Became Aware of Her Blood

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As my body careened toward breasts, hips, and menstruation, the world started to tilt, and continued to tilt, until everything turned sideways and stayed there. Some girls practiced a sway-walk or gathered in clusters on the concrete courtyard at school to giggle at boys. I still ran with gunpowder under my feet. We lived in Mexico City now. My friends had grown tall or round or stocky and I had not—that small unimportant fact afforded me a huge unspoken privilege in our sisterhood of nine-year-olds. They begged to sit next to me on the bus and wanted my opinion on whether to wear our school uniform green sweatshirts around the waist high or low on hips few of us had yet. They carried me everywhere, and in my smallness I became the biggest thing. When I scampered up a tree, they watched, waiting for me to come down. It was the last time I would be the one who laughs the loudest because everyone is, and always has been, watching her.

Some force had boarded me onto the silver-bullet train.

I would enter the land of womanhood well-placed.

When a friend snuck me into the backroom of her plant-filled house to watch a forbidden romance film, she told me it made her feel tingly down there. “Down where?” I asked, and leaned back into a beanbag. “There,” she pointed. I had never considered my down there until, a few weeks later, I crashed my bike and my legs scissored the sewer grate and a whack so intense woke me up to it.

This place, this new place, what was this place, what was it for?

My mother hadn’t told me anything about it.

I would be small for a while longer, and it would be easy to say the period of smallness seeded a confidence in me. But my sureness came from being a first child and a girl who demanded the ear of her parents and got it. My family called me Queen Bee, a name meant as a compliment or dig, depending on the circumstance. When my mother wanted to spend all day at the market, I could convince her out of it. My brothers sat wide-eyed and accepted my monologues on the right way to be. “You can’t pull a fast one over Molly,” my father told people. This differentiated me from my mother. She could bargain hard with rug sellers and stand up like a toro for her kids, but some societal framework had weakened her position within our family system. Whenever she wanted to impart a wisdom or opinion to us, her voice got louder and louder and louder until we rolled our eyes and eventually a panic washed over her face, where am I, what do I say now, what was my point, what do I actually mean? I could speak in whispers and get the attention of my family.

This gave me power over my graceful mother.

It would mold us like a river molds two sides of a riverbank.

I was nine, ten, eleven.

Whenever she took me to a department store to shop for clothes, I would drag behind her, annoyed at the fluorescent lights and the gentle way she browsed for sale items. My arm would grab hers and say let’s go. Just a minute. I couldn’t wait a minute. Don’t make me try this on. I don’t care if it’s made from good linen. I am not a peacock. She would give up on me—and sharing her useful tip that it was best to buy a few good-quality items instead of many cheaply made ones—and move on to herself. But I don’t want to wait for you to decide that’s the right dress for the upcoming wedding. As we drove home, with a bag of natural-colored clothing for me, I told my mother that when I was a woman I was not going to waste my time with shopping.

She never fought back.

She held her tongue and didn’t slap me with the reality that if you want clothes, you need to shop.

She was usually kind and let me air my proclamations.

The suggestions, though, about my appearance had begun to accumulate—maybe that skirt instead of the other one, maybe a braid instead of hair down. Did I have to look a certain way, and for whom? In the folds of my heart, a disappointment had lodged. My beloved strong mother was suddenly focused on instructing me to keep my legs crossed, my hair combed, my intensity in check. There must be other ways to become a woman. I didn’t see them around me. The word feminine, in my world, meant to be demure and accommodating to everyone but yourself. It made me want to throw punches. Yet, every year, we watched Miss America together, curled up on the couch. Because it was an event just for us, separate from the men in our family, I luxuriated in it. My mom would stroke my forehead as we talked over which woman was the best woman. The subtext of what we were doing was beyond both of us. Of course, we also watched Road to Avonlea, a quaint show about a rural town in early 1900s Canada with as much interest, as much pleasure.

Regardless, shards of glass had begun to poke up through the surface.

On a walk around the dusty ancient pyramids of Mexico, a familiar outing for our family, I took my first confused step away from my mother. Moon. Sun. I scampered up and down crumbled steps and then ran back to join my clan and hold my mother’s hand. As my father and brothers walked ahead of us, down a wide passageway of time, I studied the shape of my father’s legs.

I knew my legs were his legs.

“I’m glad I have Dad’s legs instead of yours,” I said to my mother.

“Oh?” she said.

“Yeah, definitely.”

I knew I was hurting her.

I wanted to hurt her and I didn’t know why.

