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Writing this brought tears to my eyes because I know that I am bringing you as a reader into a very intimate part of my formation and I am about to be critical of a very loving act concerning my mother’s inheritance. This is not a jab at my mother; this is a jab at a society that begins to teach young girls that we are responsible for protecting men from our womanhood. My mother and her mother and her mother’s mother passed down this inheritance of shame to me, for the sake of the men in our lives who never gave a damn. So this story is for them, and for me.
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You see, in my family, womanhood comes with the gushing of blood that signified my fertility.
I remember, too clearly, the day I got my period. It was a Sunday evening. I went up to my mom, discreetly, because I already knew that what was happening to my body was something that was to be hidden from the men of the house.
I was 12 years old.
I was a young girl and I knew that something big was happening, and I had a new responsibility. It was now my responsibility, as a woman, to hide this thing that was happening to me.
So I went up to my mother and told her: “estoy sangrando.” And she looked at me with pride, and she looked at me like I had given her a present she had been waiting to get for a long time. Suddenly we shared a bond, and she was so happy about … And I do not remember what she said after that, but I do know that she left to go buy me pads, and what she did when she came back is the REAL reason why I remember this day so clearly.
On that day, with a mixture of glee and pride, my loving and wonderful mother taught me what she had been taught to do: how to protect the men from what was happening to me. But I thought this was good news??? I remember being confused but taking vigorous mental notes because she clearly knew what she was talking about; she was an expert! She was my only guide.
The minute I became a woman, I was taught shame.
On this day, my mother taught me how to dispense of the pads. My brother and I shared a bathroom, and it was a rule that my dad and my brother were not to know about what was happening to me. My mother took me to the bathroom, and showed me how to roll up my pad and then roll toilet paper around it and throw it into the wastebasket. It was suppose to be discreet, and no one would know better. This rolled up pad, looked like all the other rolled up pieces of toilet paper. This was our woman secret. This was our bond.
The minute we teach girls shame, we teach them culpability.
It was not our potential ability to bear children, that bonded us, but our learned communal shame.
But why? Why was it my duty to protect my 14-year-old brother from this very normal reality for a lot of women? Why was it a secret? The ONLY lesson that I learned that day, and have worked years to unlearn, was that something happened to me on “the day of the Lord” that was shameful.
The minute we teach girls shame, we teach them culpability. When we teach them that they are responsible for shielding men from who we are and what our bodies do, we begin to teach girls that it is not about what we want and how we live, but what men feel comfortable knowing about us.
How many relationships have I entered where the men farted, burped, and peed with the bathroom door wide open all while I got bloated and full of keeping these lies for their comfort? They are allowed to be and exist, and I had been taught to apologize for what my body does, since conception. And I have been crumbling up toilet paper to cover up my rolled up bloody pads, for way too long, and I owe it to myself and to the women who come after me, to say: fuck this.
This mentality is sexist and we have been teaching this for centuries, passed on knowledge generationally from woman to woman, we have taught ourselves to hate ourselves. I am not longer complicit in the lie that men can exist and I can only function to make their existence a comfortable one.
Do not teach your daughters to hide anything about them, because no girl should ever be brought to tears because her dad accidentally found out that she has her period. NO GIRL. If you have taught her this, you had inadvertently taught her to be ashamed of herself, and it is you who should be ashamed of yourself.
Let's raise daughters who are revolutionary free thinkers who exist purely for the advancement of all of humanity, instead of keeping them busy hiding their pads and tampons. The minute I became a woman, I was taught shame. And I have spent 18 years thereafter unlearning this.
*Not all women have periods and not all women have vaginas.
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez is a chonga Mujerista from Managua, Nicaragua currently living in Miami, FL. She recently graduated with her Masters of Divinity from Vanderbilt University, and is looking to take some much needed time off from the academy to refresh. She is also the founder of Latina Rebels. Currently she is a writer at Philadelphia Printworks, reporter for Vivala, and a columnist/editor at Chica Magazine, blogger for Huffington Post Latino Voices, and contributor writer at SupaDaily Latina.
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