A seven year old asks the question straight out at dinner, in front of everyone. Your ears start burning and you hear your own voice say something like “I will tell you later” and move the conversation on to school.
Later does not arrive. In a year she will ask a friend, in two she will read it online, and what she finds there will be said in a language with no respect for her body in it.
Almost every woman goes through this in both directions: first as a daughter nobody explained anything to, then as a mother with nothing to explain it with. The words really are missing. The anatomical ones sound like a medical chart, the household ones are embarrassing to say out loud, and no others were handed down. Peruquois, a leading World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, and the author and facilitator of personal development trainings for women, who has an adult daughter and thirty years of work with women, offers a way through by image rather than explanation.
The flower
The image goes like this: “Your yoni is like a flower.” And then simply, in words a seven year old follows: it is made of many parts, it is very sensitive, and “it is your most sacred, one of the most sacred parts of your body.”
Then comes the part the image exists for. “Right now you are the protector of this flower,” she says. The protector here is the girl herself, not her mother, not her father and not the rules of decency. She is the owner, and it is hers alone to decide who sees it and when. When she grows up there will be a man in her life who will love that part of her too, and that will be her decision and her timing.
Almost everything that needs to be passed on fits inside that formulation. Value, sensitivity, the right to dispose of yourself. And not one word of shame.
Why an image works better than an explanation
A prohibition and an instruction do different things to a child.
When a girl is told to cover up, what she hears is a conclusion about herself: there is something indecent in me that needs hiding. When she is told this is yours and you are its keeper, she hears something else: I have something valuable and I am the one who decides about it. The words have a similar purpose and the opposite result.
Everything else gets added to the image gradually. That the body changes, that the smell changes, that discharge happens and is completely natural. Closer to the first cycle, when a girl has grown but is not yet an adult, it makes sense to explain how those days work and to share how they go for you.
On age Peruquois says there is no fixed age. All girls are different, and the thing to follow is her questions: “So we have to answer her questions. And we must not impose.”
The condition that is not in the words
“If she sees that you behave naturally, she will behave naturally too. But if you are hiding from something yourself, you transmit that feeling to your daughter,” says Peruquois.
Children read state before content. You can deliver the most correct text, but if your face goes stiff while you say it and you want it over quickly, what your daughter will remember is that this is the subject that makes her mother uncomfortable. And she will conclude that something is wrong with her.
From which follows an uncomfortable but useful thought. You prepare for a conversation like this through your own relationship with your own body, not through a choice of words. A woman who lives with the sense that there is something shameful in her body will pass that on in any vocabulary.
What a daughter actually watches
There is a second channel, and it is stronger than speech. A daughter watches very closely how her mother treats herself: how she speaks about her body, her age, her days, her appearance. That channel stays open at every age, including the teenage years when the door gets slammed and any attempt at a personal conversation is met with “Mom, enough.”
So the preparation and the conversation are the same work. A woman who is at ease in her own body gives her daughter the answer before the question is asked.
If you feel that your own shame and guilt keep you from speaking freely with your daughter, Peruquois has a course called Free Yourself from Guilt. You will find it on her website under Courses.
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