If I think back to the sounds of my childhood, I hear the harsh words and escalating pitch of my parents and my siblings, intertwined with the softer thrum of purring cats and chirping birds. We had an array of sleek, silky cats who would lie around the apartment. In Islam, dogs are haram, forbidden, but not so cats. (One of our religious figures, Abu Huraira, a companion of the Prophet [PBUH], had a cat that he carried around in the sleeves of his robe.) I named all my cats for Italian soccer players: Cannavaro, Di Matteo, Baggio, etc. Our bright, trilling canaries were kept in cages. Each day my father would take the birds from the cage, wash their feathers in water, and let them fly around the house, their wings fluttering through the warm, stagnant air.
We were not the only ones who kept birds. My cousin Muhammad, one of Uncle Sa’ad’s sons, kept a pigeon hut on the roof of their house. Muhammad, who was two years older than me, used to play soccer with us on that same roof, and he was the one who taught Amal and me how to play board games. With him, we played Chutes and Ladders and UNO. Once, when Aunt Aziza, his mother, called for him to help her carry some parcels, Amal and I stealthily took out one of his game boards and began to play. When Muhammad discovered us, he started to yell; we had touched his things. Always trying to avoid a beating, I ran to the roof, leaving Amal to fight alone with him. But Aunt Aziza had other ideas. She threw a slipper into cousin Muhammad’s back, hard, and then proceeded to wreck the game board as well.
Sometimes, our visits to my uncle’s house stretched into the night. Then my brother and I would sleep together with our cousins Amal, Muhammad, and Ahmed, strewn across the floor of one room. I remember one night when Muhammad woke me up before the others. “There’s something you have to see,” he said.
Silently, he led me up to the roof and showed me a pigeon egg on the verge of hatching. I watched, captivated, as a blind, featherless baby pigeon pecked its way through the shell and emerged. The tiny, thin-skinned bird trembled as Muhammad cradled it in the palm of his hand. Gently, he slipped it into my palm so I could feel its heat and its newborn hatchling skin and sense the frantic pulsing of its heart.
But then, without warning, Muhammad vanished from my life.
The first clue as to why came on a morning that began like any other fourth-or fifth-grade day in my girls’ primary school. Miss Sanaa, our religious studies teacher, entered the room. Her light hair was worn twisted in a bun, as always, and she carried her preparatory book under her arm. Miss Sanaa was fair-skinned, with a round face, thick eyebrows, and a beautiful smile. She was among the few teachers who were patient with us; she didn’t carry a wooden ruler and she didn’t scream at us the way so many of her colleagues did. If asked, most of us would have said that she was our favorite.
As she walked to the front, the class stood, and just as we did every other day, we answered her greeting in one voice: “Peace be upon you, and God’s mercy and blessings be upon you.” But this morning, Miss Sanaa fixed her gaze first on another girl, Yousra, and then on me. Yousra and I possessed an insatiable appetite for questions; we asked about everything. But today, no questions were allowed. “I’m going to explain a new lesson,” she said. “I do not wish any of you to ask questions either during or after the explanation, especially you two, Manal and Yousra. Keep your questions to yourselves for today.”
Yousra and I quickly looked over at each other, our eyes widening. Suddenly I was even more curious than I had been before.
The lesson was titled “Menstruation and Postpartum.” Miss Sanaa presented all of it in a vague way, largely beyond the grasp of our still girlish minds; my mother had told me that I was born into this world via her belly button. Miss Sanaa wrote the lesson on the blackboard and recited it aloud without expression, almost as if we weren’t present at all. Listening to her speak was like hearing a new language, one made up of characters we recognized, but words whose meanings eluded us entirely. Then she wrote out the homework assignment, sat down, and buried her head in her papers until the bell rang.
Unlike in the west, the simple biology of puberty and childbirth had no place in her lesson. The biology and physical changes were lessons that I never got to learn: not at school, nor at home, nor in any of the religious brochures and pamphlets that were distributed to us everywhere we went: mosques, malls, souks, schools, even in airport terminals. But we had no doubt about what “becoming a woman” meant socially: “Have some shame,” our nearly teenage selves were admonished. “You are women now!” Miss Sanaa was there to teach us our Islamic duty surrounding our time of becoming women and then later mothers, saying things such as “Don’t pray or fast during the times of menstruation and postpartum! After the blood stops, you should wash yourself and resume praying.” But where was this blood supposed to be coming from? Most of us still had no basic understanding of what menstruation and postpartum were, and we carried these questions around in our heads, afraid to speak them.
I knew only one thing about this blood, and that was what Mama had told me on the day my sister and I were propositioned by our neighbor’s son. If she had found blood on our underwear, we would have been ruined. “Do you mean like when a toy gets ruined, and you can’t play with it anymore?” I had asked her. She silenced me with a signal from her hand.
My sister and I were forbidden from jumping down from high places, and we could not ride bikes on the roof with our brother: physical activity, it seemed, produced blood. But when Mama was busy in the kitchen, I’d sneak up and join my brother anyway. At night, I checked my underwear for blood before I put it in the laundry basket.
I was thirteen years old, an intermediate school student, when the blood finally came. A group of us had been challenging each other to see who could jump down the largest number of stairs without falling; I had managed the largest number of stairs that day, and I was exceedingly happy about it. But when I returned home, I found bloodstains in my underwear. I washed them out quickly and hid the underwear so my mother wouldn’t see it. Then I crept out on the apartment balcony, sat alone, and sobbed, wishing that I had listened to Mama when she had told me not to jump with the other girls. How was I going to tell her that I was ruined?
The blood did not stop. After a few days, my fear overcame my shame, and I decided to tell my horrible secret to my cousin Amal. I went to her house that weekend, took her aside, and told her what had happened. “Did the blood keep flowing,” she asked me, “or was it just a few spots?”
“I found stains the next day and the day after.”
She laughed. “Congratulations,” she told me, “you’re a woman now! This is the blood of the menstrual cycle.”
I was completely confused. How could this be a happy moment when I had spent days sobbing? “Amal,” I said, “please help me. Tell me what the menstrual cycle is.”
Amal told me that she’d eavesdropped when her older sisters discussed their periods. Eventually she learned that women got their periods once a month. She’d found things called “sanitary towels” among her sisters’ things, and taught herself how to use them when her own period came.
“You’re a woman?” I asked her. “Why didn’t you tell me? You should have explained all this instead of letting me suffer like I suffered this week!” My next thought was: How do I get these sanitary towels without telling Mama? But sanitary towels and telling my mother would be the least of my problems.