"I started the pill!" I squealed to my mother and then-fiance and several friends. "I'm finally a woman!"
Yes, I had finally stepped into womanhood. In three months I was going to be married. I was going to have sex (finally!) and do it responsibly. Yes, that would involve taking a pill every morning for basically the next 30 years, but that's what all women did. A rite of passage, kind of like shaving your legs, only if you didn't the consequences were more serious.
Less than a year later, I threw the half-used pack of pills into the trash can. And I grinned great big and actually danced around the apartment, because now I knew I had become a real woman.
A woman who was no longer ignorant about the workings of her body. A woman who didn't depend on drugs when she was perfectly healthy. A woman who embraced her God-given gift of fertility instead of shunning it. A woman who was a true feminist by refusing to be controlled by the pharmaceutical industry or the lies of the sexual revolution. A woman who, with her husband, was reaching for self-control instead of constant self-indulgence.
I had been liberated. This was true responsibility, to do the right thing instead of taking the easy route. This was true freedom and true femininity.
Do you remember the first time you became a real woman?