Bleeding On My Paris Sport Club Jeans

I don’t know when I became cognizant of menstruation. I feel like I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade and it was due to jokes at the expense of women who were in a mood and gross men said something about “that time of the month.” 

In 5th grade my public school had a sex education week where the boys and girls were separated to learn about our changing bodies. To kick off the event, all the mothers of the girls were invited to a session in the band room on a Friday afternoon. In an effort to not feel awkward in front of my mom, I lied and told her that none of the other moms were coming to the presentation. This was the early 90s when you could still get away with lies like this because there was no classroom Facebook page to consult or parent text chain. Still I was shocked she believed me, and even more stunned that I was one of the only kids without a parent there. 

The Sex Week Kickoff was hosted by Mrs. Madiger, our matronly school nurse who was in her 50s with a long denim A-line skirt and western-inspired blouse. Mrs. Madiger was married to a man who sold used cars and together they were part of the local square dancing troop. And now she was also our defacto go-to gal for all things sex. And nothing screams “sex expert!” like a salt and pepper colored perm. She talked about our changing bodies and gently informed us of the hellscape of puberty waiting just around the corner for us. 

The piece de resistance of the band room meeting was the Air Popper popcorn machine she brought in. The idea was that each of us 11-year old girls were like the kernels of corn: we would “pop” or blossom at different times but we would all eventually get to the same place. My BFF, Jo, and I ate our bags of popcorn on our latch-key kid walk home from school and made a lot of pubic hair jokes to show how unfazed we were by the hour-long puberty seminar. 

Following the popcorn kickoff, we had a week of reproductive system lessons with Mrs. Madiger again. There were a few concepts that had not been addressed in Teen Magazine in the school library that I was curious about. Since my mom wasn’t in the room for me to be embarrassed in front of, I aimed my wonderment at Mrs. Madiger. I raised my hand confidently and asked, “What does ‘douche’ mean?” She responded by pointing to a shoebox in the front of the room and said, “Why don’t you put that in the question box.” I was like, alright...or you could just answer it now…. But I dutifully wrote down my question about Summer’s Eve commercials and left it in the box. I guess I would have to wait another day to find out what was in that box in the tampon aisle at Dillon’s that made all those women want to take long walks on the beach.

The next day she opened the aforementioned box of questions and read from the lone card inside: “What does ‘douche’ mean?” Mrs. Madiger said that douching was cleaning out your vagina with a syringe-type instrument, but that you should NEVER do it because it is terrible for your vagina. I nodded enthusiastically at her response, but inside all I could think was “Huh? If this procedure was as merciless to your girl part as she claimed, why was this being advertised in People Magazine?” To this day, I still don’t know exactly when or why a person would douche. But Mrs. Madiger seemed so emphatic about this procedure that I didn’t question her, just silently vowed to NEVER douche. I want to grab women by the arm at the pharmacy who have Summer’s Eve products in their cart and tell them that life will not be walking on the beach after you douche - you will lay on the bathroom floor crying for your lady bits. And then refer them to Mrs. Madiger for further questioning. 

Armed with all of this knowledge I marched into puberty. My friends and I would discuss who we thought would be first to get their period. We had all assumed it would be Jo and Lynne. Historically, they had reached most maturity milestones before the rest of us so it seemed like a safe bet. And it was. 

Jo and I lived on the same block and we spent nearly every day after school together. We were in 6th grade and had been hanging out at my house on a sunny afternoon, probably jumping on the trampoline to a mixtape or something. She went home around dinner time and called me about an hour later. 

“I got my period,” Jo said.

“What? But we were just together!” I said, like it was impossible for this milestone to have happened because we had recently been in the same proximity.

“Yeah, I know,” she replied. “I just went into my room after it happened and started petting my ‘worry rock.’” (Jo had to clarify this memory for me. Her “worry rock” was a rock that had been collected by her brother on a family vacation that was kept as a souvenir. I’m not sure at what time this rock became used for soothing worry. But this felt like acceptable behavior for a 12 year-old girl who had just had her world rocked).

