Girl To Woman

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Instead you realise that miles of green grass have been replaced by tower blocks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.

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Nostalgia

Betrayed by your best friend, you choose your worst friend to go on the bend.

Hours and hours of drinking and fake reminiscing.

You call it a night to save your sanity and feel alright.

Then the moment kicks in when you feel as though you’ve sinned

You stay solitude for a couple of days, thinking of different ways to approach this awkward situation.

As days begin fading, you then begin dating to pass the time so you can feel alive.

Never forgetting your best friend from back in the day that shot your emotions rocket high.

No one reaches these levels.

It’s always more like a balloon being forced to fly as high as the sky on a warm winter’s night.

We all pretend.

Realising this, I carry on with this false interpretation of life.

This is when I truly begin to fly as high as a kite, reaching the same level as that rocket flying high above the night sky.

Gender Equality- Abuse

He, he has been abused.

No scars or marks grace his body but mentally he is struggling.

He doesn’t know what to do because he is a man, the provider but internally his body is crumbling.

He doesn’t know who to turn to or what to do.

He thinks about what his father would do in this same situation and it breaks him;

As he knows in his past it was vice versa as his father is the one who broke his mother’s heart but now he is the one struggling.

Thoughts run through his mind like where to turn or does he just run?

He contemplates every decision he may make

Each one doesn’t seem to add up, this time 2+2 seems to make 5, whatever he does, he may not make it out alive.

He knows he needs to be brave and just do what’s best but fear just gets in the way.

Can he be selfish and think of himself when he has kids?

This woman has given birth to two beautiful specimens that he does not want to leave

No one will believe that it’s her; She’ll make excuses about all his mental bruises and just like that he loses.

Loses his most prized possessions. They admire him and unfortunately they admire her even more.

“Mother could do no wrong!”

Not knowing that past 6 o’clock whilst they’re tucked up in bed Mummy gets into his head with her nastiness, now he’s mentally dead.

This is why he doesn’t know where to turn as said before, he is a man, the provider.

I wish he realised that there are people out there to help him, that won’t judge him.

They’ll tell him that he is NOT the only one going through this and regardless of gender it is unacceptable.

They’ll tell him that he will see his children because they truly love him and they have probably realised the damage that’s been caused.

Children are smart and however much you try and hide what’s going on, they will know.

But still, he remains. No scars or marks grace his body but mentally he is struggling.