Young Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
It takes a lot to love yourself as an adult; for growing teens, that’s an even taller order. Poet Zoe Bernstein of Jericho inspires readers with her confidence this week as she looks ahead to the distant future, asking, “How do I hope my own child treats herself one day?” to reinforce the body positivity and self-love she’s begun to foster within.
Measuring my daughter
By Zoe Bernstein, 16, of Jericho
I will not birth my daughter onto a scale.
She will not be measured in pounds or ounces.
My stomach will not deflate by inches or shirt sizes.
I will measure my daughter in laughs and babbles,
then toddles and wobbles, then monkey bars and scraped knees.
We will eat ice cream and zucchini,
and on hot nights we will order fast-food fries from a cheap drive-in run by high school girls,
and I will want to hold their hands and shake their heads,
and tell them to measure themselves with dandelion crowns and parking tickets.
I will measure my daughter in the short stories she writes,
the dress code violations she gathers like trophies, the baby birds she saves in boxes.
I will make her cry when she asks for a scale and I say no,
I will make her scream when I delete her calorie-counting app and bring home pie.
Cherry will be her favorite, and she will ask me to hide it at the back of the fridge,
and I will build it a shrine and always have a slice ready when she wants it.
I will cry late at night when she cannot hear it about how much I miss my toxic love for the scale.
And I’ll find a great therapist to meet three times a week and let her open my eyes and wipe my tears.
I will measure my daughter in student council elections,
and meetings with the principal, and watermelon rinds.
I’ll measure her in menstrual cups and trips to New York City.
When she asks if I see her as fat or skinny, I will reach down her throat and snuff out her false hope —
I will say I’ve never looked, and I will be telling the truth.
I might measure her in tears, or kisses, or late nights over math homework.
But I will not measure her in pounds or ounces.
