I’m on the last leg of my walk when I feel it. Oh my gosh. It’s a sensation every pubescent girl and adult woman has felt many times. I don’t mean a release of blood. I mean a release of blood with no catchment system in place. Dang! I’m so glad I wore my baggy black sweats today. I did it not to flaunt my fashion sense but because I’m fed up with being cold this season. Thank goodness. I still act as though nothing were wrong, hoping passersby won’t look down and see any sort of darker patch in my crotch area. You can’t just bend over and look up into your nether regions in public to figure out what others see. Well, you can. I have. You have to do it in a way that looks casual, nonchalant. You try to look like you’re doing something else. Like what? I have no idea. Like something other than what you’re doing. But then you risk your undies pressing against your pants and further sponging the feared color onto them even more. So I walk along, looking lighthearted on the outside, meanwhile wondering in fear how long this release will be. When will it stop? Will I look like a scene in a horror movie by the time I get home and run in my bathroom?
When I first got my period, I was 12. It was almost time for softball practice and I had gotten out to the field first. There was a boy out there who offered to be the catcher. I pitched my first ball, swinging my arm around in a high circle, releasing with oomph, and stepping down hard onto my left foot. Whoa. What just happened? Something came out of me in an area where nothing ever had before. I said some unusual reason to the catcher about why I needed to go, and tried to look casual as I power-walked to the locker room. It was the beginning of a most unusual lifetime of body fluidology. An education familiar to half the people on this planet.
You see, as a girl, it takes a good decade or four to understand your body. Girls who grow up with moms unfazed by verbal intimacy are on the fast-track in Body Fluids 101. Those of us who gleaned what we could from friends at school and magazine covers in the grocery store were a little less savvy. We just had to wing it, hoping everything coming out of us was status quo. Because it’s not just blood. During the rest of the month, there is a wide variety of essential, miraculous, important consistencies that make themselves known. But the fact that the subject is hush-hush shrouds their myriad purposes. Sometimes mid-month a long string of fantastic durability would extend to the floor as I showered. A fluid material with superhero qualities that would make a slug green with envy. I could make a lasso of the stuff. Maybe Wonder Woman did. It could win science awards for surface tension and tensile strength. Surely, its uses by NASA would be endless if it were the kind of thing anyone could actually talk about.
But no one I knew talked about it. And this was not a topic of conversation in my house. I wasn’t about to shift the paradigm. The only reason I even told my mom that I started my period was because I knew I would need some supplies. Fast. Otherwise, I don’t think I ever would have mentioned it. After all those years of completely avoiding any talk whatsoever about bodies and body changes, when my mom learned of my news she said, “Edee, you’re becoming a woman now!!!” and hugged me as though it were some celebratory moment. Hmmm. Total silence about personal issues all my life and now excited let’s-throw-a-party jubilation. Eeeesh. One minute of personal talk with my mom was about all I could handle after a lifetime without it.
That was the start of learning the subtle signs the body gives to alert the inhabitant that she will soon need to dress her undies accordingly. Like getting a premonition that a wound will soon occur. It took decades for me to accurately read. And because I’ve been fortunate to have a very light period, I’ve been lucky. If I was off, it didn’t matter. Not much happened the first day anyway.
Now everything is changing again at 43. But I have to admit that the guys in my life are still better at predicting it than I am. My husband is probably thinking, “Okay, she just yelled at each of us for totally different reasons. Hmmm. I give it 15 hours and 23 minutes. What’s your guess?” In a few years my son will surely reply, “No way dad, 21 hours, 2 minutes.” And just like those earlier days, I’m having to relearn the subtle clues or else I am caught walking home, saved only by what I happened to put on earlier in the morning.
It reminds me of a close one I experienced 30 years ago, a middle school near-death experience it would have been, had I not happened to be wearing black sweats that day as well. It was a small school in a small town and there were about six of us kids who wanted to be in band class. Not enough for a band class. So our parents took turns carpooling the six of us over to the high school to practice with them during their band period every other day.
It came time for the mother of the boy I liked to take us over. We piled in her car, went to practice, then piled back in 45 minutes later. About 20 seconds before we pulled up to our school to jump out, I felt it. Not the almost unnoticeable feeling of a first-day’s light-red dot. No. It was the feeling of a second-day’s uncontrollable gush. In the swirl of school, sports, and whatever occupied my mind the previous day, I had not paid close enough attention. I had missed the subtle clue to prepare me for today’s onslaught. Oh no!! No, no, no! Can I just pause here and tell you that when this happens, five million thoughts fly through your brain at the speed of light? But when you only have 5 seconds to act, it gets boiled down to just a few thoughts in bold: I like this guy! Oh my gosh, I’m in his car! We’re about to jump out! What am I gonna do?
The car stopped, the kids flew out on either side of me, and all I could do was take a longggg, sliiiiding, mopping swipe along the thank-God-it’s-vinyl seat until I got to the very edge and stood up. I looked back to take a panicked yet x-ray-vision-clarity kind of micro-examination to assess the damage. In shocked relief, I sighed that it was almost undetectable. There were some very thin streaks of light red, but the olive green vinyl acted as a friendly camouflage for this novice-in-training. I ran along, my backside completely wet, headed toward my locker for my gym shorts. Thanks to the black sweats hiding what color that wetness was, I was relieved. I also knew that by the time the boy I liked and his two brothers hopped in their car after school, it would take a lot of close looking to see what had quietly transpired unbeknownst to them, and they would no doubt be more distracted by each other than to think about magnifying their car vinyl for trace fluids.
We’ve all had various and sundry experiences like this. Every one of us girls. When we’re on top of things, we’ve chosen between a miniature diaper or feminine corks. In times of distress we’ve had to quickly concoct homemade pads of layered toilet paper in a port-a-potty, or ask a friend while laying out at the beach if we could have a tampon really quickly in order to run behind a shrub before “that feeling” makes itself known on the outside of our swimsuit.
We girls know each other’s stories. That’s one of the great things about being a girl – you cut past the shallow stuff real fast and start talking about reality with each other. Red tent or not, we’re candid. Not usually posting it on blogs, no. But, not one to cower at “indecent” talk, I enjoy a little shock value from time to time. A moment to air some dirty laundry and laugh now and then when people are least expecting it to be mentioned. At least I didn’t attach photos. I contemplated it. Even posed in front of the mirror with my newly crimsoned loincloth once I ran in the bathroom this morning. I decided against that much shock value. You’re welcome, family.
Speaking of family, I have not repeated my mom’s silence since becoming a mother myself. I decided from the very naked day our first baby boy was born that there would never be a reason to hide myself or my natural processes from him, as they were concealed from me as a child. We were both naked when he came into the world, he drank his sustenance from my body every two hours for a year, my body humorously released that sustenance all over the room and all over his face every morning when there was more milk than there was room inside me for that milk, we sat in the bathtub with his inflatable toys for hours, so at what point would I say, “Well, now everything about me is going to be private and mysterious. From now on I will be fully clothed so that you forget that I am a human being. Awkwardness will gradually replace our openness so that you can ask your peers for answers to things instead of me. Sound good?”?
Well, enough about all this. It’s time to get back to some gripping news about Orcas Island’s rainy weather. In the meantime, I’ll see you in the feminine products aisle in the store. Thank goodness I don’t have to send my parents there for me anymore.
courageous. honest.
Thank you!