Puberty to Burn
As we sat at the antique brown oak dinner table, Univision playing in the background with the current top melodramatic novela, I could feel my entire, (yes, my entire nine-year-old life) becoming one of those melodramatic novelas; filled with mood swings, pain, and tears, all thanks to my mama and two trifling words: the talk.
“Family Life” is what the Tucson Unified School District called sex education in their public schools. Starting in 4th grade and ending in 8th grade, yet still continued in sometimes required health courses across high schools, schools send back a permission slip on pastel printer paper for parents to sign to decide whether or not their child would be enrolled in these once a week courses on puberty, peer pressure, and “growing up”. Although, in my household, growing up meant trading in braids for buns to make sure your split ends didn’t burn while you flipped tortillas over the gas stove with dare I say it: bare hands. A “skill” that is deemed by others as talent, or a “rite of passage”, rather than just something I was expected to know — much like a period.
You probably wouldn’t connect flipping tortillas over a blue-orange flame to anything like periods, and there was a time I didn’t even connect periods to sex. I sat at our oak table, picking at the corner that had woodchips flying off after scratching at it for so long, as my mom stood in the kitchen (you guessed it, flipping tortillas) her hair tied back and sweat beading not because of the heat from the kitchen, but because of the stress of having to tell her 4th grader she wouldn’t stay a 4th grader for long.
“Gorda, come over here, you’re going to flip this for me.” My mom ordered me.
“Ma, what if I get burned?” I asked as I stared at the rusty stove and round, spotted batches of flour tortillas asking to be warmed up, my fingers tap-dancing a mile a minute on the side of my thigh.
“Every girl has to do it. You’re going to grow up and have to make your own dinner, getting burned is a part of it.”
Not every girl gets burned when they start growing up — at least not in the same way, and not every girl should have to burn in order to do so. There are girls like Monet, 19, lives alone, pays her own bills and learned about “growing up” in the same way she learned how to fix a flat tire — because she had no other choice. Marie never sat down with her mom at the dinner table after helping make dinner like I did to learn about periods, puberty, sex etc. She was forced by someone she knew and trusted at age 10, forced to learn about a secret that she was threatened to keep for nine years after that. Today, Monet openly discusses what it was like to be violated in hopes of helping other 10-year-old kids and independent 19-year-olds (and of course, everything in between, before and after).
My mom didn’t spend more than 15 minutes explaining a period. She sat me down after my failed attempt of flipping a tortilla that ended in me burning it to a dark, flaky crisp, and explained to me that I was going to get older and things would start changing, like I would have to make my own dinners and one day dinner for my future family so I would have to start practicing with my little siblings, or how I was going to go through different body changes. She didn’t get much more specific than that. I later learned that the only reason the conversation had been brought up was because my cousin started her period earlier than expected. If her mom hadn’t called my mom and announced my cousin’s new step into puberty like a graduation, these 15 minutes of awkward silences followed by a “how to open a pad” demonstration with no explanation would not have happened.
Marie, college student, with a passion for public health, has always been outspoken and comfortable. Her confidence glistens and radiates in rooms regardless of where she resides. She never had a brief “talk” like I did. Every now and then for a couple years of her childhood, her mom would sprinkle hints here and there about what she would one day have to go through. She would never hide the fact that she had a period the way I had been taught. I was told you couldn’t show a pad in public and you had to always stuff it in your pocket even if it ruins it. Marie would walk out of her health class with Ibuprofen in her left hand, a tampon in her right. She wasn’t the least bit worried about virginities and body counts, and was more worried about her actual health instead of what other people convinced her health was. Marie faced a lot of backlash. She had never slept with a boy until the end of her senior year — the way a lot of people expect to, and yet for four years, sly comments and whispered gossip followed her around the halls like a bored monitor. Whether she slept with 10 boys or one, it shouldn’t have mattered what she was doing with her body, but the fact that she was confident in it threatened traditional views that have been forced onto us high schoolers by years of a curriculum centered on abstinence as the only option for us. Yet, she proudly wore her confidence, as she should have. That’s important for someone that wants to be a doctor — to be unapologetically, biologically liberated.
When my mom decided to enroll me in Family Life, I told everyone I already learned how to use a pad. When the other girls asked me what a pad was for, I told the other little girls that a pad is for your period, and your period is when your “little girl cells” are replaced in your body by “big girl cells”. The teachers would laugh and say, “yes that’s exactly what it is”.
I didn’t realize how problematic that was back then.
Maybe if my mom’s mom hadn’t told me that you’re not allowed to wear tampons until you’re married, I wouldn’t be so afraid of them now. And maybe if our public-school teachers weren’t forced to teach us romanticized versions of puberty and abstinence, it would be a lot easier for girls like Monet to feel comfortable to confide in others without feeling like she’s tainting the image of “innocence” and “purity”, and girls like Monet and I wouldn’t have to use girls like Marie as health teachers — although, luckily for us, she doesn’t seem to mind. Perhaps most people don’t consider those 15 minutes of stuttering, those conversations you’ve never had, or the shortened comments about periods, or the poorly constructed sex education classes as an event that would change the way you feel about your body and yourself. And perhaps it’s time we did.
