puberty

Puberty, for me, was an interesting and embarrassing experience, although it seems normal in most ways.

I started to get boobs around fourth grade, and although I wasn’t the first, I was pretty close to it. I remember not wanting to wear a bra because I thought they were uncomfortable, and I remember changing for gym, and not looking around or looking at myself. I changed in the corner, because I didn’t want to see how far ahead I was of the other girls. And to top it all off, I wasn’t exactly big, but I wasn’t the smallest in my grade, so I had issues dealing with that as well as boobs and hairy parts and all that.

When I think of my puberty years, I think of them being anything but ‘magical.’ I would like to have been invited into womanhood with a ‘period party,’ like I’ve heard some mothers throwing…I would like to have known everything there is to know about what was going on with my body…I would like to have been educated by something other than a Disney-produced pre-teen girls guide to living as a lady VHS. I would like to have discussed it more, instead of mysteriously disappearing from the classroom with all of my girl classmates. Buuut, I wasn’t. Instead, my puberty years, (probably like some of yours,) were littered with embarassing leaks, some awkward times with a tampon applicator and some ruined pairs of jeans.

I don't remember developing breasts, but I do remember fighting the bra my mother wanted to buy me. Why on earth did I want to wear that thing, with too many straps that I was constantly adjusting? Puberty for me was more linked to that *other* development in female sexuality.

Sixth grade, after school, late in the year when the weather was starting to warm up in Florida, I went to the bathroom, pulled down my jeans, and immediately started to squeal for my mother. How had this happened! Nothing hurt, nothing was wrong, but it had to be! My mother leaned in on the door frame, an inscrutable look on her face, until suddenly she burst out laughing. "Clean up, we'll go get some pads." PERIOD?! Oh. Well, I should have known that, right, but it took me completely by surprise.

I remember when I first started noticing my body changing. I was sitting in the bathtub, thinking about life, school, music etc. I looked down at my body. I noticed, my chest wasn't right. My nipples had gotten bigger and my chest had fat on it. I had...boobs. I got this instantly and it was a little weird. What I thought would never happen, happened, I really was a girl!

For years my boobs grew, I eventually got pubic hair, which I wasn't sure what to do with (my mom and sister never shaved their pubic area...I didn't know what to do about armpit and leg hair). Then I got my period. Everything had been fine up to this point. I got that women had breasts, I got that. I didn't get this whole bleeding from my crotch thing and was convinced I had colon cancer. Yeah, thanks 20/20. I really didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell my mom. I was just perplexed in fear. I started using my mom's pads thinking, she won't notice if I just used one...

I was one of those girls who went to bed one night a Girl, and seemed to wake up the very next day with a giant set of breasts. My body developed early: I was the first girl in elementary school to have breasts, the first to try and figure out, alone, why I both wanted to hide them and have them seen. I was the first to be forced into a brassiere (and was really pissed about it), the first to have to fend off the strap being snapped behind me all the time.

What came with that was an unexpected bipolarity of being treated like a girl -- including the benefit and enjoyment of some level of androgyny, being allowed to play football afterschool with the boys, picking fights, having "buddies," not being groped -- and then being treated like a woman, but only in the respect of appearance and sexuality, as well as sexual objectivism. I didn't inherit any new rights with my changing body: of course, it was a woman's body, so there weren't any real rights to inherit.