Galatea - Madeline Miller.epub Today

I looked down at his hand on my skin. I did not flinch. I did not cry.

In the beginning, I was exactly what he wanted. I stood where he placed me. I wore the heavy silk robes that scratched my brand-new skin. I smiled when he told me to smile, and I kept my eyes fixed on his face. He called me his greatest creation. He did not call me his wife; he called me his masterpiece. Galatea - Madeline Miller.epub

He reached out to grab my wrist, his grip hard and unforgiving like the stone I used to be. "I made you!" he shouted, his face turning a deep, angry red. "You belong to me!" I looked down at his hand on my skin

The shift happened when my daughter, Paphos, was born. As I held her tiny, warm body against my chest, I looked at her soft skin. I realized that he would try to carve her, too. Not with a iron chisel, but with his voice, his rules, and his suffocating expectations. He would want her to be a silent statue, just like he wanted me to be. In the beginning, I was exactly what he wanted

"You made the statue," I told him, prying his fingers away with a strength that shocked him. "But the gods made the woman. And the woman belongs to no one."

"You are so beautiful," he whispered to me the next morning, running his fingers down my arm.

I was no longer a masterpiece on a pedestal. I was a mother, a human, and finally, completely free.