Little Girls

There are women walking this Earth that are not women, but little girls. For it is the experience that gives you that title and not the years you have lived.

There are little girls who are already women without reaching legal age and it is because of their responses to the chaos experienced that have earned them this title despite the few years they have on this Earth.

This has been my experience and the same for some of my students.
I can recognize them with my eyes closed but with my ears and heart wide open.

‘I am tired’ she said. ‘I am tired of always having to defend myself or feel like I have to because the behaviors around me are more attacks than casual interactions.’

She is always en guarde. And so was I when I was her age.

The world was and still is broad and uncertain.
The most my grandmother did to ‘teach’ me about danger was to cage me in our apartment after school to shield me from the world and always tell me to never go anywhere with anyone. It didn’t help that she didn’t include ‘friends of the family’ because that was the predator I experienced when I was eight and everything changed after that.

After that experience, I saw the world with different eyes, and ‘suspicion’, ‘distrust’, ‘doubt’, ‘angst’ and ‘fear’ became usual feelings. I saw every adult differently and the only savior in my eyes would be my grandmother YET even she, was flawed. Her inability to speak the language and self-professed lack of education made her unreliable and relinquished her of any responsibility because she would throw the responsibility to UNDERSTAND the world on my ‘little girl’ shoulders.

‘Yo no se Ingles. Yo no entiendo lo que estan diciendo. Para que vas a la escuela?’ – she would say.

TRANS: ‘I don’t know English. I don’t know what they are saying. Why are you going to school?’

Some people never get to know this about little girls like me, but I am reminded every time I cross paths with students like Bella*.

She has the strength to fend for herself like a woman and even though she may respond or react like a child would, curt, sassy, and disrespectfully, I know she deep down inside wouldn’t if only she was considered. The weight of the responsibility it takes to raise yourself is felt and who answers in those moments of exhaustion is the child.
I have learned that when you consider a child, their voice, their worth, their value, and their talent, they respond differently.
Not all of the time but most of the time.

I can honestly say that my grandmother’s high regard for religion rubbed off on me… what seemed like endless Sunday school lessons, ‘little missionaries’, the primroses, daisies… allowed me to learn how to forgive and move on or I could frame it as a ‘coping mechanism’ because the constant compassion for those that assaulted and killed my innocence numbed me and I became an insensitive young adult and now an adult.

The little girl that lives within me peeks through the heavy veiled curtain woven from scar tissue every now and then.
Rosie has learned that only those who have demonstrated to genuinely love her are those who are allowed to play with her. She can feel trust, she can feel safe, she can feel love with the very few.
Rosa on the other hand continues to be tired but is learning through experience how to let go and be soft like little Rosie.