When I was about ten years old, my mother began giving me what I called “lessons in womanhood”. I didn’t call it that at the time, but as I recounted those stories to my girlfriends in my 20’s and early 30’s, that was it came to be lovingly called. My mom knew she would die young—she said she “always knew”. Just after my thirteenth birthday, just as I began my cusp of womanhood, just as I began to understand what it meant to have had body change—and all of that attention, just as a rush of sexual hormones began coursing through my veins, just as girlfriends made way for boyfriends, just as I began writing poetry and understand my softness, just as I didn’t ever want to forget the first time a man kissed my hand, my make out sessions and hickeys, just when I needed them most of all; my lessons abruptly stopped.
My older brother headed toward college; my mother took a job working the 3 to 11 shift at the hospital…latch-key kid…I didn’t see her, I was mature for my age, but alone. I was left to fend, to navigate, to make painful mistake after mistake, without understanding the reasons; to want, to yearn for, to hope for more and to be what felt like romantically, unendingly alone.
What I felt was that I wanted men that didn’t want me and the men that wanted me, I didn’t want. That somewhere out there in the world, there had a man who knew, instinctively knew how to love me in a way that was the most meaningful to me. I didn’t find him. I didn’t marry or have offspring. I had children and grandchildren that I didn’t get to meet. That for thousands of years my ancestors knew how to meet, marry, mate and survive; feasts, famine, disease and war. With all of my education, I fucked that up. The end of the line—my genetic pool; survival of the fittest stops with me. I fucked up. Nothing breaks my heart more than that, I don’t know if anything ever will.
I always knew in my soul that what was wrong was that someone, somewhere didn’t teach me something that I should have been taught. More than a handful of years ago, I began my quest to understand where it began going sideways and what needed to be done, if anything. My education continues to evolve; but as I contemplate my own mortality, I began to question, could I pass on to my collective daughters the learned path, the wisdom that women held as true from the beginning of time? An education that I believe was sadly lost to a femininist-embracing society where women were taught they could have it all. That was a lie, they cannot. That is no less a fairy tale than knights on white steed’s and castles ever after. But there can be the happiest of fulfilled lives and loves and therefore I stand before you have chosen to continue my mother’s work and share these moments of inheriting womanhood.
My education would not have begun had it not been for a quest of mentors, teachers, and both men and women I have had the privilege to call friends. For the countless books read, groups, hours of conversation, laughter, tears and my unending process of research fueled only by the strength and courage of conviction that this the clarity from disillusionment is correct; that today, my beliefs allow me to stand on the shoulders and be carried by the men and women that have walked this path before me. I can only look forward if I look back.
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