You Are Not Alone

We decided to visit a new-to-us trail on Monday afternoon. I have been pretty sick for the last week and haven’t been able to do my typical spin workouts so I thought a walk would be a good substitute. This trail goes through our town forest and we thought we could depend on it being a simple walk in the woods.

It was not.

Somehow hidden to us was a relatively massive elevation gain in our own town. I had no idea there was that much of a vertical change in such a small area. It ended up taking us just over an hour to walk about 2.5 miles!

There were times when we had to walk behind the kids and give their bums a little push up the hill.

We had to hold each other’s hands to get through the slippery leaves and around and over boulders in the trail.

Maybe one or two of us decided the best tactic was to sit on our bottoms and scoot down the slope at times.

It was a surprisingly difficult walk, but we made it through with each other’s help. And I couldn’t help but be relieved: I’d been considering exploring that trail on my own. Now, I would feel fairly confident about taking the walk on my own, but I would have been intimidated and scared to do so if I’d never been on that trail before.

The good thing is, we are never alone. We have each other. The next four years are going to be very difficult; we’ve been down this road before. The relationships we’ve built are important and we will get through this together. And it’s time that we burn the patriarchy down to its bare bones and rebuild the way the world sees women.

We will read difficult books and learn from them. We will hear difficult stories and learn from them. We will learn how to build a better world and we will do it. Together.