“Whoa,” I said, feeling equal parts jealous and relieved it wasn’t me. 

Sixth grade continued and it became summer. It was the 4th of July and my parents had let my friend Lynne and I loose at the local county fair with $15. (I don’t know if it looked as much like a meth smorgasbord then as it does now, but if so, shame on them for allowing us to be there). Anyways, Lynne had just come back from visiting her family in Arizona and announced to me on the Tilt-O-Whirl that she got her period. This time I was straight jealous. All of us girls who had not started our periods yet agreed that we had plenty of vaginal discharge but no actual periods. The consensus of us thought I would be next to start mine since I had started to grow boobs a few months before. They were correct again.

****

My friend Christina was an only child. Her family had a Winnebago and enjoyed camping. I had never really been away from south central Kansas, so when Christina’s parents asked if I would like to come on their family vacation to Colorado Springs that summer, I enthusiastically said, “Yes!” Honestly, they could have asked me to go to the threshold of Hell and I would have been like, “alright,” because I was desperate to go anywhere. 

We had gone to a local grocery store in Colorado Springs to restock on items towards the end of our trip. While using the public restroom at the grocery store, something unusual was spotted in my underwear. It was almost like tar - kind of a thick, black substance. I thought, “this doesn’t seem like what was described as a ‘period’ in Teen Magazine. There was no gushing, or trickle of blood down my leg. It just looked like a piece of fresh highway in my underwear. 

Maybe I was in denial about the situation. I didn’t want to tell Christina or her mom, so I spent the final two days of the trip destroying my underwear with the tar-like substance. It never occurred to me to put toilet paper or anything to protect myself from the gooey blood. 

Two months passed. I started to wonder if what I had experienced was just weird vaginal discharge, because I never started a proper Teen Magazine period. Then came a day in mid-October. I was wearing white jeans and a pinstripe blue button down shirt. I used the bathroom at home that evening, and this time it was unmistakable - I had started my period. 

I knew I had to tell my mom. She and I had always been close, so I wasn’t afraid to tell her, just embarrassed. But more embarrassing than telling her was the idea that she would tell my dad. And at that point in time, nothing would top the humiliation of my dad knowing I had a period. That’s the most mortifying idea when you are 12 years old. 

Mom was doing dishes and my dad and brother weren’t around. So I sat down at the kitchen table and said, “Mom, if I tell you something, do you promise you won’t tell dad?” 

She turned the water off and looked very concerned. 

“Yeah. What is it?” She asked nervously.

“Okay, I got my period,” I sighed. 

She looked relieved. Then she went into full Mom Mode. She asked when it had happened. I didn’t tell her about Colorado. That had been so long ago. So I told her the more recent facts. She had me go into her bedroom and we sat on the waterbed and she talked to me about the “responsibilities” that come with having a period. She told me she would get me “supplies” and that this meant I needed to be “responsible” with my body. Then she launched into a very stern talk about how I should never, ever, under any circumstance, use a scented tampon. Why, I wondered, are there so many vagina products that seem to want to harm me? I sensed that there was a story behind this warning, but I was too overwhelmed/grossed out to inquire. I kind of nodded along, still embarrassed and horrified at the idea that she might still tell my dad. 

At this point in time I probably weighed about 85 pounds. I was definitely starting to develop and get curvy, but still very petite. I say this because it’s the only explanation I can give for my mom giving me panty liners instead of full maxi pads. She had made the assumption that my small frame would not be capable of producing a full-on flow of menstrual blood so I would only need the equivalent of a Qtips worth of absorption for my period.  

Armed with a sheet of notebook-paper worth of absorbency, I went to 7th grade the next day. Teen Magazine always suggested that girls wear long t-shirts during menstruation in case of a leak. Heeding the words of my pre-teen bible, I wore an extra-long navy and green striped Paris Sport Club shirt from Maurices with a pair of light denim Paris Sport Club jeans. Very on trend for my hometown in 1994. 

