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Have you ever noticed how some of the deepest parts of you were shaped before you were even old enough to name them?
That is what today makes me think about.
International Women’s Day is meaningful, but the question that stays with me is bigger than the holiday itself. Why are women not celebrated every single day?
When I think about the people who shaped the way I see life, strength, love, responsibility, and faith, I keep coming back to women. Not in a vague way, but in a personal way. In the earliest parts of my memory.
I was raised around women whose strength came in different forms. I saw it in care, in discipline, in survival, and in a kind of tenderness that still knew how to hold firm. They were teaching me long before I understood I was being taught.
Even now, I find myself looking at women and wondering about the weight they have carried, the lives they have survived, and the private stories behind their strength. That instinct to value them, to honor them, and to protect what is good in them feels older than language in me. I see pieces of it now in my son, too, and that reminds me how deeply these things are passed down.
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Okay now let’s get back to the article.
Some truths settle into you early when you are raised around women who carry themselves with that kind of strength.
That is why one day has never felt like enough. Women deserve more than a date on a calendar. They deserve to be valued in the way we speak to them, love them, protect them, and move through the world around them.
I wrote a poem for that feeling.
Women
My first memories are filled with beautiful, strong women.
My eldest sister in the water, teaching me not to fear it.
My second eldest sister, showing me how to fight back.
My third eldest sister, teaching me to see the world through love and fear of God.
My mother in the kitchen, feeding five children,
telling stories between pots and heat and long days.
My grandmother, turning responsibility into something a boy could carry,
teaching me that a man should know what a home needs
and answer it without being asked.
Those women are no longer part of my everyday life,
but I still meet them in the way I think,
in the way I choose,
in the way I recognize what is good.
Now when I look at women,
I wonder what made them strong.
What they survived quietly.
What they had to become to keep going.
And when I watch my son
look after my younger cousins,
my nieces,
and my baby sister,
I see how some lessons do not leave.
They live on in us.
Some people give us life twice, once by bringing us here, and again by shaping who we become.
Women deserve more than a single day. They deserve reverence every single day.
