How about this as a gift to your pre-teen daughter: Gather together your women friends, and her girl friends and their mothers, and talk about your bleeding time!
This is what I offer the girls in my Girls Journeying Together™ groups and we have a lovely evening. I highly recommend it.
Women supporting girls – sharing their experience of their first bleed and how their monthly cycle is now.
Women supporting women – offering sympathy and advice for difficult times and howls of laughter for experiences shared.
Girls supporting girls – daring to ask their questions and touching offers of support to one another.
Even if you have the kind of relationship with your daughter where you openly discuss such things, a great deal is gained by sharing with a group of other women. Curiously, girls will often say things in the group that they’ve not shared with their mother. And women will say more, spurred on by the contributions of other mothers – lots of “Me too!” or “Oh for me it’s different…” And girls will hear things that their own mother might not have thought to say. And by asking their questions and airing their concerns the girls realise that they are not alone, and often come up with ways to support one another outside the group. And each girl gains a sense of having a bunch of mothers, as well as her own, that she could turn to and talk to.
If you’re not sure how to host such a meeting, I can guide you. Just email me or comment below.
Gather women and girls together :- friendships deepen, understanding widens, and laughter is shared.
