First published on Story Collider
“A week? Every month!? Forever?”
“Not forever. Just most of your adult life.”
I felt utterly betrayed by this knowledge. As I understood it, I had crossed a line. On one side, I had been happily ignorant, assuming that the rest of my life would be exactly as it had been up to that point. I was going to grow up and be a veterinarian and a writer. My parents would look exactly the same and have the same dog for the next seventy or so years. On the other side of the line, where I now stood, something awful was going to happen to me, and continue happening. And I was going to be powerless to stop it. In many ways, learning about my destiny to “become a woman” was a step out of childhood more than my actual first period.
Over the next several years, my friends and I rode the roller coaster of expectation. Menses was not to be feared, as we had originally thought. Instead, we began to internalize the euphemism “becoming a woman,” understanding that non-menstruating females were girlsand those who did menstruate were women. To have a period was to be included in a club that contained older sisters, cousins, and high schoolers; there was no way to fake membership. The right to carry a little pouch of tampons in your backpack came with the right to brag about it. Basically every girl in my fifth grade class was anticipating a day when she could say, “Oh, it’s just my period,” as her body magically transformed in to Cindy Crawford’s before our eyes. Instead, girls who started their periods at school would be escorted to the nurse’s office, usually shedding tears of embarrassment. My eagerness, which had grown out of dread, slowly changed into bemused resignation and frustration.