The morning of my thirteenth birthday I stood in the family bathroom, my panties in my hands. Frost carved symbols across the window. The mirror weeped with condensation. I stared at the coming winter, at the faint outline of our dilapidated barn through the frost, at my own distorted image in the crying mirror.
I don't understand this, I thought. I know what these stains mean, but they don't look like what I expected. They're the color of rust. They smell funny, like the pile of broken pipes in the backyard.
I didn't have to summon the courage to show my mom. She barreled through the unlocked door the way she did every morning, into the tiny space crowded with my seven-bodied family's cheap toiletries. She noticed my panties, saw my frantic expression.
"Is this the first time this has happened?"
It was a demand more than a question.
"Yes, Mom. I think I just got my first period."
She bent over at the waist. I heard two vertebrae crack beneath her chenille robe. Her fingers worked the child-proof mechanism surrounding the cabinet latch. The warped particle-board door popped open and hit me in the leg but I didn't flinch. My mom reached inside and pulled out an elastic contraption and a sanitary napkin. She pressed one hand into a heavy thigh, grunted as she rose. Her robe gaped open and I saw her breasts, loose and large, mottled with deep blue veins.
"Happy Birthday, Birdie. You're a woman now."
Her tone was almost sarcastic. She didn't tell me what to do. She left the room, left the belt and pad on the toilet tank, let me fumble in confusion and sadness.
I spent my birthday shifting my body at school. The cotton between my legs felt foreign, felt wet and alive. I worried that everyone could tell I was marked with blood. I wore my puffy winter coat tightly tied around my waist, over my plaid uniform skirt, as if I thought a blizzard might fall from the popcorn ceiling covering my ninth-grade English class.
My friends were like me - Catholic, thirteen, afraid. We didn't understand our bodies' natural rhythms. We learned the facts of life at school, flim-strip mythology, sat in darkened sixth-grade rooms three years in the past, the boys shooting hoops at the playground. The school nurse adjusted her sensible glasses and padded to the front of the class in soft white shoes. A solid gold crucifix flapped against her chest in time to her gait. She flipped the light switch. We blinked hard in the florescent blaze, blinked in surprise and discomfort. We would have to bleed every month the rest of our lives?
"Girls, you might see advertisements for something call tampons."
The nurse spoke the word with careful anger.
"Do not use these. You all want to be virgins on your wedding night, and tampons will take your virginity."
I didn't use tampons until I lost my virginity to a slim gymnast, until I gave birth three times, until I turned twenty-four, until I grabbed my babies, two suitcases full of clothes, and left my young abusive husband in a cloud of fear. He hated the change of the moon, the way it swelled my belly, the boxes of pads hidden in the child-proofed cabinet the same way my mom hid them.
The week I left him I attended a yard sale and bought two pans, bought two rough Army blankets, a set of chipped plates, bought a dog-eared book with a fertility goddess on the cover. A book about menstruation. I turned the pages at night, while my children slept in our one-room apartment. My mind resisted the words, the simple discussion of female blood empowerment. My mind resisted.
I am not like these women. I'm Catholic. These things are sinful, I murmured to myself as I read about women who painted with their blood, who sewed their own pads, who let men do things to them while they bled, sexual things. I am afraid of these things. I don't want to go to Hell.
I left the book under the sink with a box of pads and didn't open it for a few months. The moon grew full and waned, grew full and waned. My body responded to the tide, my breasts and belly ached the days before new moon. The bleeding would start, I would stick a fresh pad to my panties, wish it were five days later, wish the flow would hurry, would end. I had to carefully dole out my pads. They cost a lot of money, too much money for a poor single mom who took in other children during the day to earn a few dollars.
One new moon my period began. I felt the cramp, the signal of her royal arrival. I rushed to the bathroom and opened the cabinet. No more pads. I had no money, no hope of collecting more for three more days, until Friday, until the working moms collected their own pay. I picked up the goddess book, and in a motion that mimicked my mom so many years before, pressed into my thigh, rose to face the mirror. I followed the book's instructions, sewed my own pads that night, by hand with a needle and thread, made five pads from the cotton polka-dotted dress in which I had faced the Justice of the Peace on the day of my marriage. I rotated the pads, let the blood-filled ones soak in a ceramic jar filled with water, salt, and vinegar.
Handling the blood taught me to embrace the moon. The slick redness signified change, power, my connection to our animal nature. I slept with a new man, let him celebrate my body, honor the tides. I crossed a bridge, the Golden Gate, the Wall of China, all kinds of mental construction elaborate, built by men, by the women who served them. I never looked back.
These days I live in a poor rural community filled with hard-working people. When the moon carries change, I use whatever means I like - pad, tampon, my homemade garments. I like the feel of blood outside my body, know it tells me secrets of what lies inside. Last month I walked to a small drug store to buy a box of tampons. I found them under lock and key, in a glass case, next to razor heads and bottles of weight-loss pills. I couldn't imagine what danger a tampon, a pad held. Maybe you could smother someone with one? I laughed at the image and signaled a clerk.
"Hey, why are the feminine supplies locked up? I need a box of tampons, please. Surely they aren't considered dangerous?"
The young woman looked me in the eye. She wore her hair swept up into an elaborate bun held in place with two pencils.
"Too many people are stealing them so we have to keep them in the case. Manangement decision. I think it sucks."
A flurry of poor faces cascaded through my mind. The women I laugh with when our children play in the park, the poor women of my town who spend saved pennies on bread, on milk. They don't have money, have even the four dollars necessary, to buy a box of labeled supplies. I did the only thing I knew I should do. I refused the clerk, told her to keep the cotton under secure protection, marched home and printed up a flier, in English, in Spanish, telling the women of my town I would teach them how to Make Their Own. I'm holding the class at the library this weekend, and in the short time I advertised, it has filled beyond capacity. We have the power to take back what belongs to us, our bodies, our blood, our acceptance and love of the moon.
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Comments: 22
I'm not sure of the moon effect though, but I'm a hopeless skeptic.
Beautifully written, too.
I learned about menstruation because the monsoons in Bangkok one year made all the sewers near my school back-up. I didn't see it, but some used bit of padding was floating in the black waters for all to see, and my two best friends were whispering about "it." I had (have) no idea what "it" was but I learned from these girls, who had learned from their older sisters, that women were all "doomed" to this "curse" for their entire lives.
I wish I'd learned all of this from someone like you, who embraced the natural process and the good health it signifies. As such, I hope many young women will read what you have to say here, and your new students, I hope, included many younger women as well. Looking forward to your follow-up article!!
Lloyd, LOL!!!! Now that is one damn true statement!! Gonads, indeed!
Mariana, thank you for your kind comment. I am still at least a good ten years from not having periods, and to tell the truth, I am completely fine with it, now that I have learned to embrace my body as a friend and not a convenience package.
If Gather ever holds a non-fiction publishing contest with a major book publisher, you would win it, hands down, girlfriend !
You will be the next Jeannette Walls, writing the next Glass Castle.
You are THAT good.