Everyone thinks adulthood is something you need to get over with and not something to be eased into .For me it was terrifying being a female and reaching adulthood by female standards.I have always been a tomboy so when my body started changing i was scared because i didn't want to change my body into something i was so sure i couldn't identify with.It started at thirteen, one month and two days after my birthday.I had started realizing changes around my chestal area .Painful changes you might say as when i run or jump my growing tissues aches in pain.Puberty was setting in and to manage it i took steps. Step one, i started wearing bra and stopped hanging with my male friends for fear of rifdicule.It wasn't the hair or the physical body changes or the hormonal surge that clinched it,it was my period.At school we were taught menstruation and periods and such but i almost never pay attention to those topics because in my naivete thought i was above those bodily functions.Therefore waking up to bathe and realizing my underwear was stained was for me the end of my life not to mention the cramps that choose that moment to register in my brain.I was compelled to tell my mother who beamed and readily supplied the necessary materials saying that she has been waiting for this day for the end of my tomboyish ways and the begining of my womanhood.Step two,every month from then on it means that i have to go to my mom's medicine drawer and avail myself of her resources.I was forced to take a good look at myself and redefine who I was and what I was going to make of myself with what I have. I consumed so many self help books to understand my body better and if possible get the changes to stop.I looked forward with dread during the beginning of every month to the unwanted and scary process that my body would commence in addition to the pain that always accompanies it.Before the d-day i would get so cranky,withdrawn and annoyed at so many things especially at my mother because she is my mother and she is supposed to take care of me.She is supposed to take away that burden that i don't want even though i didn't voice it, she is supposed to know what am thinking and going through because as i said she is my mother.It was my sister who literally saved me from myself a couple of days to another d-day.Within myself i was convinced that i was going to become a boy whether anybody liked it or not and by anybody i meant my mother.I was convinced that if i wish and pray hard enough that God would hear me and magically restore to me the body i really was meant to have and make me into who i wanted to be and of course i wrote all this in my journal.My very nosy very curious sister with the knack for sniffing things out sniffed out my journal where i stashed it under a pile of dirty clothes and read it.When i came back from school and was doing my laundry in the laundry room,she came up to me,offered me a chocolate bar before sitting on my pile of clothes on the floor.She asked me how school was and if there was any bully tormenting me to which i snorted and told her that i invented bullying. She laughed and asked me why i was allowing a natural process God made to bully me.I quietly asked her to get up from my clothes carry herself out of room and never to ask me that again despite the anger brewing in me as i knew then that she read my journal. She laughed in that i-know-best-and-am-your-senior kind of way which is totally annoying.She proceeded to tell me about her own first time which she agreed was painful but which she bore wholeheartedly because it was a thing of pride.She told me how women are the backbone and silent leaders of the family and society and how being a woman is the best there is to be.By the time she was done i was viewing womanhood in a different light.She then told me things to do to minimise the pain and make the experience bearable and when it finally came again and i did all that she told me,it was wonderful.I barely noticed it all thanks to my sister and i stopped wishing for a new body. Now in many countries and culture ,females are struggling with the definition of self that comes with adulthood and puberty based on social standards .They strive to come to terms with the natural growth of their person and how they really want to perceive themselves. this puts them at risk of identity crisis and subsequent identity displacement.Mothers and female relations then should pay sufficient to the girl child during this period of transition in a child because if my older sister had not intervened who knows where i would be with my issues by now.