Thank You Raven!

 Raven,

I stumbled across this website while searching for stories about women with strong, capable hands. It sounds absurd, perhaps, but I have two daughters now, and they are moving into that treacherous age where they start measuring themselves against the tiny, impossible dolls the world insists they must become.

I grew up feeling like a brute. It sounds dramatic, but I was always the one whose hands looked bigger than the boys’ in our class photos. And my hands weren't even truly large! They were just… not delicate. The teasing, the comparisons, it buried me. I remember spending a whole summer wearing these ridiculous wrist warmers, hiding the evidence, embarrassed that I couldn't be one of those girls with small, perfect, feminine hands. It was a flaw, a thing to be apologized for, a physical sign that I couldn't quite fit into the space reserved for soft women.

Reading your archive, seeing how you take that feature, that thing that once held such shame—and wield it like a magnificent, elegant weapon… it has been a revelation. You speak about them as power, as conduits for storytelling, as the very definition of confidence. You demand the right to take up space.

I need that lesson for my girls. I need them to understand that size isn't shame, but capacity. I need them to know that strength and beauty are not mutually exclusive. I need them to understand that if a feature is ‘different,’ it is often just more interesting.

Of course, I can’t exactly send them this link. Not yet, anyway—for obvious, glorious reasons. But I will steal the philosophy. I will take the way you speak about your reach, your grip, the way you use your hands to gesture and express yourself, and I will translate it into a language they can absorb. I will teach them that their hands are tools for creation, not objects for shrinking.

Thank you for being so fiercely, unapologetically visible.

Thankful Mom