When do you change from girl to woman?
Is it when your body begins to change
Curves begin to show And hair begins to grow?
Or is it when you mentally change
You see years fly by you then realise that you’re not a youth
Do you immediately wake up on the birthday of your legal age and feel a certain way?
More mature, older, wiser because we all know with age comes wisdom
With age comes the loss of innocence turned into nasty experiences
The loss of your mother, death of your father
Abused by your lover under the covers
The rose tinted glasses are well and truly off
Life is no longer a playing field
Instead you realise that miles of green grass have been replaced by tower blocks
A concrete jungle, the leader of the pack nicknamed Lion
He too is in limbo, not knowing whether he is boy or man
He tries to prove his manhood by running the ‘hood’
Thinking fear means you’re respected
Not knowing that fear means that you’ll always be rejected, From real life,
you’ll never get to experience a true love
As you always want the girl who shuts up and lets you beat her
To show the boys who never believed ya
They sing your praises
Secretly only because you pay their wages
You see, they don’t respect you,
They respect your possessions and that is what they aspire to
For you the rose tinted glasses are truly on
Not knowing that you were born alone and you will surely die alone.
This piece of writing stemmed from a two month trip I took to Zambia as part of a University project. The cultural differences showed that even though young women may experience certain things, their perception of when you become a woman contrasted significantly to my own views at the time. I was 20 and felt as though I was in limbo between youth and womanhood, which is what led me to question ‘When do you change from girl to woman?’ I was heavily influenced by real life experiences and the harsh realities that many girls/women face.