When I was 13, I awoke in the middle of the night around 3 to some horrendous cramping. It was awful. I knew what it was, so I wasn't scared about it because I was literally in the process of taking a health class, and my mom had already done the birds and bees talk before that. I spent the rest of the night awake and in pain because I couldn't exactly wake up my mother to tell her what was going on. That's the day, beyond a shadow of a doubt I knew this was the in earnest, in my mind anyway, the beginning of the path to womanhood. My hips widened, my boobs got bigger, I became much more uncomfortable at times with my body in general and attention it was getting. I hated it. I missed being a little girl and not worrying about pads, and shaving, and deodorant, and going braless.
Everything overnight it seemed became dangerous. My mom took to constantly reminding me about the dangers of pregnancy. She worked for a government agency that dealt with a lot of pregnant teens and she was determined that her daughter would not become one. (I didn't). Boys were now dangerous too, according to my dad. They were not to be trusted. My brother who was only a few grades up from me, took on this new macho persona, I'm sure spurred on directly from my dad, that he was my protector. It was annoying. He was a total cock block. Then there were the mean streets of the city. They were filled with people who wanted to hurt me, because I was magically now a woman. Beware of this, beware of that my parents crooned in unison. It sounded like a witches hex.
When high school rolled around, womanhood was about being the most beautiful and developing a ridiculous amount of vanity. You cared a lot what others thought of you. Part of the new challenge was also not to become the high school slut. It seemed important, never to take on that title, even if you did nothing to deserve it other than exist. Where I went, you had to be the good girl. It was imperative. I went to a school filled with ultra nerds. All of us were studying to be the next batch of doctors, and we each had parents very involved in our educations that rode us hard for that dream. If you got knocked up, if you caught anything, you would be outed, and then tossed out. It did happen to one girl, and the shaming of her was very real. We were so brain washed at that school into thinking education was literally everything that anyone who deviated from that path was quite literally an infectious leper. And she became one, until she eventually left 3 months into her pregnancy, Scarlet A and all, restoring pride in the school and the students once more, that we "weren't that type of school." You think only stereotypical jocks and cheerleaders have that kind of mentality, think again.
In college, I defined my womanhood to be about freedom. I was free to choose without the constraints of my parents or sibling, what I wanted to do with my own life. The day I was dropped off on campus, I didn't cry a single tear as my parents drove off into the literal sunset. I threw a party. I was on a single sex floor, sandwiched between two male floors, and about to be a part of a new sisterhood. It was wondrous. I met girls from all over; my own roommate hailing all the way from Japan. I could date who I wanted without an overbearing watchful eye over my shoulder. I could go where I wanted no matter how late at night and how many weirdos may or may not have been creeping. I could sleep with whom I wanted. It was a rush. I kept it together somehow, though, because I was still that same terrifying ultra nerd under the surface who would eventually graduate with honors, but still freedom was freedom, and I took it all in and felt no shame in being able to revel in that new skin of choice.
Post graduation, womanhood for me seemed and still seems to be tied in with family and marriage. Everyone began this mad rush into marriage with friends saying I do left and right (most of them are divorced now), and having children. There were and still are constant questions about when, not if, but when am I going to get pregnant. (I think mom's youthful warnings may have worked too well). Or if it's not that, it's when are you going to get married. It's as if my life cannot be complete without the two even though more and more women and men these days claim we have evolved past this point of it being a woman's duty to become wife and mother.
That may be a world view, but my own is built on a foundation of being my own woman. I want power and I'm not ashamed to say it. I have my own business and I revel in the fact that I answer to no one, and specifically, no man. We're told so often that women just simply depend on men, or their husbands, and don't earn. We're conditioned to want a man to be the bread winner, but I don't ascribe to that. I wanted and still want to always be able to be able to stand on my own two feet. That's not to say I hate men or don't want them in my life, or I dislike marriage or kids, far from it, but with so much more opportunity and choices available to us now as women, it was my time to grasp at that and to create my own future of my own making.
This is what it's like to be 'a' woman.
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