, she had a front-row seat to one of history’s greatest moments – the invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944. Thousands of ships and 160,000 men faced the great cliffs as tons of bombs rained from overhead. It would be perhaps the greatest news story of all time, but Martha found that it wasn’t her skill as a writer that was needed. The sea was filled with dead and wounded soldiers, and she leapt into action, helping wherever and however she could. At nightfall, she waded ashore with the medics and found herself on Omaha Beach, a stretcher-bearer with blistered hands, soaked to the skin with sea water and exhaustion. She would labor through the night, the daring she had known the night before transformed into bravery as she followed the mine sweepers. In the days to come, Martha Gellhorn would leave that place a different person; no longer an observer of history, but a participant…the lone woman in the D-Day invasion. Heroism sometimes arrives on a wave of opportunity, and we either rise or we don’t.

Credit: Beloved Children of the Holocaust