How I Became a Woman

I decided yesterday to postpone Daring Mondays until next week because it was International Women’s Day and I really wanted to be able to immerse myself in that for a bit. I hope that’s ok with all of you (like you have a say anyway).

You may be assuming, based on the title of this post, that I’m going to write about getting my first period (menarche), or that the answer to the question is simple: I was born that way, but you’d be wrong on both counts. (In fact, I’ve just realized this week that I don’t even remember my first period. I can’t even tell you how old I was at the time. I can’t express how sad this realization makes me.) No, I’m thinking about a totally different, and much more recent, development that has exploded me into Womanhood (or maybe Woman-ness would be more accurate) and feminism.

I know quite a few of you first met me when I posted Eve Ensler’s TED video and shared what it meant to me, so you might be surprised to know that even just a few months ago I was that woman talking to other women and prefacing the conversation with, “I’m not a feminist, but…” My friend (Hi Erin!) says that if you are a woman you are a feminist – or, at least, you should be. But I still wasn’t convinced, because (and Tess here is, I think, the answer to your question from yesterday) my idea of a feminist was someone who was loud and vocal to the point of being offensive, someone who was aggressive, political, corporate, and relatively irrelevant to me as a housewife. (Why did I think that? Well, I suppose the answer is that the men in the media successfully accomplished their goal.)

In fact, I’m so drastically different now than I was two years ago (in many ways, but particularly on the issue of Womanhood) that I apologized to my husband the other week; I felt kind of bad because the man didn’t sign up for marriage to a vocal feminist. (Fabulous and amazing husband that he is, he told me he knew I was opinionated when he married me and shrugged the rest off.)

So, what the hell happened?

Long story…

I have something called PCOS; I was first diagnosed with it over a dozen years ago, but because the medical community is stupid when it comes to women’s issues I was told that nothing could be done. And, finally, when something could be done (metformin was now perscribable for PCOS) my doctor plainly told me he wouldn’t do it. I could “loose some weight” and everything would be fine. (Let’s not talk about what I think of my doctor – stupid Canada with it’s shortage of doctors.) Everything changed in 2008 when two things happened.

First, I decided my doctor could screw himself, I was going to find help myself and I set up an appointment with a naturopath. I got acupuncture, took herbs and homeopathic drops; my period started coming again. Miracle of miracles! Not all that consistently, but it was coming.

Second, I was doing a chakra course with UMS and had to do some guided meditations on each chakra and then on clearing them. One day, while upstairs in my (former) store doing the meditation something inside of me revealed itself. I had been focusing on the directions in the meditation while also wondering, if all this energy medicine stuff was true, could this chakra tell me why I was sick and how to get better? The result of this pondering was that I finished the guided meditation with the very clear realization that I don’t like being a woman – that I never had liked, or really wanted to be, a woman/girl.

This seemed so immediately profound to me; I knew it was true. My mother had been raised by (in her words) a “raging alcoholic” whom I would call a “raging” misogynist too. (Which is just ironic because she is the 7th of nine girls, in spite of his seeming hatred of our sex.) He abused all the girls/women in his life in pretty much every way a man can and made it clear to them that they were, all of them, worth less than their one brother.

Being a Girl Sucks!

My mother never told me it was better to be a boy, or that it sucked to be a girl; and she never consciously wanted me to be anything other than what I was. But, her life left an indelible mark on her and I learned the lessons she never put into words without even knowing it.

It’s not good to be a girl. It’s not safe to be a girl. Girl’s are weak. Girl’s need a boy to save them. Girl’s just can’t do it.

My soul heard these messages that spoke so directly against all it wanted to be and it learned to hate being what I was. I didn’t want to be weak, to be helpless, to be used or abused. I didn’t want to flounder in life – I wanted to burn bright, to burn out shining and changing the world. And what I understood (without knowing I was understanding this mind) is that to do any of that I needed to be a boy. So, I started to resent and reject my girl-ness.

I can look back and “see” all of this and can tell you all this quite frankly, but until that voice that was living inside my belly said it to me I never knew it. I was 30 years old before any of my resentment, rejecting, or hatred of my sex became conscious. Still, it seems my sub-conscious and my body knew it (and reacted to it) all along.

The question then became, what now?

I knew that I needed to figure out how to learn to love my girl-ness (seeing as this hating it wasn’t really working for me or my body), but I had no idea how to go about it. I was racking my brain for where I could go to find out what it really means to be a woman, and you know what I realized: there was no where. I had no idea where to begin; as far as I knew there was no safe source in our culture who could teach me, not only what it meant to be a woman, but how I could love myself as one and that I had real power. Still, my intuition told me that I could cure myself if I followed this path. So, with no compass and no idea what I was doing that’s exactly what I did…

I set out to figure out how to become a True Woman.

I look around me now and I know I’m not alone. I know other women are where I was (still blind and not even knowing that they don’t know) and still more of you are with me on this journey back to ourselves – somewhere along the path I’ve been walking for two years. The deeper I go, the more I feel driven to be one of the voices that pulls back the black veils that have been thrown over us, and to shine a light on our Hearts, our Truth, and our Power too. I’m not sure what that is going to totally look like, but yesterday I was sure it would have to begin by sharing with you how I became a Woman in the first place.

Tomorrow I’ll talk a little bit more about what happened, how I got from there to here, what I’m doing now, and where I’d like to go… In the meantime:

Can you relate to my story? Does it speak to you? What do you think of feminism? Are you one? Why? Why not? What do you think of being a woman? Are you already on this journey with me or are you still looking for the path? What are you thinking right now?

(Read the rest of the story in Journeying into the Feminine)