Not Just Along for the Ride...My Search for Womanhood

Ainsely Kendrick

The First Kiss. Cheesy as is it, the first kiss does have a lot of importance in our lives. It is our first close contact with someone outside our family, and for most, it is our first emotional/sexual experience. It can be repulsive or erotic, quick or slow, wet or dry. How does this simple act of affection change us in one moment? Even those of us who did not have a "fairy-tale" first-kiss experience will have to admit to walking away with a sort of confused elated feeling, like something was left behind. For me it was a bit of my innocence. At 15, I decided to give my first experience to a drunken 21 year-old named Chucky.

I analyze just about everything, and so I began to think about womanhood and every female's "passage" into that whole new world. Is the first kiss part of this passage? How do we know when we are women? What is the difference between a girl and a woman? When I was younger (cough! last week!), I used to think all my doubts and questions about life would magically make sense when I was a woman. I was greatly disappointed.

Society seems to pinpoint that defining moment in celebratory fashion with confirmations, debutant balls and bat mitzvah's -- how can any of these possibly turn a teenager into a woman overnight? These ceremonies are pushed on girls and their families like drug dealers do crack: They are addictive and expensive; plus in my opinion they have no real way in establishing your own sense of self. They are just for show.

While I was speaking with family, friends, and work colleagues about this subject, I listened to some great stories about their own realization of womanhood. Many of them recognized they had attainted womanhood by giving birth, getting married, or having sex for the first time. Would I have to go through all that to become a woman?

Isn't womanhood supposed to bring big physical changes? Shouldn't I have real breasts by now? I'm 24 -- all my life I've watched my friends sprout like pumpkins in October, and all the while I've been sitting on the sidelines holding onto my kumquats. How unfair is that?

It finally dawned on me that it was not the experiences of others that define our womanhood. It is our own. I guess I have found my womanhood in my own way and in my own time. I know I am a woman not because some ceremony, chest lumps, or pair of blood-stained panties says so, but because I feel it. I make my own choices, set my own goals, and decide what path to take. I admire the woman I have become. My womanhood is defined by me and not by society.