Girls

First, let me tell you a bit of background for today’s post.

Every year, we used to have trainee teachers coming and teaching us for a few weeks in our school. When I was in 10th std and we had a trainee to teach us biology. One of my classmate asked during class, “teacher, how are twins formed”.

Teacher blushed, swallowed few gulps of air, blushed again and told us ” that is not part of your syllabus”

The question was pretty straight forward, all she had to say was there are two types of twins, fraternal and identical. When two ovum are fertilized by two sperms, you get fraternal twins. If a fertilized single zygote divides and forms two embryos for someone unknown reason, then you get identical twins. What was the big deal in telling 15 year old girls how twins are formed?

Yesterday my son came home and told me “mom, I am scarred for life”

“How come?” I asked

“I was with my friend A and few other boys from my class after school and somehow the topic went to ‘periods’ and A, fished out a tampon from her bag and wanted to show us how it works”

“And?”

“And, What, we all ran away from her”

20 years ago, no girl would have even dared to utter the word periods. It was a topic not to be talked with anyone, especially boys.

I am happy that girls now don’t feel shy to talk about periods. That is liberation from taboos that were unhealthy and unnecessary. What is there to be ashamed of?

 

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