Puberty is scary. For young women, this adolescent stage of life means drastic and inevitable change; LUXURY/ANNOYANCE OF WOMANHOOD, LUXURY/ANNOYANCE OF WOMANHOOD, and shaving your legs. Vivid memories of my first time shaving my legs remain intact. I remember feeling EMOTION.
I was in GRADE IN SCHOOL . The night before AN OCCASION, my sister and I were modeling our new ADJECTIVE dresses and deciding what shoes to wear. Both my sister and I had picked TIME OF YEAR dresses that ended just above the knee; ingenuous hairs covering our bare calves stood on edge in response to the fresh air.
When my mother asked if we wanted to try shaving our legs for the big occasion, we both replied with EMOTION at the invitation to enter into this ritual of womanhood.
Growing up, my mother carefully protected my sister and I from the danger of maturing too fast. I did not have a COVETED ITEM till 6th grade, I was not allowed to wear ARTICLE OF CLOTHING until middle school, and I did not know what a period was until I learned about it in my fifth-grade public school sex education class.
I felt EMOTION that my mother trusted I was mature enough to shave my legs for this occasion. I VERB and VERB my legs of the ADJECTIVE hairs with my head held high. I had entered the door from childhood to womanhood. But similar to Alice in Wonderland, the moment I walked through the door, it shrank behind me. I was never to return to my innocence. And I didn’t want to. PARENTAL FIGURE/MENTOR say that innocence is bliss, but I say innocence is restless.
