Dear Miss Flower French Toast Stick, or at least that’s what my last name was, according to my four-year-old little brain. If only I could warn you about the hardships you are about to go through growing up into a woman. Enjoy life as much as you can before it turns into a battle of insecurities, but just be warned that growing into a woman will be the most challenging thing to overcome. In fact, writing this at nineteen years old, I have not overcome half of the challenges I am going to warn you about.
Let’s fast forward to sixth grade when you got your first period and had absolutely no idea what was happening to your body. I wish you weren’t so scared of the changes that were happening to you. You knew it was your period but still hid it from Mom for three months. As an early bloomer going through these changes, it was terrifying, but I wish I could let you know everything was going to be okay, and it was normal for a woman to go through this as much as it was a pain to deal with. I wish you would have told Mom sooner, so you didn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of bleeding through at a sleepover and everyone whispering about you. But you were just so young and just starting to mature and did not know how to tell Mom you were turning into a woman.
After getting your period, I wish I could have warned you about the hormonal weight gain that would happen. I was always on the bigger side, but, man, the weight gain after getting my period was insane. I wish I could warn you about the cruel people on this planet who make fun of people for their weight. I wish I could tell you to ignore all those comments because, in the end, it doesn’t matter how much you actually weigh. But it was always hard to feel comfortable changing in locker rooms, or swimming at parties, or even borrowing clothes from friends because you knew you were not going to fit into them.
I wish I could warn you how awful men treat women and the unfairness that we are always surrounded by. I wish I could tell you to ignore the guy who said he could always see your underwear line through your leggings, the one who made you never want to wear normal underwear ever again because you feared getting bullied. I wish I could tell you not to let men use you for your body because you are worth so much more than that. I wish I could tell you that you are perfect the way you are, and maybe then you would have a little more confidence in yourself.
I am writing to you not to scare you, but to warn you how hard it is to turn into a woman, starting at just a young little girl. I am writing to tell you that a women’s body is amazing in the ways it can grow a whole human being inside of us, and the number of nurturing skills us women have is incredible. These are the best parts about being a woman, the parts that allow me to move past all the hardships that I have been through, whether it is getting made fun of for not having the “perfect” body, guys only wanting me for my body, or going through your period at a young age and constantly having to worry about bleeding through.
Being a woman is something that I will always be proud of, and to my future self, I wish you would start to be more self-aware of how amazing your body is as a woman, rather than hiding the woman you are turning into.