Lauren and I had begun to push our own edges without knowing why either. We performed a provocative dance for our entire family on the green lawn of my grandparents’ suburban condo in Illinois. She actually knew how to move. I followed along because the urge to be subversive had lit within me. Our grandmother Pat-Pat smiled and said nothing from behind her dual-tone sunglasses. Goodness. Goodness gracious, Catholic girls. She had always thought me, the straight-A student, smart and sensible and good. With her praise, a warm feeling bloomed in me. My intellect must be special. She didn’t “Lord over” me the same way she did my mother.

My mother—smashed between the two fierce bookends of us—was more of a feeler, less apt to bite anyone who came toward her. How could I be both good and bad? The good label started to grate on me as soon as I could name it. I didn’t feel like a good girl when I noticed the boys (and men) were never asked to do dishes. Lauren and I huddled in a corner to make a plan.

“Okay, we have an announcement,” we called out. We would not shower for an entire week until the boys had to do the same amount of dishes as the girls. Our hair would get greasy. We would get smelly. We would get as gross as needed to make this change happen. Everyone would have to deal with us. The adults waved us away—oh, so cute, these girls being so adamant—until we bore down, made our case.

“Yeah,” I heard my mom say, “why do the girls always have to do the dishes?”

By girls she meant girls and women because grown women refer to themselves as girls just as men refer to them as girls.

I knew my mom would eventually come through for us.

I beamed at her. Thank you.

We now understood how to use our female body to get what we wanted.

It was our first feminist protest.

Somewhere in all of this, we moved to America, to Texas. We were no longer internationals. I befriended two neighborhood girls. We swam in each other’s backyard pools, zoomed our bikes through alleys. In private, I pretended to be a gorgeous woman who emerged from the ocean in a Neutrogena commercial. One afternoon, they asked if they could dye my hair blond with lemon juice.

“No,” I said with crossed arms.

I had never been and would never be one to alter my physical self—and I was mad that my world thought, and therefore I thought, blond was better. They begged. They must have sniffed me out, known, as girls know about each other, that I bullied myself and so they, therefore, could do the same. We skipped into one of their bedrooms under the pretense of them showing me a new horse book. The door slammed shut. Then wham. They pushed me onto the floor. One straddled me and held my arms over my head. I flailed as the other poured lemon juice all over my hair, all over my face, until my eyes stung, stung, stung. When they flopped away from me, we were all aware a transgression had been made. I left without saying anything. On my walk through the alley back home, I cried and pulled at the dark green ivy crawling up fences, wrapped it around my arms, around and around until it tangled me up.

This was about the time my hands took over and wanted to explore beneath my underwear at night. I wouldn’t let them. Nope. Not gonna do it. Gonna be good. Under my blue bedspread, they drummed on my belly, ready for something I sensed was not an okay thing to do.

Instead, my hands led me down a pool lane in the butterfly stroke. At swim practice, and during races, I beat my two legs into one tail, arced up and out of crystal-clear chlorinated water. When our coach threw his gold watch to the bottom of the pool, we hovered on the edge. What now? He spoke about the importance of breath holding, how to control the body.

“Who wants—” he began to ask, and, before he could finish his sentence, I dove, ready to return the gold up to the light.

One of my swim friends had a deathly allergy to macadamia nuts. I had never met someone with an allergy. I immediately wanted one too. What could I be allergic to? Nothing was wrong with me. I wanted something to be wrong so adults would worry over me or so I would stand out. My mother always told me my body was strong. Probably all the dirt I had eaten as a child. I fought illness off quickly. My cuts healed up with no fanfare. Nothing ever lingered in my system. No part of me was wounded.

I was out of luck.

In our American house, I would often slide an old shoebox out from our white cupboard and place it on my lap. Inside lived my mother’s modeling pictures: her wearing a black hat down over one eye and pulling gum out of her red-lipped mouth, her neck arched back with mini-bicycles riding across it, her smiling face in a Japanese newspaper, a few more. These were her only copies. She had shoved them next to photo albums on a bottom shelf. I had started to take serious stock of my own beauty. I didn’t want to care about beauty but somehow I did. There was something less tailored about my face. I didn’t know how an unbeautiful girl could be born to a beautiful woman.

I once wanted a pair of the side-zip pants everyone else at school wore.

“They don’t work on your body,” my mother had said in the dressing room. The only way I knew how to deal with the sting was by getting grouchy with her. I was unable to tell her it hurt my feelings. But when my dad was out of town for work, I would sneak downstairs to sleep in her bed. She never said no. Propped up in bed with a paperback, she would slowly eat a stack of saltine crackers and butter from a paper towel with one hand and stroke my forehead with the other.

I could have stayed there forever.

One day, during my shoebox ritual, I discovered my hamster had escaped and chewed the edges of my mother’s modeling pictures, destroyed them as if he had been seeking them out.

“Oh no.”

Followed by a sudden and full and strange satisfaction.

