Chapter 1 Chapter 1

Change, Change, Change—a Basic Look at Our Bodies and Their Transitions

Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry with your girlfriends.

—Laurie Kuslansky

Today, looking at my granddaughters as they enter puberty I understand from my own life experience that they can't know that the ease of their little girl lives is now going to start becoming complicated. Chemical changes and life itself become very difficult to understand. This is the life cycle. As we enter womanhood we grow breasts, our moods change, our bodies change, the known is now unknown, uncharted new territory.

Becoming a woman, especially before you are a woman, is a difficult passage at best. There is so much pressure. You may be the first one in your class to get your period, or the last one; both scenarios feel awful. You may be the one with the huge boobs, or the one whose breasts have not grown at all and the boys notice. Again, either way, other kids make fun of you, and you feel mortified.

I was the last in my class to grow breasts and the last to get my period. I was so embarrassed by this that I pretended I had my period when I really didn't just so I wasn't the one who was "out of the group." I made up stories about my "cramps" like the other girls. There was always some girl in the class who had cramps so bad, real or imagined, that she had to be sent home. I wished so much then that it could be me. (Imagine.)

One day, the other girls found out I was lying when my mother, who did not know how to tell a lie or be dishonest, told the mother of the most popular girl in the class that she didn't know why I was such a late bloomer.

The word was out and they all made fun of me. "How could you?" I wailed to my perplexed mother.

The year before this, the Catholic school I attended started running those scratchy black-and-white films showing sterile pictures of fallopian tubes and talking about "bleeding." Eeewww! I didn't want to know anything about it, at the time, which is pretty funny considering my work now. But I digress. So there I was, the only one in my class without her period and wishing/praying for it!

It all seems silly now, but so overwhelming when you are a fifteen-year-old.

Why did I even want the process to begin? I had the freedom of living without hormonal cycles, and the relatively steady physical and emotional balance of that freedom. Yet I did not know to appreciate it. No one told me about the long, drawn-out process I was about to enter; I did not know of the cycles of woman.

Then it finally came . . . a spot of blood. I was thrilled! "Guess what?" I blurted out to my mother. "I'm bleeding!" She seemed embarrassed, but later that evening without a mention she put a box of Kotex (trade name for humongous sanitary pads) in my room along with this awful-looking strap-thing-y to hold it on to my skinny little body. It felt like I was riding a horse, but I wore it proudly and complained about the discomfort to my girlfriends (for attention) while I prayed for cramps.

My mother was very Victorian, modest and shy, so she never really talked to me about it. In fact, the entire "sex talk" we had happened one day when I was standing on the kitchen stool putting away some dishes for her on a high shelf. She remarked that I had some hair under my arms (about four strands), and then she whispered, "Oh, do you have it down there also?"

Down there. That was it; the closest we ever got to talking about my changing body, my transition, my new life. A product of her time, my mother's shame of her own body became my shame, so I kept all things girly and personal to myself.

I entered...