Dear Women,

We are marching!  We are marching for rights and equality and everything in between.  We are rising up and reminding the world we are here!  Simultaneously, we are participating in something that I have been praying, begging, and hoping goes away in 2017.  It has been weighing on me since mid-2016.  I have been hoping the turn of a new calendar year would present the opportunity for this to fad to go to fad heaven and live with all other fads of the past, like tall bangs, french rolling your pants, ked tennis shoes, and choker necklaces.  Can we please all agree that we will stop putting on our hand our hips in photos?  Please.  I can’t even with this one more minute.

If you keep doing it, then I have to keep doing it, and then you keep doing it, and then the generations of women and girls behind us will keep doing it.  And we all just keep doing it for fear that our arm, and possibly our waist, won’t look as thin as it could had we not propped our hand – OPI painted nails and all – on that popped out hip of ours.  It’s just time to join together, fight this together, as women, who are all created equal, and agree that we will place our arm, hip, hand, or any other body part where it naturally falls at the time of a photo opportunity.

I can’t swoop my hair to the right while also trying to make sure my hand is on my hip and one leg is slightly bent while I’m smooshed between an in-law, niece, and a best friend in a group photo at one more party celebration.  I can’t watch others do this too.  I can’t stand for it anymore.  If there’s a photo with my Grandmother next to a cake for her birthday, I just want to put my hand on her shoulder.  I want to smile and even dare to wear a ponytail.  I don’t want to worry about how big or little or muscular or fat my tricep looks.  I just want to pose by the cake and smile, and then eat the cake.

Ladies, we’re better than this.  We don’t have to put our hand on our hips in photos to look pretty.  We don’t have to have our hand propped up like an extra family member in a Christmas family photo shoot one more day.

We need to all agree, women across the nation, that we will simply smile for a photo in our natural state.  Please join me in this fight!

Your Sister,

Brooke

Photo by Kimberly Potterf