Menarche - the Gateway to Womanhood

“When my period came for the first time, I called Mother from school. I was in the eighth grade.

‘It’s here’, I said

‘I’ll be right there’, she replied

Once home, she made me a bath of rose petals.”​

When Women Were Birds Author - Terry Tempest Williams

I have read these lines over and over. It is simple, hardly seeming to be on the verge of profound. But yet I get pulled to open this page and re read it aloud, silently and to other women. The idea of being made a rose petal bath as a response to Menarche feels luxurious, nurturing, honouring. It is a teaching of self care, a foundation of self respect, celebration and giving nourishment, sacred space to the body when the gates open from Heaven to Earth and the ‘Holy Waters’ start flowing.

Rose is a flower that softens, relaxes, opens and sweetens it is a symbol of Mother, of the Feminine, of One Fully Embodied. It is severely protected so it may thrive, come alive and into full flowered expression by thorns that tear at skin and ward off predators from coming too near.

Many women instead of rose water baths are given a box of pads or tampons to get on with their day. There was not a stopping, a gesture of pamper, pleasure, nurture or time out. Many women like me were told that cramps and pain were just normal, a part of being a woman.

I received my first blood later than many of my peers. I was 15. I remember watching an educational movie about a girl getting her period in primary school, it left me feeling disempowered and definitely not wanting that. There was so much embarrassment portrayed in the movie, that she had to hide her menstrual pads in a big paper bag and people around her when buying them looked at her with sympathy.

After this introduction I asked for my period to come as late as possible. I wondered how much time I could squeeze between now and Menarche. I hoped and prayed that it would be a long time before I saw any red. Girls around me at school called it ‘the curse’, ‘rags’ they would talk about it negatively like it was one of the worse things in the world. A nuisance, an inconvenience. Making me even more determined to put distance between me and the coming Red Sea.

The period has become something that gets in the way, slows you down, an embarrassment. When you got it at school you dreaded having blood seep through onto your skirt. I would go to the bathroom and check my skirt often. In a family of three girls I do not know when my sisters started their cycle. Like me it was not mentioned, it was kept quiet.

Too quiet.

When we keep things too quiet it becomes a taboo. A taboo is something we dissociate from, we put it over there away in a box, a draw, a basement somewhere far away - not here with us.

For many women the silence around Menarche created a Great Wall of China. Keeping out the pelvic bowl and the wisdom within it. What was thought as empowering has been women treating their bodies in a linear fashion when they are cyclic, expecting to keep up with male energy when a males body does not loose blood each month. 80% of a woman’s bodies functions and focus go to the Red Cycle.

Women forgot that in each Red Cycle they give some of their essence to the Earth, their body has to rebuild blood and they are 3 times more intuitively sensitive than usual. When women do not have this menstrual literacy they are at risk of becoming slaves to a ‘doing’ world. Not listening to their own cycles, developing negative feelings and attitudes toward the feminine, fitting in with world demands rather than feeling what is needed and a true priority, growing distance to their creative centre and thinking that outside experts know their bodies

better than themselves.

Menarche and how we experience this in our family, through our female lines and community sets the ground for how we approach our womanhood and womanly life cycles. It starts with the seed and how we feed, how we water and how we connect with the environment it grows roots and stems into determines if it thrives or not.

Our first Menarche shows us that we can flower, we can shine, we are received, we are seen, we are honoured, valued, responded to. It shows us we can caretake ourselves, we can put our needs first, we can have pleasure in our cycles, we can grow, develop and awaken through this gift that comes with being in a womanly body.

Menarche, that first show is an opportunity to ground a girl into her womanhood through the simplicity of celebration. I don’t mean a big party but if that is what is wanted by all means. It is the celebration of gratitude, of enthusiasm, of grace and mystery as the girl enters this new cycle, an the ability to open up and let the 'Holy Waters’ cleanse her body and her psyche.

As she develops from bud to flower and her mentors, sisters, mother, aunties share with her the female anatomy, its wisdom, beauty and the bounty she embodies, she takes up her space, her pelvic bowl more easily and naturally.

When I was 15 and had my first showing, I did not feel acknowledged, honoured or celebrated. There was no joy or enthusiasm. It was a let down, it was disappointing. I felt angry because I knew there was wisdom but without my elders passing this down, and the ‘internet’ yet to be born, I had no way to receive it.

I longed for something I knew in my bones was available, a sacredness, a reverence for the feminine and taking up a female body in this life time. But all around me in the pocket that I came into the world the feminine was dry, her roots were stunted as were her branches. Sacred She Wisdom was a buried treasure that was succulent, flourishing and golden. This is what I knew inside but outside it felt grey, dense, superficial and ‘She’ was not present.