Menstruation Shame Passed Down to Daughters — WordsByEkta🌿
The Invisible Boundary
My mother bathed every morning before her temple visit, the cool water washing away yesterday's sins — or so she believed. During those days when my body bled quietly, a secret shame settled over the house like an unspoken curse. I was not allowed to touch her — not until she returned from temple and her morning prayers were done.
If our skin brushed accidentally, she would vanish into the bathroom and bathe again, scrubbing until the invisible stain was gone.
The kitchen was a no-man's land. If the maid who cleaned the dishes was menstruating, my mother would wash every plate and spoon again, as if the water itself could erase impurity.
I was twelve when I first understood that my blood marked me. Not with words, but with silence — the way her eyes flickered away when I came too close, the sudden coldness in her touch, the way the house seemed to contract around me.
There was no room for questions. No space for anger or confusion. Just the invisible boundary that separated us, carved by ancient fears and modern shame.
I learned to step lightly, to hold my breath, to make myself small. Menstruation was a time of exile, not just from the temple or the kitchen, but from the woman who was supposed to be my closest ally.
When I see my own daughter's first period approaching, I want to tell her the truth: That her blood is not a curse. That no water or prayer can change her worth. That the boundaries others build are not hers to carry.
But the silence is thick. The weight of those invisible walls lingers in my voice, in my hesitation, in the way I still hesitate to cross the kitchen threshold during her time.
I don't know if I'll ever fully tear down the walls my mother built with fear and love — walls made of silence, water, and unspoken rules.
But maybe telling this story is the first step.
I have been thinking about what it means to inherit shame. Not the kind that is handed to you directly — not a lecture, not a punishment — but the kind that seeps in through cracks so small you never see them forming. The kind that lives in a flickered glance, a re-washed dish, a body that instinctively moves away before the mind has even registered why.
My mother never told me I was impure. She didn't need to. The rules spoke louder than any words she could have chosen. And the cruelest part of inherited shame is this: it doesn't announce itself as shame. It announces itself as love. As protection. As the way things have always been done, the way her mother did it, and her mother before her.
I think about the girls who grew up in houses like mine — who learned, before they learned anything else about their own bodies, that those bodies were sometimes a problem to be managed. Who absorbed silence as instruction. Who mistook exclusion for spiritual practice because no one ever offered them another language for it.
And I think about what breaks the chain. It isn't always a single conversation, a grand reckoning between mother and daughter over chai. Sometimes it's quieter than that. A girl who decides not to leave the kitchen. A woman who doesn't re-wash the dishes. A mother who sits beside her daughter on those first difficult days instead of stepping back.
I still carry some of the old reflexes. I won't pretend otherwise. The conditioning runs deep — deeper than intention, sometimes deeper than awareness. But I also know that awareness is where it begins to loosen. That naming a thing, even imperfectly, even with a voice that still trembles a little, is an act of refusal.
A refusal to pass the silence on.
A refusal to let my daughter inherit a boundary she never helped build.
Maybe that is what writing this is. Not a breakthrough. Not a resolution. Just one brick set down, quietly, so my daughter doesn't have to carry it.
Sometimes it is enough to refuse to add another brick.
✍️ Written by WordsByEkta🌿
🖋️ Emotional Storyteller | Writing what hearts never say aloud
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