I had started to sense towards the end of the school day that something was amiss. I had brought an extra panty liner to school with me in my backpack so I took it with me into the restroom. Upon entering the stall I knew I was in trouble. There was, like, a LOT of blood. I kept wiping and trying to stuff my underwear with enough extra toilet paper to sop up the excess that was coming out of me. With only an hour left in the school day I had to just get enough absorption to finish out the day and walk home from school. 

When the bell rang I carefully walked to my locker and grabbed my backpack and Jo and I started our trek down Ridge Road toward our houses. 

“I think I’m leaking,” I said to Jo. 

“Like, blood?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think it might be bad,” I told her. Kind of in denial about the tide in my panties. 

When we got to my house we went straight to my room to investigate. I took off my prized Paris Sport Club jeans that I had spent all of my babysitting money on. The crotch was completely covered in blood. 

“What do I do?” I started to freak out. 

Jo had always been the Mother Hen of my friendship circle. She said we needed to rinse out the jeans before we washed them. We took them into the bathroom and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed the jeans in the sink. Then she said we needed to put them in the washer, but in cold water, so we didn’t just bake in the blood. I would do anything she said. I was kind of a hot mess when it came to domestic responsibilities, even then. 

So after the extreme rinse cycle, we put them in the washing machine but never the dryer. We only sort of salvaged the jeans - I was never able to wear them with shirts that fit at the waist. They took on more of a brownish tinge in the crotch, so it was hard to say if it would be more embarrassing for people to have thought it was a poop stain or period stain. Either way, it took several more babysitting jobs to replace the jeans. 

A year later most of my friends had graduated to tampon wearing. I was late to adopt this trend. They seemed complicated and, after my mom’s harsh warning about the scented tampon, I hesitated. But my friends told me that I needed to try them so I didn’t feel like I was wearing a diaper. At that time there were not ultra-supreme thin pads with wings like we have now. It was like sitting on a JCPenney Christmas catalog all day. My friend, Lynne, from the Tilt a Whirl, championed the tampon movement for me. She insisted that I just needed some coaching to get it inserted. 

One Sunday afternoon in 8th grade we were playing basketball at the local college gym. She had brought a tampon for me to try. We went into the bathroom and she sat outside the stall while I went in and tried to psych myself into insertion. I opened the wrapper and studied the tampon. It didn’t look too difficult. I put a leg up on the seat of the toilet.

“OK, just insert it as it is,” she said. Whatever the hell that meant. 

I put it about halfway in - that was all that I felt like I could do. Being smaller framed it just felt...awkward to push it in any further. 

“Now push the bottom of the stick upwards,” Lynne instructed. 

I tried. Maybe it went a little bit deeper, but not much. This didn’t feel right. About half of the tampon was still sticking out of me. 

“Did you do it?” Lynne asked hopefully. 

“Maybe?” I said with trepidation. 

“You just need to get used to it,” she said confidently. “Come out and after a while you won’t even realize you have it in anymore.” 

I trusted her. After all, she’d had a period for three months longer than I had. When I emerged from the stall she asked how I felt. I told her it hurt. She said the hurt would go away. 

I walked about ten feet and the tampon that was only half way inside me seemed to be stabbing my insides while also dragging itself down my thigh as I walked.

I told Lynne I wanted to take it out.

“You need to leave it in so you get used to it.” She seemed kind of bossy about it at this point. Suddenly, I didn’t care that she had so much more menstrual experience than me, I just wanted to take this cotton swab from Hell out of my vagina and go home. I hobbled back to the bathroom stall with the tampon rubbing my thigh and also stabbing my cervix. I took it out, put my trusty phone book pad back on, and rode my bicycle home. 

It would be a solid year before I tried the tampon again. This time I read the package instructions rather than rely on another 13 year-old to coach me through the experience. 

Girls, the message I want to get across from these ponderings is that the world of your body is hard to navigate. And it is made even more complicated if you rely too heavily on Teen Magazine to tell you what to do. And mothers, if you need someone to launch a shock and awe campaign for your daughter when she gets her first period, let her read this. She can’t be nearly as clueless as I and it will certainly make her feel better knowing she is more capable at handling her period than I.