It's always amusing to see girls talk about their menstrual cycles so, um, candidly.
Females, for the most part, are squeamish about anything men may find horrifyingly amusing: boxing, bugs, Fear Factor, face transplant specials on the Discovery Channel. Yet, it seems men will ever fully understand the whole cycle of life thing. And we couldn't. We could pick our own boogers and scabs until the day is long, but as soon as we see blood below the waist we're bound to faint.
But that's okay. We'll kill the spiders and catch the mice and watch people eat goat balls while you go do the hard stuff.
Lynn Harris
Someone engrave me a silver tampon. As of this month, when I turned 35 1/2, I have been getting my period for 25 years. A quarter century. Your math is correct: I got it when I was 10 1/2, and I don't even have the giant rack to which I am thus entitled. (Historical note: I am old enough to remember those pads with belts, which, since you asked, are like wearing a hammock.)
The first time it came, I told no one. I was mortified, ashamed. It was not the shame of bleeding the blood of Eve's original sin, or any of that hooey. It was the shame of being ten and a freaking half. I wasn't ready to be a woman. I was ready to be an officer in the Shaun Cassidy Fan Club. I thought those girls in Are You There, God? were out of their gourds. They wanted their periods? (That girl wanted to be named Mavis?) In my school, no one had it, no one wanted it, no one talked about it. Until at least ninth grade, I bled, irregularly, in silence.
I told my mom the second time I got it, as I needed a funding grant for pads. She said something that to this day I do not understand: "We're going to have to tell your grandmother." Of course I listened in on the phone line on our weekly call to Atlanta. "Lynn's not a little girl any more," my mom said. Said my grandmother: "Oh, the poo-ahh thing!"
My period was not only early, it was crafty. It read my datebook. It came on the first day of horse camp, the first day of sleepaway camp, just before the first performance of "Oliver Twist," though there are many other reasons to hate that show. I lived in fear, carrying tampons, once I'd gotten that Scout badge, hidden in a Hello, Kitty case.
But now that I'm married -- though not to Shaun Cassidy -- and I see birth as something to give, not control, it's different. At least, it's going to have to be. I have to stop envisioning my uterus as the creepy lair of a scheming Gollum, the musty apartment of my bitchy Aunt Flow. I have to find a way to think of my reproductive system as my friend, or, as I well know, it will make other plans behind my back.
Lynn Harris writes for Glamour, Nerve, and Salon. For the love of God, buy her book, Miss Media.
