#27 Girlhood
give me back my girlhood/it was mine first
My first taste of leaving girlhood happened one February day when I was 11. I went to the bathroom as soon as I got home after school, on a Tuesday, and started screaming at the sight of blood on my underwear. I thought something ruptured, I was in danger, maybe my life was at risk. I ran to the living room to find my grandmother and tell her about the ghastly sight, and she proceeded to explain I wasn’t dying, I’d just gotten my period. Girlhood left me by bits, starting with that first blow. I began to leave it as it began to leave me.
Girlhood is beautiful, sometimes soft and sometimes with sharp edges, but girlhood is also a violent thing: it’s noticed most when it leaves you, when it’s ripped from you as your body changes. It has always struck me as inaccurate to say innocence is lost. To me, innocence was always taken. Like a blindfold falling off, a push, or a shove: the unwanted attention walking down the street, the way a teen boy’s eyes lingered on my chest. Leaving girlhood feels a lot like what it must be like to leave Barbieland — the moment Barbie first skates with Ken down Malibu, the way the illusion shatters — the self-consciousness arrives, and it never leaves.
This is also girlhood. The mirror never stops reflecting you, all the ways you look and seem and feel, the ways your body moves, the ways you shrink.
That February day was important for another, equally important reason: my mom got home later that afternoon, and sent me to talk with her in my parents’ bedroom, on their couch: They had decided to separate, and the decision was final. Blood between my legs, sitting uncomfortably in my underwear, I asked her where we would live. Girlhood began ending then, in the most metaphoric and physical of ways. There was the dissolution of my parent's marriage, the ending of my perceived innocence. I say perceived because I felt no different than I did prior to bleeding: I had silly school-girl crushes, was obsessed with Hilary Duff, wrote songs in my journal over school recess. I was preoccupied with wearing the right clothes and spending afternoons at the country club, brooding and scheming over what ways I could be accepted, having spent my first year in a new school.
Looking back, girlhood extended itself until sometime that year, halfway through third (or was it fourth?) grade, softball games and summers away at camp in Maine, trips to Florida and Disneyland. Those years have a nice, old-house smell quality to them, in the way that old photo albums or memories with long-lost friends made at the pool on vacation do.
Girlhood was lipgloss and Sketcher sneakers and lollipops, swimsuits and archery and horseback riding. It was High School Musical and Spin the Bottle kisses with boys. It was listening to Big Girls Don't Cry or Thinking of You on my bedroom floor, playing CDs in the DVD player, a deep blue standby screen in the afternoon Sun.
Growing up I've always felt that we never leave girlhood out of our own volition: girlhood always feels taken from us. Yet it remains just out of reach, a place we can access when we feel safe, inhibited, but never in broad daylight again. Being reminded of your womanly-ness, of your body, of the way you’re seen, well, how could you ever feel like a girl again? Someone apart from sex, apart from desirability, only playing the part of a girl but rarely wanting to know about crossing the bridge to womanhood.
In girlhood, you’re curious about sex insofar as it concerns boys and girls and everything in between and all the body parts involved, as if they were floating above your head, no more than informative drawings in a book (if your school was that progressive), something your parents did, at least once. Masturbation was something secretive, even when it was public knowledge. A curious yet shameful thing, especially when you were a girl. At fourteen, no one wanted to admit to doing it in a sex-ed class in school. I wasn’t yet there, either, and found shame in that too. It would still be a year or two away from my first experiences with my own sexuality, one of those rare moments in girlhood that, if you’re lucky, you get to experience on your own — at your pace, with yourself, or with someone you like — something comfortable and exciting and alien, but familiar all at once.
The experience of girlhood is something that bonds us girls in a way that’s unique and painful and loving. It’s an understanding that’s hard to explain to anyone else. Being a girl is about community, about taking care of each other, about wanting to make sure you get home alright. It’s the look you give another girl when you walk past the street in front of a group of men, the smile you give each other at a party when one of you is dancing with their crush, the tacit knowledge behind the worried look one gives the other when you feel off, in danger, when you know you have to protect each other from whatever harm may come.
This is maybe why girlhood is something that has always felt taken from me, ripped from my hands: its outward ending feels so final. All of a sudden your body morphs and changes and all of it is out of your control; you’ve been kicked out of Barbieland, who you are is up for scrutiny in a way that wasn’t as obvious before.
You’re no longer protected by your smallness, if you ever were: and the teenage conversations about girlhood aren’t so much about its joys but about the final relief about leaving it, the desire to be desired, the knowledge that you’re becoming a woman, someone sophisticated and knowing and elegant. At least that was what we aspired to be one day, what we thought womanhood would be like. Poised, confident, always beautiful. Something to behold, someone to admire.
Yet for all the things out of my control, girlhood continues to glitter inside me. I access that part of me when I buy my favorite Crocs, decorate it with unicorns and flower pins, when I play Hilary Duff on YouTube, as she sings the songs I grew up with back to me. I am a girl again when I’m dancing in the living room, when I’m reading an Emily Henry book. When I watch Thirteen Going on Thirty. I access girlhood in the moments that I feel safe, when I feel seen in the way that I really am — someone who used to love Justin Bieber — when my body and the way it curves and shapes around me doesn’t matter, when I’m home, when I am with other girls.
Girlhood is a promise I want to go back to forever, believe it’s always been mine, even when the first years leaving it felt like an exile.
Girlhood is beautiful but it is also violence. To be a girl in the world is to accept this. To be a woman in the world is to remember it. I like to think that being friends with other women is also an admission of each other’s humanity: we are all trying to shape and curve our bodies in a way that makes us feel safe, see the cracks where we still want to be more, never less, see all the impossible shapes we try to contort ourselves in and forgive ourselves. Forgive each other.
In the end, this is my most basic understanding of what it’s like to want a better world for girls. To allow each other the humanity of being who we are. Accepting our girlhood and the awkwardness of not knowing what the right amount to be anything is in the world, and loving each other for it.
Perhaps the language I love — the language of girlhood — is also the language I resent. Having to create it, having to speak it, having a million little understandings, a sign of support in a sea of unwanted attention: Are you safe? I’m with you.
Maybe this language wouldn’t exist in the face of violence. Maybe it would shapeshift into something else, a language of building and dreaming. And I like to think we’re speaking that language, even if for a moment, we already do: when we are together, when we laugh over food, when we whisper at the cinema when we look at each other across the room.
Can you see what I see? Do you think we could one day build what we want to build?
I do. I do.
This made me pause and think in the best way. Thank you for writing it ♡ we would love to have you with us at gēnu if you are interested! Looking forward to reading more from you.