[BelovedK]

Was it when you became a mother, had your first moontime, got married, left home???

When did it happen for you?

What nuggets of insight do you have to share out of your womanly wisdom?

Can't wait to hear.......

 

[supersarahmommy]

There's a really awesome poem by Sandra Cisneros about menstraution that is incredible... For some reason, I can't find my copy. Not my own words, but I would love to use it as a jumping point for me.

Does anybody else out there have a copy?

 

[mirandahope]

This is a short note about when I became a woman. It was 11 years after I got my first period. I had left home. I had spent the summer traveling, staying mostly at a hostel in the interior of BC.
I had met a young man who I fell desperately and quickly in love with. We spent the weekend making out (in public places all over the town), and two weeks after he had left, hitching a ride to the coast, I got a letter from him saying he wished we had talked more. I went out to visit him in Alberta, where he was from, and spent another week or so discovering myself as a lover, a sexual being. I had been sexually abused as a child and had thought that I'd never be able to have that kind of intimacy with someone. But with this man, it was powerful and all encompassing. I felt swept away, and also opened up.
He came to visit me in the fall, back on the west coast, and the intimacy I felt with him opened spiritual places I hadn't imagined existed.
After he left, I went to see my counsellor. I told her that it had been perfect, and casually mentioned the sores on his lips. After a red flag raised itself in her mind, she showed me a medical book with info about herpes. My heart sank. I had opened myself to this man and exposed myself to herpes. My first love. My first vulnerable, sweet, wild ride into sexuality with a man.
It took me a while to break up with him. I confronted him about not telling me about his cold sores, because obviously he would know. He brushed it off with a modicum of an apology. I went out to Alberta at Christmas and felt drawn into the magnetism of intimacy with him again. But when I got back to the coast at New Years, I phoned him from my new apartment, and ended it.

I think about what it was that I consider to be the defining moment that I became a woman in that experience. It wasn't that I had been opened with this man. It wasn't that I had broken up with him. Nor was it that I had realized that I had put myself in medical danger without knowing it. It was that I had loved, been vulnerable, opened my soul with another person, been hurt, claimed back the spaces I had shared with him, and yet also took the lessons with me. To this day, I am thankful that I learned with him that I can be a sexual being and not break into 10,000 little glass pieces all over the room. But I also know that I put myself in a risky place because I was naive, and from that I have learned caution. (thankfully, 3 years later, I had a blood test that showed I was immune to herpes). But through that experience, I learned more about my sexual and spiritual strengths: which define me as a woman.