Essay · 5 min read
A letter for my daughter on becoming a woman
No one will tell you when it happens. There is no ceremony, no certificate, no Tuesday afternoon when you wake up arrived. There is only weather.
Daughter — they will tell you, when you are still very small, that one day you will become a woman. They will say it as though it is a destination. A door at the end of a corridor. A dress that finally fits.
It is not. There is no door. There is only weather.
Some mornings the sky will turn a colour you have never seen, and you will not know whether to be afraid of it or to dress for it. Some afternoons your body will arrive in a room before your name does, and you will spend the whole evening trying to retrieve yourself from other people's eyes.
You will be told that becoming a woman means softness. It also means a spine. You will be told it means giving. It also means the holy, unfashionable word no.
There will be people — some who love you, some who only think they do — who will mistake your becoming for a service they are owed. They will hand you a list. Smaller. Quieter. Kinder. Useful. Burn the list. Use the ash to write your own.
Becoming a woman is not the moment your body changes. It is every moment afterwards in which you choose, again, to live inside it on your own terms.
I cannot do this for you. No mother can. What I can do is leave you the door of my own becoming open, so that when the weather is strange, you know there is a room you can come back to — already warm, already lit, with a chair set for you, always.
“Becoming a woman is not a doorway. It is a slow weather. Some mornings the sky will be unrecognisable, and you will still be the one standing in it.”