Your own day of womanhood💫 |Deepsikha Roy|

 They say, changes are beautiful.

For the first time, I found it painful.

 

A prolonged pain which they claimed very pure,

But still I was kept away from everything pious,

The reason, even I am not sure. 

 

Things that are natural are the gifts of the deity,

But still I was not allowed to serve the Almighty.

 

As a child I knew blood is menacing.

As a woman I know it can be embarrassing.

 

Immoral things in public were taught not to be exposed,

Now I know even the beautiful changes in me are also meant to be disclosed. 

 

I still remember the day when for the first time my underclothes got stained with blood without any injury. It was not like I did not know about women's menstruation. I was made aware of these changes by my mother. The things I was unaware of were my limitations during the cycles. In many places, women faces a lot of restrictions till now by their family and the society during these seven days. Although I am lucky enough that there were not many for me, but few.

Growing up as a curious child with a question bank inside my head, I had a lot of interrogations and heat moments with my mother as she never retorts me why women in period are not allowed to visit worship places, why we have to lower our voices while discussing about these things. To everything she simply says, "because we heard this from our mother, we followed, and now you also have to follow." The reasons were never convincing until I solved the real one. 

Let us not talk about today's women. Now, we have a lot of facilities and information for everything. Turning back to the pages of history, may be a millennium ago, women did not have the advanced sanitary facilities we relish now. If they roamed around, everything would get bloodstained. In temples women had a lot of responsibilities unlike us joining hands in devout and ringing the bells. They had to climb the stairs, make Prasad and many more devotional offerings. So without any sanitary facilities they could not make up to the temples while bleeding. Even in home, others prepared food for them so that they could rest for some days. Without any hygienic solutions, it was really difficult for women to even get out of their comfort place and do any sort of arduous activities.

All these things were being transferred to generations after generations like the Chinese whisper game, where the players form a line, the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second one and this process repeats until the last player is reached. The last player announces the message and it is being compared with the original version the first player conveyed. Usually the final version differs significantly from that of the first player. So basically the first player here are the generations a millennium ago, and we are just the middle ones conveying the garbled informations. From not going to the temples for self hygiene to being impure,  from others making food for comfort to total restrictions in entering the kitchen, the whispers travelled a long way. 

Dear people, the society is sometimes not orthodox and blameworthy. Sometimes they just have the altered informations like the players of a Chinese whisper. It is not their fault even. May be they heard things from people prior to them and believed them blindly unlike us where we have so much of informations around us and we can question things based on them. We have the social media, televisions and much more which makes us think critically. Now, we know that we bleed because it's a monthly menstrual cycle and not a monthly women's problem.

Share your story about the day you entered into the verge of womanhood for the first time and how many restrictions did you face in the comment section below.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY TO ALL. 

I dedicate this piece of writing to this pair of stong women in my life who makes my existence purposeful everyday.