It was 2022 and I was playing hooky. I didn’t want to go to class, so I did the classic “my stomach hurts” and “If I feel better I’ll go to school later.” My grandparents were hesitant but they weren’t going to fight a teenage girl. I was sitting on TikTok in my room which was right next to the living room and I heard my grandparents start talking. I closed my phone and quietly snuck towards my door to make sure they weren’t talking about me faking it.
Instead I heard my grandma raging to my grandpa about Roe v. Wade.
She sounded defeated and devastated while my grandpa comforted her emotions through words of confirmation. I heard her telling her stories about the protests of her youth fighting for women all over the states and now she knows it will have to happen again. She was speaking of how she hates that women will always have to fight for something men are just given. That first it was the right to our own names, to our own property, to education, and now, again, our own bodies.
I was so happy I skipped school that day because I learned a bigger lesson than my civics teacher ever could’ve taught me.
I learned real hurt.
My grandma is the coolest, baddest, and most mysterious person I know. I thought I knew her life story, but every few months I learn something new about her. So this is my recall of her.
She grew up in a small town in Kansas as an only child. She attended a one-room schoolhouse where she excelled in reading and writing so much that she actually skipped two grades and graduated early. She then moved to Nebraska for college at Doane University where she studied French, German, and Spanish. She met my grandfather there and got married at Doane after she graduated. They then moved to New York where my grandfather attended Columbia to get his master’s in engineering. They then moved to Illinois where they both got jobs at Caterpillar — my grandpa as an engineer and my grandma following him to translate when they traveled for work.
They were the ultimate team. One needed the other. But if you ask me, my science-brained grandpa wouldn’t have gotten very far in Germany without my quadrilingual grandma.
She then went on to have two kids — the hardest job a woman can do — and is now a grandma of five girls and a great-grandmother to a little girl.
One woman created three generations of strong, independent women without even trying. Just by being one badass woman.
My grandparents are who I owe everything to. They have given my mom, my sisters, and me a life that they didn’t always get to see for women.
What my grandma gave me wasn’t a roadmap. It was a standard.
She taught me that there is always a woman behind anything smart or innovative, even when she doesn’t get the credit. She taught me to never think less of myself because I am a woman, and to actually hold myself to a higher standard than a man would ever hold himself. Because that, she said, is how a woman succeeds. We have to work harder, smarter, and faster — not because it’s fair, but because it’s the only way we are truly seen. And when people try to pull you down, it’s usually because you’re succeeding. So you do even more.
I don’t know if that was learned behavior or something she passed to me through the heart. But I carry it with me everywhere I go.
That’s why I am writing this. So that women who didn’t have someone like my grandmother can hear what I was taught. Feminism looks different for everyone. For me, it isn’t a movement — it’s my grandma. A woman who has fought for everything in her life and continues to fight for the generations after her. It’s lived, generational, and deeply personal. And I will keep fighting so that maybe, just maybe, one day future women won’t have to feel that “hurt” I felt for my grandma on the day I played hooky.