This I believe

                                                                      

By JoAnne Young

I believe in girlhood. 

 

The ring of that statement sounds strange in my head. For years I’ve been on a self-determined campaign to persuade people to stop using “girl” when they are actually talking about women. “I’ve started seeing this girl,” says the man dating a woman in her 30s. Or, “I have this girl that does my taxes,” about the well-established accountant. And, “that girl on the volleyball team,” who is 21. It’s demeaning, referring to a grown woman as if she’s a child, immature, lacking authority. Unconsciously or consciously, it implies the “girl” is inferior to men who are her peers. 

 

That being said, I’ve recently begun thinking about my own girlhood, the memories I abandoned as I focused on womanhood and all the complications that came with it. 

 

I flashed on pulling a catfish from an Arkansas lake with my dad. 

 

I smiled, remembering collecting box turtles from the woods behind my house, thinking I could contain them in an open box lined with grass and lettuce, only to have them disappear back into the woods by morning. 

 

I thought of riding my beloved blue bike up and down a deep, wide ditch, my green cowgirl hat hanging loose and cool at my neck. 

 

I marveled at my determination to carve an ice rink into my back yard, below freezing temperatures and me shoveling for hours in the deep northern Michigan snow. 

 

I summoned my high school days, the fun of piling into a convertible, a dozen of us girls riding around the school parking lot, nowhere to be but in the moment.   

 

Then there’s the one I’d rather forget. My first kiss, at age 11, from a man in his 50s who lived three houses down. He had lured me into his backyard shed under the pretense of tuning up my bike, once there pulling me to him, putting his mouth on mine and telling me to open wider. Dumbstruck as I was, I didn’t even notice what other touching was going on. But I knew, even then, to pull away and get out the door. I booked it home, only to encounter another breach of faith when my parents told me to return to the shed for my bike, while they waited and watched from three lawns away. 

 

The effect of that stiff, repugnant first kiss, that kiss that would covertly afflict so many kisses to come, was delivered in the undergrowth of girlhood, but manifested in the clearing of maturity. For all of these grownup years, when friends would float through stories of their first kisses, I could only listen and nod, never to tell my own. 

 

Now, so many decades later here I am, asking to reclaim my girlhood, pronouncing my belief that there was a freedom in spending hours on something that would produce nothing. A freedom in pretending to be someone I would likely never become. Freedom in summer play in which I would Peter Pan promise myself to never grow up. 

 

And most importantly, I believe in the loosening of the bonds of silence given to those men who would sully our girlhoods and have us forget. 

This I believe, in remembering and reviving the girl and the unspoiled days of the spring of our lives.