When you’re a little kid, everyone talks about your period like it’s going to be a party bus to WOOOOOOOOOO! Mountain. It’s all romantic metaphors about “blossoming gardens” and “unfurling crotch orchids,” and kids buy into it because they don’t know what a euphemism is because they’re eleven. But it’s also a profoundly secret thing—a confidence for closed-door meetings between women. Those two contradictory approaches (periods are the best! and we must never ever speak of them), made me feel like I was the only not-brainwashed one in a culty dystopian novel. “Oh, yes, you can’t imagine the joy readings in your subjectivity port when the Administration gifts you your woman’s flow! SPEAKING OF THE FLOW OUTSIDE OF THE MENARCHE BUNKER WILL RESULT IN DEACTIVATION.”
Girls in the ’70s were the cultiest—they couldn’t wait to get their periods and incessantly wrote books about it. “Oh, I hope I get it today! I just have to bleed stinkily out of my vagina before that cow Francine.” The reality, of course, is that when you hit puberty you don’t magically blossom into a woman—you’re still the same tiny fool you were at puberty-minus-one, only now once a month hot brown blood just glops and glops out of your private area like a broken Slurpee machine. Forever. Or, at least, until you’re inconceivably elderly, in an eleven-year-old’s estimation. Don’t worry, to deal, you just have to cork up your hole with this thing that’s like a severed toe made out of cotton (and if you don’t swap it out often enough, your legs fall off and you die). Or you wear a diaper. Or, if you have a super-chunky flow, you do both so you don’t get stigmata on your pants in front of [hot eighth-grade boy I’m still too bashful to mention]. Also, your uterus is knives and you poop a bunch and you’re hormonal and you get acne. Have fun in sixth grade, Margaret.
Personally, I couldn’t handle that dark knowledge at all. So, before I hit puberty (and, let’s be honest, for like fifteen years afterwards), I treated my reproductive system like it was the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story: “When you look at it, it’s as if you were blind.” I mean, I washed the parts and stuff, but I had no use for it—and the only thing I really knew was that it was eventually going to screw me over and ruin this sunny, golden childhood biz I had going on. More like vagin-UUUUUUUGGGHHHHHHHH.
If Google had existed when I was eleven, my search history would have looked something like this:
how much comes out
how many cups come out
how to stop period
cancel your period
people with no period
spells to delay period
magic to stop period
blood magic
witchcraft
witches
the witches
roald dahl
new roald dahl books
free roald dahl books for kids
(Priorities.)
My mom—probably sensing my anxiety—dragged me to a mother-daughter puberty class called Growing Up Female*—four hours on a sunny Saturday, trapped in my elementary school library talking about penises and nipples with my mom. Strangely enough, this did not make my eventual pubin’-out process less awkward.
I don’t want to give you guys TMI, but let’s just say that my “Aunt Period Blood” eventually did come to town. When it arrived, my avoidance was so finely calibrated that I blocked out the memory almost completely. I think, though I don’t know for sure, that I was swimming in the ocean near my uncle’s house: a wide, shallow inlet where the flats bake in the sun until the tide pours in, and then the hot mud turns the whole bay to bathwater. I can recall quick flashes of confusion and panic, guiltily unspooling toilet paper in an unfamiliar bathroom by that strange, sticky beach.
I did not want to talk about it. I avoided talking about it so assiduously that—for years—I invariably failed to tell my menopausal mom when we’d run out of stuffin’ corks and diaper nuggets (#copyrighted), forcing her to run to the grocery store at inhumane hours while I squeezed out silent, single tears in the car. (If this had been a Roald Dahl book, she would have developed clairvoyance and summoned the ’pons by telekinesis and/or delivery giant. Thanks for nothing, regular human mom.*)
This avoidance (and my life) reached an all-time nadir one morning when my mom didn’t have time to make it to the store and back before work, so I was forced to go to school wearing a menstrual pad belt that had been in our first aid drawer since approximately 1861. If you’ve never seen one of these things, because you haven’t been to THE ANTIQUITIES MUSEUM, it is a literal belt that goes around your waist, with two straps that dangle down your front and back cracks, ice cold metal clips holding a small throw pillow in place over your shame canyon. I wish I could tell you I only had to go through that once before I learned my lesson.
One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: “Kotex Understands.” In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death—the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly—I’d sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I’d cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands.*
Then, each month, once my period was over, I would burrow back into snug denial all over again: pretending my lady-parts didn’t exist and that nothing would ever, ever come out of them, to the point where the blood would surprise me all over again, every month.
Twelve years later, I finally said the word “period” out loud in public.
Part of that anxiety came from the fact that, particularly in my youth, I was a hider, a dissociater, a fantasist. It was easier to bury myself in stories than to deal with the fact that the realities of adulthood were barreling down on me: money and loneliness and self-doubt and death.
Part of that anxiety came from the fact that, as a fat kid, I was already on high alert for humiliation at all times. When your body itself is treated like one big meat-blooper, you don’t open yourself up to unnecessary embarrassment. I was a careful, exacting child. I hoarded my dignity. Even now, I watch where I step. I double-fact-check before I publish. I avoid canoes.
The most significant source of my adolescent period anxiety was the fact that, in America in 2016 (and far more so in 1993), acknowledging the completely normal and mundane function of most uteruses is still taboo. The taboo is so strong that it contributes to the widespread stonewalling of women from seats of power—for fear that, as her first act in the White House, Hillary might change Presidents’ Day to Brownie Batter Makes the Boo-Hoos Stop Day. The taboo is strong enough that a dude once broke up with me because a surprise period started while we were having sex and the sight of it shattered some pornified illusion he had of women as messless pleasure pillows. The taboo is so strong that while we’ve all seen swimming pools of blood shed in horror movies and action movies and even on the news, when a woman ran the 2015 London Marathon without a tampon, photos of blood spotting her running gear made the social media rounds to near-universal disgust. The blood is the same—the only difference is where it’s coming from. The disgust is at women’s natural bodies, not at blood itself.
We can mention periods obliquely, of course, when we want to delegitimize women’s real concerns, dismiss their more inconvenient emotions, and perpetuate the myth that having outie junk instead of innie junk (and a male gender identity) makes a person an innately more rational and competent human being. But to suggest that having a period isn’t an abomination, but is, in fact, natural and good, or—my god—to actually let people see what period blood looks like? (This is going to blow a lot of you guys’ minds, but: It looks like blood.) You might as well suggest replacing the national anthem with Donald Trump harmonizing with an air horn.