Womanhood
Published in the 2026 KEEPERS Youth Poetry Anthology
in my family, during gatherings
of dozens of relatives who celebrate
birthdays and deaths, there’s a
period of time between the main
course and dessert, where men go
outside to smoke – in silence, I
assume – and women stay to
clean, set the table, catch up on
whatever bullshit husbands said
during the meal. for those twenty
minutes, every sip of hot tea taken
in the absence of men, dissolves the
restriction on their tongues, and the
women of my family come back
to life.
gossip exchanged like currency and
love counted on cups of shared tea.
sitting on мама’s lap, I ask where I
come from. she says - жүрегімнен.
from her heart. I learned that women
in my family were raised to be the
shadow, but are too bright not to be
the light, guiding me to know that I
could do anything, to know that I
could build or break a mountain, but
despite their broken homes and
cuts from picking up shattered
loyalty, the women in my family
raised me to build. because for us,
double X stood for extra love.
my womanhood was never really a
“hood,” we call her “Ауылым” or
“поселок городского типа” and
she is still waiting to be loved in
all three languages. still, I’ll make
100 out of a third of me that does
not need translation.
my earliest memories are of learning to clean the kitchen. serving
others before a full plate for myself. because my womanhood
came with a rulebook, not a guidebook. too many don’ts
and not enough hows. папа taught me, do not speak
too much, and I still wonder how else to feel heard?
brother said do not dress like a slut, iI still have
not learned how to be seen past my body. I
found sanctuary in girls’ bathrooms,
inverting my stomach, thought
making myself smaller
would get me
noticed.
but the
women in my
family taught me
how to find confessionals
within each other. taught me
how to turn makeup into war paint
because every day is a battle, and while
their tongues may have whispered the truth,
they taught me to speak loudly, as if every moment
of my existence is a twenty-minute break where men go
outside to smoke. they taught me that “dressed like a slut”
looks like a skin that is finally breathing after years of suffocation.
Taught me that speaking “too much” is done to fill up generations of silence before me.
so go ahead, try to tell me what I am, and I will speak in
spite of you. filling up hungry bellies with my words,
like the woman in my family taught me to.
