The Last Will and Testament of This Woman – From Elders to Youth

For all my women friends, and maybe especially my younger friends, the following poem by Claire Braz-Valentine is for you – for us (Claire was delighted to give permission for me to run it):

The Last Will and Testament of This Woman

To every woman who is my daughter
To every woman who is my sister:

I will to you first of all, my diets—
my grapefruit diet, my orange diet, rice diet, wine diet, water diet,
banana diet and fasting diet.

I will you every time anyone ever said to me, “Have you ever
thought of going on a diet?”

I will you TOPS clubs, Weight Watchers Clubs, Pill Pushing
Doctors, amphetamines, water pills, thyroid pills, and laxatives
that I have known
and I have known many—

I will you all the times I wished the scale would say 125 instead of 145

I will you a living girdle,
an eighteen hour girdle,
a four way stretch girdle,
a two way stretch girdle.
an I can’t believe it’s a girdle girdle,
a rubber girdle full of holes that “breathed” when I couldn’t.
a girdle with legs so tight I left it in the public bathroom in the waste-
basket—
a garbage can full of girdles,
And the day a man told me, “You got an ass that could kill a man”
And all the time it was killing me.

I will you my bras,
my bra with under-wires that pushed me up,
my cross-my-heart bra that pushed me out,
my padded bras that made me fuller,
my natural bras that made me natural,
a garbage can full of bras—
a dresser full of bras—
and the everlasting indecision about whether to or not to.

I will you something called a Merry Widow
which is something like an iron maiden.
I will you all the tears I cried lying on the bed at six o’clock in
the morning after my junior prom,
trapped in the damn thing
till I thought I was squeezed to death
And my mother finally freeing my tortured body.

I will you my diaphragm that didn’t fit,
that got stuck,
that got a hole in it,
that slipped,
that I forgot and wore for a week.
I will you my diaphragm pregnancy.

I will you my coil that made me bleed every day for a year.
I will you my bow that made me bleed every day for three months.
I will you my pregnancy that I lost because I bled so much.

I will you my birth control pills
that made me throw up,
grew me big breasts
and then spots on my face
and a terrible case of nervousness
and a good start on a beard.

I will you my douche bag
filled with lemon flavored scents,
mint flavored scents,
flower flavored scents,
washed rinsed and flushed with flavored scents.

I will you all the foams and jellies and sprays
and suppositories that I was ever
tempted to insert into that most mysterious warehouse of undesirable
smell.
I give you them all.
I give you them all.

I give you my false eyelashes
false fingernails
my perfume
my pancake makeup
my blusher
my rouge
my eye shadow
my mascara that made my eyes bigger,
that made my eyes darker,
that made my eyes like a distorted clown
when I cried.

I give you every ad I ever read
that made me think I needed these things.

I will to you every bit of shame I ever was made to feel
about being the woman I was born to be.

I will you all of this
in the hopes that once you have all these things
you will realize that you don’t need them
much sooner than I realized that.

–Claire Braz-Valentine