Live and Learn

During my first period, at school, I stained my jeans since I had no idea how often I was supposed to change my pads. The school gym teacher helped me, but I remember thinking that she wasn't very helpful especially since the entire experience was horrifying.

I started using tampons about a year later. I figured out on my own how to use them - but it took hours of sitting in my room trying to decipher those damn tampax drawings and trying to figure out how they corresponded to my own body - mirrors helped. I was afraid to ask my mom, because I thought using tampons was something bad, like virgins couldn't use them (I was brought up in a traditional Italian-American household).

My friend Marcy didn't know that she couldn't go swimming wearing a pad. So she got in the pool and the pad totally disintegrated. There were these little bits of pad floating all over the place and Marcy was swimming around trying to gather up the pieces.

One thing I have a clear memory of is the first time I used a tampon. I rode my bike to meet some people and on the way I could only think about how much the tampon was irritating me. I forget if I removed when I got to the place or not. Maybe I had another one with me that I inserted more deeply into my vagina. Since I was an athletic teenager I tended to use tampons, despite this initial discomfort. And, as an adult, I prefer tampons, even though I think pads cause less health problems.

My mom told my dad when I got my period and he told his cousin ( a nice woman with whom I used to go jogging), and she said to me one day "So I heard you started your period." I was absolutely mortified - I didn't want anyone to know I was menstruating, ever! At twelve, I guess I thought this was realistic.

The thing that really bugged me throughout junior high, was not being sophisticated enough to plan ahead for leaks. It seemed to me that everyone at school "knew" when I was menstruating. Probably they didn't, but I felt like all eyes were on me.

One time in band my nightmares of bleeding through were realized in grotesque proportions. Stephanie Hunnicut had chosen to wear white corduroy jeans to school that day, and during the 45 minute band period she bleed entirely through her pants and caused a huge puddle on the chair. She left in the middle of class with everyone watching her stain on her pants. We all turned and stared at the blood on the chair. It was bright red on her pants and on the chair it was already darkening, turning brown and drying.

Her misfortune was captivating to us. As a group of adolescent flute players who regularly passed the Judy Blume book - Forever - behind the music stand to find out things about sex , we were always grasping at any information we could get about what was happening to our bodies, and what we were expected to do with them. After seeing the spectacle of her blood all over her and the chair, we were sure that we needed to continue our quest for menstrual and sexual knowledge. She was the lesson that showed us what could happen if we did not manage our bodies properly.

My dad is a gynecologist, so one day after I spent about six hours in the bathroom sweating and crying and trying to insert an "o.b." (foolishly thinking that it would be easier to insert because it was smaller than a tampon with an applicator) while my friends Wendy and Jill coached me from outside the door, I found my dad watching the game and told him about my little problem. In his typical professional way, he didn't bat an eye, took me upstairs to my mom's cache of stuff, and told me to make an "O" with my thumb and forefinger. He ejected a tampon through that "O" and said "See? You go try it." I was extremely doubtful, but did as I was told, and the thing went in so easily that I spent 10 minutes searching around the toilet for the tampons I had obviously dropped before I noticed the tell-tale string between my legs. After an entire day of trying to walk in a half inserted o.b., I had stopped believing the claim "you won't even feel it" -- that's just advertising hype, I thought. The moment I found the string was such a revelation of freedom that I got dressed and ran downstairs to give my father a big kiss. I think he just grunted and motioned me out of the way of the TV., but I was so grateful.

One thing I have a clear memory of is the first time I used a tampon. I rode my bike to meet some people and on the way I could only think about how much the tampon was irritating me. I forget if I removed when I got to the place or not. Maybe I had another one with me that I inserted more deeply into my vagina. Since I was an athletic teenager I tended to use tampons, despite this initial discomfort. And, as an adult, I prefer tampons, even though I think pads cause less health problems.

My mom told my dad when I got my period and her told his cousin ( a nice woman with whom I used to go jogging), and she said to me one day "So I heard you started your period." I was absolutely mortified - I didn't want anyone to know I was menstruating, ever! At 12, I guess I thought this was realistic.

I was worried about telling my boyfriend, Howie, who also went to my school (but boys and girls were separated, so I didn't see him much during the day.) I told my brother, who was friends with Howie, and of course Karl told Howie immediately even though I swore him to secrecy. I was really humiliated by this, because at the time I was quite aware that this was the first experience in my life that Howie and I could not share and that I couldn't even comfortably tell him about. That made me perceive a big rift between us, even when he kept saying, "Karl told me, you know. You don't have to pretend." I just kept insisting that I was "sick" and couldn't talk about it. One pretty weird thing I should probably add is that school, the Hebrew Academy, was Orthodox Jewish, and as a young and impressionable girl I had been led to believe that women are "unclean" when they have their periods, as we learned that married women sleep in separate beds from their husbands for two weeks of every month, and when they have stopped bleeding for seven days they go to the mikvah which is a kind of ritual bath, in which they immerse themselves naked, and then they may have sex again with their husbands. I was a little mixed up with this -- obviously Howie and I were not married and were not having sex -- but I remember having a vague conviction that I, too, was unclean, and shouldn't really make out with Howie (fully clothed and only above the neck!) when I was menstruating.

I guess being late is its own ghetto -- my friend Leslie Thorne definitely held it over my head that she was more "mature" than me (geez, she was a jerk), and at the same time pressured me to shave my legs because she did, even though I was not yet a "woman."

For a while in my early twenties I was having trouble with leaking during the night and staining sheets -- my flow was too heavy on the first and second day to make it thought the night without a tampon change. I was getting pretty annoyed with this and was trying to convince myself, somehow, to wake up in the middle of the night to change the tampon. I didn't quite realize what my determination would mean... The answer came in the form of a dream, but not a nice friendly dream where the good tampon fairy tapped me on the shoulder politely and suggested I wake up and save my sheets. Instead, I had a dream that I was shot while confronting someone who was going through my mailbox, and woke up because I was leaking my life away through a gunshot wound to the chest. I realized immediately that the leaking was not from a chest wound, but that it was time to change my tampon. The next month I dreamt of being stabbed. After that I decided I was not interested in being murdered in my sleep every month, and had no more nightmares; however I did continue to wake up in time to change my tampons.