tw: menstruation

sorry if this is too long.

when i was 13 me and my classmates were going to do the maypole at our school that year, which in itself is a coming of age ritual, and i came on the day of ready to dance. i was wearing all white and a flower garland on my head, and as i sat in the back of the car driving into my school, i looked down at my panties. they were bright red. i nearly started crying because i was terrified of the blood staining my dress. i ran into the bathroom and stuffed my underwear with toilet paper. the whole thing made me feel ashamed and awkward and uncomfortable. it wasn’t how i wanted to feel.

two weeks later, i went to the northern california womyn’s herbal symposium with my mom. it’s an all womyn herbal festival, where the womyn are celebrated and so are their bodies and cycles. every year a “maiden ceremony” takes place, where the group celebrates the transition of a young, newly bleeding girl into a womyn. i decided to take part in the ceremony. before it began, me and about 8 other girls met with the high priestess and talked about periods and our bodies. that was where i first learned, at the ripe age of 13, that the word cunt isn’t a bad word. the ceremony started.

we walked down through the camp, to where all the 300 or so women stood waiting. they were singing “we are here to tell you that you’re wonderful and beautiful, we are here to tell you, that we’re always whole. we are here to notice that your loving is a miracle, how deeply you’re connected to our soul.” they had formed a human passageway, and we went down under their arms, as these hundreds of womyn smiled down at us. we got to the center of the circle, and the high priestess began the ceremony. to each of us she cut off a bit of our hair, gave us a red moon necklace, painted a red moon on our forehead, and embraced us.

once the ceremony was over, i walked up the hill to my mom, crying quietly because i was happy that i was bleeding.

submitted by: rebel-grrrl