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| Art Card by Author |
How I love being a woman. - Anne with an E
One day you wake up to the world fine around you. The routine is easy, you’ve done it a million times before. Eat your breakfast, take your shower, put your clothes on. You’ve done it a million times so it should be easy, except a startled gasp leaves your panicked self as you see red staining your sheets.
They say blood marks the first sign of your womanhood. Blood that can now sustain life, as they call womanhood. And while your mom and all your other female relatives might be excited for you to start a new age, you can’t shake the fear and the confusion in this for you.
What is this?
One day you think you’ve gotten the hang of it. The constant changes, the way you seem to grow differently than your friends. You’re “maturing”, and it’s all part of the way they say you’re supposed to grow up. You’re quickly becoming a lot of things in an effort to embrace the title of being a young woman. It’s frightening, but it’s also exhilarating; to explore things you didn’t know were out there, to be part of something that they say you were eventually destined to be part of.
Womanhood is a wide range of things, they tell you. And they show you all the avenues you can see, and all the avenues they’re not so subtly encouraging you to take.
For once, seemingly, you think; where do I fit in all this?
One day you learn that the girlhood and the womanhood in you hangs in a balanced state. You don’t completely leave girlhood at once, even when they call you a woman, and it’s taken you a few lessons to remember that. There remains the youth of your childhood, so eager to live out the many dreams you made for yourself.
But sharp pains in your heart break away at the naivety that was the core of your girlhood — broken friendships, failed courtships, the pressure to immediately be the best at what you do or what you aim to do. The pains chip away the child in you and beneath it forms a strong, young woman.
And while you celebrate each rise above the ashes, while you are proud of the way you learn how to handle these moments, you still can’t completely forget about the girl who just wishes for more playtime.
One day you think, womanhood hurts. And ever since then you’ve never not really thought about it that way.
From the body aches to the heartaches, there isn’t much that you’re told you can’t deal with as part of your womanhood. You cry, and you bleed, and you cry. Apparently, it’s a long journey full of aches that other people don’t seem to be getting, and you think about how that’s so unfair. Isn’t this their first shot at life too? Or maybe it’s just that they’re too good at riding with the aches that they have, while you aren’t. And that’s another ache that stuns you.
You see everyone else seemingly have their life together, how your sisters seem to be glowing with life. Success, love, happiness — they all seem to be so easy for everyone else. And you’re over here, wondering how you could do the same when you’re riddled with anxieties given to you by a world that’s so expectant of you to be everything you could possibly be.
They don’t tell you that they’re thinking the same thing you are. And you don’t learn that you’re all on the same boat, until way much later in your life.
One day you’re out there, celebrating your nth birthday with your closest friends and the love of your life. The party only gets brighter throughout the night as you embrace the being that you are in the company of loved ones. Or maybe you’re celebrating it indoors with your pets and your houseplants. Maybe the gentle breeze of the night soothes you by the window, the music playing in the background providing enough warmth in your solace.
But either decked in full glam or cozy in your warm pajamas, you think about how everything eventually fell into place. Contentment resides beneath your heart when you realize that you’ve finally grown into what being a woman meant to you. The anxieties are still there, the pressure still beating, but where there was once a pit of chaos now only resides a feeling of fulfillment.
Is this, finally, what womanhood is supposed to feel like?
One day you’ll tell the young ones that womanhood is a point of pride. Whether they’re yours or not is no matter, you only see how the twinkle in their eyes reflect back on how eager you also once were to experience the glory of womanhood. You tell them that it’s going to be an adventure, an honor, everything that they dream it would be and more.
You spare them the tales of horror and the tales of woe for now, because as much as womanhood bore you deep pain, that’s not how you want them to experience it second-hand. Even through all the aches and all the suffering that it got you, you know that womanhood is so much more than that.
So in your old age, never at the end of your womanhood, you tell them your stories and you tell them your lessons. And they learn, through you, just how magical and how powerful womanhood can be.
