THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN’T WALK THREE STEPS BEHIND

MIXED MARRIAGES — 1

THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN’T WALK THREE STEPS BEHIND

You came from a country where women walk three steps behind their man,

Where a woman’s silence is praised and her obedience is the plan,

Where men speak like kings while women lower their eyes and stand,

But darling I was born with a mind, not a ring around my hand.

Your country women obey the men, or so you tried to make me see,

But I obey Jesus, and only Jesus gets that part of me,

I will not bow to a man’s temper, his rules, his pride, his decree,

You picked the wrong bloody woman when you came home to me.

Women are child bearers, cooks and cleaners, servants dressed as wives,

Owned by a man’s expectations while he wanders through their lives,

Expected to smile over saucepans, forgive the cuts and knives,

But this one has a voice, a brain, and far too many lives.

A man’s world? But your world is England, don’t try that shit with me,

I have survived enough to know exactly who I choose to be,

I am not some quiet little wife you can command and never see,

I am a woman with a mind, and that mind belongs to me.

I was fifteen when you got me pregnant, and I was still a child,

While you were looking toward a passport, I was trying to survive,

I carried a baby in my body before I understood my life,

And somehow I became your wife before I ever learned to be alive.

Two beautiful daughters came from the wreckage of those years,

Two little girls I held so tightly through the shouting and the tears,

They were the reason I kept breathing when I could not see a way,

The only little pieces of myself I never gave away.

I am creative, clever, intelligent, and I have things to say,

There is more to life than vindaloo served up on a bloody tray,

More than a pan of food from your servant, oh I mean your wife,

Did you really think my only purpose was to feed you through your life?

You wanted the wife who cooked, who cleaned, who stayed behind the door,

The woman who would swallow every insult and still give you more,

But I had poetry inside my bones and fire beneath my skin,

You married a woman with a soul, and tried to keep her in.

I talk from real experiences, I don’t invent the things I write,

I have dragged my heart through broken days and crawled back into light,

I know the taste of fractured bones, the silence after a fight,

And I know the loneliness of being betrayed behind my back at night.

I came to my senses slowly, fractured bones and broken heart,

I looked at what we had become and watched the pieces fall apart,

I had loved you through the ugly, through the damage and the scars,

But sometimes God lets you break before He shows you where you are.

You said once that you loved me, do you remember that?

You said it like a promise, like a hand upon my back,

But then you added the word only, and I heard the hidden lie,

You loved me only when I fitted what you wanted me to be like.

Only when I cooked your food, only when I played the wife,

Only when I swallowed anger and made your bloody comfort life,

Only when I stood behind you, never questioning your throne,

But I was never born to be somebody else’s own.

And maybe I should hate you, maybe that’s what people say,

Maybe I should forget the kitchen, the fists, the girls, the days,

Maybe I should bury everything and let the dead have their own way,

But the truth has lived inside my bones, and it will not stay away.

You died in twenty twenty one, but death cannot change the past,

It cannot make fourteen years of fear suddenly disappear fast,

It cannot turn the punches into love or make the broken moments last,

And it cannot make me sorry that I finally escaped at last.

So let me say it plainly, since plain words seem hard to hear,

I am not three steps behind you, and I will not disappear,

Your customs may have followed you, but they stopped when you came here,

And especially at my doorstep mate, I make the rules in here.

You thought a ring could make me smaller, thought a marriage made me blind,

Thought you could drag another country’s rules across my mind,

But I am not your servant, not your shadow, not your kind,

I am the woman who survived you, and finally got back her mind.

And if you ever say you loved me, I may laugh beneath my breath,

Because love should never feel like slowly learning how to live with death,

You said only once, and darling that one word told me why,

For the woman you wanted died there, and the woman I am survived.

So if my words sound angry, let them, if my truth makes somebody cry,

I am not an English woman slandering you, I am telling you why,

I am the woman who lived it, I am the woman who survived,

And I will not apologise for the truth I kept inside.

I was fifteen, I was a mother, I was a wife before I knew my life,

I learned your food, carried your children, and learned the shape of being a wife,

I gave you fourteen years of me, my heart, my tears, my life,

But you never got all of me, and that is how I survived.