So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(9)

In retrospect this is consistent with how I react to any change: I resist it dramatically. Every year that passed when I didn’t have to learn how to use a tampon felt like I was dodging the draft.

And then Aunt Flo arrived. I thought it was disgusting. I didn’t tell my mom because I was hoping it would go away, so instead I took toilet paper from the airplane lavatory and rolled it around my underwear. (No one taught me this—I think it’s instinctual knowledge all women carry with them from birth.)

So the rest of the plane ride was fine. But how was I going to get through a beach vacay without letting it slip that I needed a tampon but had no idea how to use one?

Well, I’d read a lot about periods by that point. I knew that periods can be irregular at first, so I hoped it wouldn’t last long and I could just wing it. I was also under the impression that your period stops when you’re in water, which was convenient.1 I could do the TP roll when we were drinking virgin daiquiris next to the pig roast and then nip away to the loo to remove it before going down to the beach. They also tell you that if you go into the water with your period you’ll make yourself vulnerable to attack from sharks, which can allegedly smell the blood, but the incompatibility between these two pieces of wisdom did nothing to make me question either. I went into the water thinking I wouldn’t bleed through my suit while also keeping an eye out for Jaws.

Nothing disastrous happened either way, but I still feel I was right to dread the decades of menstruation ahead of me. I have my fair share of bled through my white pants stories. (The worst was during the tenth-grade band trip, and I bled all the way through my pants and onto the seat and spent most of the journey embarrassed and trying to scrub it out.) I also had terrible cramps. I know many women think we should be celebrating our periods and the miracle of life they represent, and I get it—they’re still considered shameful in much of the world, and even in America. I’m not advocating for shame. Tampons should be free! Everyone should talk about their periods! Growing up I felt as though I had to suffer in silence, and as a result I didn’t think there was anything I could do about the attendant miseries of my monthly cycle, so I ended up in pain and publicly bleeding through my pants. (If you read my first book, you may remember that I didn’t stop bleeding through my pants as an adult employee of the Obama White House—sure. But that was because of laziness and a lack of preparation, not shame.)2

Still, I don’t think that the project of destigmatizing periods is incompatible with acknowledging that they aren’t fun and that life would be a lot better if we didn’t have them. The point is that periods both suck and are an unavoidable part of life. There’s no reason we should make them suck worse by refusing to discuss them. From my perspective, in the midst of perimenopause, it’s fucking annoying that I had to go through it at all. My actual period has reverted to being as hellish as it was in high school, and I’m still on the NuvaRing because it kept me from having really bad periods when I was younger and now I’m terrified to even imagine how bad they’d be if I stopped. Everything that you dealt with in high school that you thought was over in your twenties and thirties comes back with a vengeance in your forties, except that in your forties you get the bonus of also being really hot all the time. And I don’t mean hot as in sexy. I had to get one of those fans you plug into your iPhone! All this uterine drama feels like it’s for nothing, too, because I can’t even have kids! Some women think that if you don’t have a baby, menopause is worse? Who came up with that? Is the point to try to make it even? Like, OK, you guys had to be pregnant for nine months and undergo LABOR, so the women who don’t have kids should have to endure at least some kind of additional reproduction-related suffering. It’s only fair!

1 When I told co-author Lauren that this was a common line about periods, she didn’t believe me. I don’t envy millennials very often, but I do think they got the better end of the deal when it comes to sex ed. Mostly. There are still abstinence-only schools—bad—but things have come a long way. When I was in eighth grade we took a multiple-choice test in health class that included the following question:

Which of these ways can you contract AIDS?

a) sitting on a toilet seat

b) kissing

c) holding hands

d) all of the above

I can’t remember what I thought the answer was, but my best friend, Cara, knew the question wasn’t right, so she didn’t answer it. Then she got into an argument with the teacher about it, who claimed that the correct answer was “all of the above.” Stupid. (To be totally clear, the answer is none of the above.)

Anyway, to resolve this dispute between me and Lauren about whether getting your period in water is a thing, we googled “Do you get your period in water?” and the first result was an article called “10 Period Myths You Shouldn’t Believe” on Seventeen.com. So I guess we were both right: It was a thing, just a wrong thing. And according to the article, your period doesn’t stop in water, but it can slow down and may not flow because of counterpressure.

2 I’ll repeat the advice I gave in my first book, which is to never leave the house without at least two tampons and a Tide stick.





SEVEN THINGS IN MY MEDICINE CABINET




Kate Somerville ExfoliKate and EradiKate are two of the best products I have ever used. They aren’t cheap, but they last a long time. The young among you will be happy to know that the deliciously painful period zits you look forward to every month return with a vengeance in your forties (or at least they have for me). As long as I DON’T PICK THEM, this stuff works.