Puzzle Paragraph One: Daughter of God

Once upon a time, I was the scum on your bathroom tub. I was the jam between your wart-infested toes, the lint in your chubby bellybutton, the sweat under your unshaven pits. Always trailing ten steps behind my male counterparts, I walked under a cold shadow, longing for the kiss of sunlight, even if the exposure burnt my fair skin to a rosey pink. I was tired of playing the insignificant mouse. I yearned to be the elephant: substantial, important, and dominant. If my wishes were to be granted, I would bask in the sun as the great pink-skinned elephant that my heart tells me I am inside.

(Holy snicker doodle, they really do exist.)

Submissive me, I prayed to Jesus Christ for guidance. But it struck me like a lightning bolt across a midnight sky: Jesus has a chiseled face, defined muscles, and a beard. Testosterone courses through his veins. Jesus is a man! We do not call him the Daughter of God. My mother is the Daughter of God. My neighbor, Ms. Indepene, is the Daughter of God. My sister is the Daughter of God. Jesus is the Son of God. He walks in the sun as the Son, and here I am, kneeling beside my bed, asking a man to lead the women of my generation out of the slums, the shadows, the Red Sea, and into the light. Even in my prayers--my personal thoughts--a male rules over me.

I unclasped my pale palms and stood up next to the end of my bed, where a quilt my great grandmother sewed for my thirteenth birthday lay disheveled in a pile. I ran my fingertips over its raised fabric squares; each was a different pattern, yet they were sewn together to create one coherent piece of art. I could not rely on myself alone for change. One square does not create a quilt. In fact, it usually ends up in the scrap bin without hesitation. Women needed to create one united power for feminine progress, with everyone's individuality weaved together to foster strength and in turn, change. We needed to become persuasive together, our words needed to drip with rhetoric, to drown out the deep voices of the men, to wash them away in the flood. We needed to build our own arc and sail to a New World, accompanied by all the pink elephants of the land. We needed to write our own history.

What we do today influences what we accomplish tomorrow.