I know a woman who was long unaware of her power . . .
she, fierce, fought all-comers to little satisfaction or effect and otherwise shrank . . .
not until her 36th year did she begin to claim her inheritance . . .
when she stepped out on her own by the small step of offering to write a newspaper column for our town in England . . .
when she met a man strong enough to let her be strong . . .
and exercised it first by finishing her degree and leaving her family . . .
whose three sons came one by one,
leaving Dallas and their father’s house to live with her in a two-bedroom apartment . . .
since, she has ever served non-profit organizations
rising from secretary to executive
using all the tools and more gained in raising three sons,
having never had brothers . . .
when she began to see her own dominant and frightening father
as a person with whom to have dealings of her choosings . . .
and to whom not to look for confidence and esteem . . .
only since then has he come to respect her . . .
she is a woman fiercely loyal to her blood family . . .
only very rarely equivocal . . .
who taught her boys how to raise and be raised by dogs . . .
who has spent thousands on two unhealthy spaniels . . .
who fought through her own cancer to move her own difficult Spanish mother from Florida
and then tend toward her dying,
and her retarded sister . . .
who mourns the trailer park loss of her blood in her first grand-daughter,
lost through the selfishness of her father,
his mother’s youngest son . . .
who respects her dreams, intuitions
and one time god chewed her ass while she sat at her desk . . .
who reads the national enquirer . . .
who understands every word our dogs say and translate for the rest of us dumb . . .
with the capacity during the workday to mollify god-unfearing power people in the top of the Hopkins hierarchy . . .
to call social services for her sister’s labyrinthine benefits . . .
to guide graphic artists towards her vision . . .
to have lunch with one of her sons . . .
to crunch numbers of her call center . . .
to interrogate surgeons for her father’s lung cancer . .
who threw her mother under her house in florida.
to push and challenge her own doctors
to treat her cancer with sufficient aggression and boldness . . .
who paid cash for a used British racing green BMW Z3
in which she drives her eldest granddaughter
through the country lanes all year round with the top down . . .
who had to have a house of her own,
detached and uncovenanted before she could enjoy peace . . .