For much of middle school, I made home in magnolia trees. My brothers and I biked down the street to meet up with some other boys. In their front yard, we climbed as high as possible: white flowers in spring and waxy leaves in summer. They were all boys. They were younger than me. Climbing trees, and the anticipation of climbing trees, sent a surge through me. I wanted to feel the rough bark under my palms. I wanted to do it all day long as heat pushed sweat down my nose. Move, move, move my body. When we traveled through airports as a family, I never took the escalator. I ran up the stairs two at a time. My father once suggested a dance class for me. He had loved the one he took in college. But to me then, grace and strength didn’t occupy the same house. I dismissed dance as too girly and feminine.

Instead, I made myself masculine; doing so protected my sadness about beauty. I told my mom I wanted to be like the lady down the road. She had almost no breasts. “One day, you’ll appreciate yours,” my mother encouraged. I found sports. Longer girls could run faster than me now. I had the piss and vinegar for hurdles. It was a natural movement for me. I grinded my shoe into the sticky track, glared forward, and burst, soaring one leg over the hurdle as the other whipped around to find the ground and launch me, without a beat, toward the next hurdle. It felt like running from an animal. During practice and races, my coach would lean in over the track from the field and yell, “Good job, kiddo,” as I came around each lap. My body moved faster with these words. This was my place. These were my blessings, these simple words.

But my hips were changing.

“My hip bones feel like they’re moving,” I explained to my mom.

“Don’t worry about it, Molly,” she said, and ended the conversation. My friends didn’t know what I was talking about either.

I couldn’t climb trees in exactly the same way.

I couldn’t move the same way.

I couldn’t accept the new breast buds on my chest, so I engineered a complex game of telephone to avoid feeling embarrassed in front of my mother. I asked a flat-chested friend to ask her mother to suggest to my mother that we all go on a bra-shopping expedition. But I would have rather been lying in a meadow of wildflowers and wondering about all the ways a girl could be a girl and a woman could be a woman.

The brown spots in my underwear caught my attention. Had I pooped? No. Maybe this was that period thing, but I knew almost nothing about it. Wasn’t it supposed to be red?

A few days later, I wore a red skirt to our end-of-the-year school assembly.

I bled all over the seat. No. No. This couldn’t be happening. Then the principal called me up to the podium to receive the Citizenship Award for being the kindest student in the school. No, no way, not now. Years of shame flushed through my small body, red from toes to forehead. Everyone, all five hundred people or so, turned to stare and smile at me for all my goodness, and the pewter silence of it almost killed me. I willed myself to slip the event program over the blood smear on the chair and walk myself on up there.

Public Announcement: Someone has entered her womanhood. Let it be known.

Despite the wet blood between my legs, no one said anything to me. I don’t know who noticed and who didn’t.

My mother gave me maxi pads and told me about the hook pads she had once worn as a girl. Months later, I asked her about tampons. I hated the feeling of a pad between my legs and always seemed to bleed through them in school, onto my shorts, on the car seat of our carpool driver. Like a fugitive, I stole away to the bathroom with my tampon box and read the instructions cover to cover. I was supposed to stick something the width of an entire pencil inside me.

How would it not injure me?

“Mommmm,” I called, and upstairs she came.

I wouldn’t let her watch. She coached me through the door. Deep breath. Go. The tampon eventually fit nice and snug. I glanced in the mirror and bust through the door. Without saying a word to my mom, I ran down the stairs and cartwheeled around the yard. Summer. Birdsong. Breeze.

I could move again.

This change granted me a station above my brothers.

Now that my period had arrived, I sighed at their ignorance. They didn’t “get” anything at all. They were mere boys and I was a woman. One day, when my mother and brothers went into the mall, I waited in our Jeep with the windows down to let a hot muggy air blow through. In the backseat, I raised my legs up to stare at them: freckles, tan, slender, and they pleased me, especially because my mother had compared her legs to mine earlier that day, noting how mine were such a nicer color. Apparently, mine didn’t have any veins like hers. Despite my comment at the pyramids, my mother’s legs had never seemed ugly to me before. Why didn’t she like her legs?

It was the last moment I would gaze upon my legs with such admiration.

Even though my mother had put a hand on my shoulder and acted like something grand had begun for me, I still considered my period a nuisance. But only because that’s how everyone talked about it, that’s what we were supposed to feel about it. Oh, I’m on my period. Oh, my cramps. Oh, it’s such a pain. It was cool to be put out by the whole drama. Secretly, the rhythm of it had won me over, though I couldn’t articulate it and I didn’t understand what becoming a cycling woman meant, beyond blood and pregnancy.

I had a new body now.

But if someone had told me that blood and pee came out of two separate holes, I would have been shocked.

I knew so little of what this new body could do.

I knew so little of my femaleness.