Womanhood: All Grown Up

My First Time

By Sara Maldonado
QuailBellMagazine.com

I remember the first moment I truly felt like a woman. It wasn’t in the embrace of my first lover nor was it having my first legal drink or even the first time that I shaved…um…down there. But rather, it was a random Sunday afternoon. It was raining outside, I was kind of bored and watching TV with Boyfriend Volume 3, Edition 2.

We began discussing post-graduate employment and plans. His eyes lit up as he spoke about previous internships and his summer employment experience. He talked about his sparkling GPA and the courses that he’d taken, the professors he knew, the people he had talked to. He laid out his plans. Both the Five and Ten Year ones. He knew his path would lead to the ever fabled land of Success.

That was when my womanhood cherry popped.

It wasn’t the fact that I knew that he was being much too enthusiastic considering the alarming rate at which the Millennial set was being underemployed or even yet, unemployed. It wasn’t that I knew that there was a flaw in his Five or Ten Year ones because I really wasn’t sure. It was just the simple fact that I knew that I didn’t know.

“I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.” According to Plato’s “Apology,” Socrates believed that the wisest man was the man that knew that he did not know anything. Oddly enough, this is the most important teaching that I have taken with me from my short stint of Catholic education.

It was also this exact teaching that led me to my first feeling of being a woman. As he droned on and on about his future plans, although I had some of my own, I also knew that I couldn’t be so exact with what it was that I wanted to do with my life because life has a mind of its own. This is not an easy lesson to remember and to hold. Even after leaving college I had to continuously remind myself of Socrates’ teaching and to let go of the anxieties that made me feel that maybe I wasn’t ambitious enough or that maybe I wasn’t meant for success.

Feeling like a woman is a particularly strange feeling. Womanhood seems to come and go for me. For the most part, I still feel like a young girl, even though according to the law I’ve been an adult for quite some time. But I can now see why Shania Twain wrote such an enthusiastic song about it. For when I do feel that womanhood lens go over my eyes and take over my soul, it is transformative. You see, it has nothing to do with what’s in between your legs or inside your uterus. It doesn’t even have to do with age. It is something I cannot really explain with words, nonetheless I will try. It seems to me as if it is related to your wisdom and overall self-confidence.

I have a theory about womanhood, although being only a semi-woman, I am sure this will change drastically over time. I believe that the feeling of being a woman comes from newly acquired wisdom. This then leads to overall self-confidence which boosts your woman factor even more which is why women such as Oprah, Michelle Obama, and heck, even Beyoncé ooze womanhood from their pores. They are confident and have an aura of knowing that many of us wish we could emulate at least 15 percent of the week.

Although my first time was pretty ordinary, it led to an extraordinary feeling. I am woman, hear me roar.

#Real #Womanhood #Identity #GrowingUp #FirstPersonEssay #Reflection #MyLife #Millennials #Nonfiction #Prose

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