by Stacy Feder

I got my period in my sister’s bed.

I don’t think I knew how to admit it, but I was terrified. Of everything. Growing up. Being responsible for my body’s changing. Myself changing. Being responsible in general. Keeping pads in my locker. How the hell to hide a tampon in your backpack? And spotting. Shit. Because that’s how it starts. With a spot. Usually a pretty big one in the belly of your underwear. Beet red and dry. Or fresh apple red if you’re lucky to catch it as it comes on. My mother was a big advocate of not wearing panties to bed. To give ourselves time to “air out.” Like leaving the car windows down in the driveway on a cool night. Like hanging the clothes on the line. So I didn’t catch my spot in my panties, but it happened in a swath of brick red across the back of my yellow and gray paint-splattered sleeping pants. In my sister’s bed. I found it in the morning. That was the first day of my yearlong cycle. Throughout the next two years of middle school, I only got my period two more times. I’m pretty sure I hated my period into oblivion.

I wished it to go away immediately. I wanted to cry. I hated standing up. Feeling the rush of blood fall out of me. Hated that gravity. It was too much of a confession, an admission, for me. I didn’t tell anyone. I buried those blighted pajama pants in the bottom of the trash with the heel of my shoe. They were every ugly thing about my body and what my body could spontaneously produce. The unpredictability I was damned to. The awful, true secret of bleeding for me was like the reality of finding out the mythical mentally retarded brother my family kept hidden in a room at home, that no one talked about, was actually real. Which is horrible to say, to imagine, to fear. But when you are young and fearful and ashamed you tend to think shameful things.

I was embarrassed. I was juvenile. Every hour, every minute of my period I was prompted by fist-clenching phobias and potential mortifications that I denied myself the adequate comforts of general feminine hygiene. I refused to change my pad or tampon anywhere but the privacy of my bathroom at home. Even though I was terrified of circulating urban legends about the girls who got TSS, I would knowingly wear my tampon for ten to twelve hours, hence my period anxiety snow-balling into near preteen hysteria, but my virginal reputation in tact. I felt trapped by something I could not articulate. I could not risk the chance that my period would be witnessed by another party and that I’d have to tell the truth about something I was trying desperately to keep to myself. Maybe I had a problem with honesty. Or maybe I was just completely unable to express this part of myself. Both made me feel guilty.

I was afraid everyone could see my pad at school. I was afraid it made me walk funny. So I tried to not walk funny, which probably made me walk funny. It may be a bit perverse to admit, but I looked at the inverted “V” in girl’s jeans to try to detect the puffy bulge of the maxi-pad. For some reason it was important to know who was bleeding and when. For ammunition, maybe. Middle school is rough. I needed my survival strategies. I was gullible and a reliable punching bag for the relentless teasing of my peers, and I had little visible guile and that was widely taken advantage of, so I relied on such humiliation tactics as calling girls out on “riding the cotton pony” as my avenging tactics. It wasn’t much, but I hoped it would hurt them as much as it would hurt me. Which is why I was so extremely thankful that my period did not come again the next month, or the next. I could defend myself honestly when accosted by the sword-slashing period-having insinuations. I could wear my white Esprits with confidence. Until I was called Jello-butt. Then I didn’t wear white pants anymore.

No one should wear white pants anyway.

Poor Trish Powers.* She hated her period too. And everyone witnessed it. Out on the playground in fifth grade a spackling of rust colored spots developed on her white linen culottes while she was sitting down watching the boys play basketball. When the recess bell rang, we could all see that it wasn’t dirt, although that was her excuse. “I was sitting on a log!!!” Oh boy. Did. She. Scream. The way people scream when they are bereft of excuses and have only the volume of a voice to intensify a defense. The tinge of red inarguably came from a formidable, hatred place. Why else would she have to go home for the rest of the afternoon? I don’t think there is such a thing as a surprise orthodontist appointment, although I have often wished for them.

I don’t remember ever specifically calling any girl out for “riding the pony,” but the point is I thought about it. I thought about it venomously. And maybe I was the girl who pointed out Trish’s speckles to the prepubescent congregation alongside the school wall. I think I secretly hated her. No, no. I know. It was myself I hated, but she was an easy target. She dressed too old for her age. Wore adult jewelry. She wouldn’t pop the sweaty whiteheads the dotted her flat forehead. Her mom smoked and her clothes smelled like the couch in her living room. She wasn’t a poor kid, a weirdo home-schooler or Christian kid, but the cool girls ridiculed her all the time. Girls are bastards. I feared them, and had to learn how to be feared to gain respect. It wasn’t a game, but I needed to make sense of my desperate need to belong. But that’s not my point. My point is that the period was something easy to ridicule. Ridicule others for. Ridicule ourselves. My best friend, Ana Beth King,** once wore a pad smeared with lipstick as a bowtie to a school dance. She had more confidence than many girls our age, and she began the rebellions against her body with comical protests that I had neither the courage nor the imagination to muster. At summer camp I was shown how to humiliate the tampon itself. Girls would steal tampons out of other girls’ suitcases, color the tips with lipstick, dip them in water so they’d expand into soft, cotton wings, and hang them from the cabin eaves like bloody, white bats. Or they’d whip bloated tampons around like helicopter blades and fling them into other girl’s faces, or the fire, or the trees.

Feminine protection was not something to take seriously, and it was important to show other girls, and most importantly the boys, that we did not suffer protecting ourselves or protecting our bodies genuinely. Maybe that’s taking it too far. But the evidence is there simply in the marketing of feminine hygiene products. How much money has been spent by marketing agencies trying to develop new ways of disguising the smell of our bodies with awful baby powder perfumes. And they package the products in pastel colors, to be easy on the eyes, I suppose. And they are always trying to make each individual item as small as possible so as not to reveal its foreseeable and grotesque future. There has never been any pride in toting a bagful of saddle-sized pads. Gross.

I was so proud of not having my period every month and not having to face the shame the rest of my female classmates had to face every month. I started experimenting with boys at an early age, and not bleeding like the other girls was a major selling point. Until high school and sex. Or should I say high school and the fear of pregnancy. And college and the fear of pregnancy. And my twenties and the fear of pregnancy. It has actually taken me twenty years of bleeding to begin to take my body and its reproduction possibilities seriously and to shirk the shame becoming a woman brought me. From unprotected sex to over-dosing on over the counter birth control, I have been trying to rid my body of this act of bleeding, and I have lived in denial of my body’s thoughtless purpose. Thoughtless in that my body does not care how I feel about the fact that it bleeds. Its bleeding or not bleeding is its only way to communicate to me what is happening inside my body, and that is a respectable communication. True, how we feel has a large impact on how our bodies work, and sure it is possible that the depression I experienced in my formative years put direct stress on my reproduction system. But God, the years I have spent not listening, refusing to listen, denying what I hear. I am lucky I am as healthy as I am. I wish I would have listened earlier. Maybe I would have been happier if my body was working properly. Maybe that is what my body was trying to tell me.

*  Name change for obvious reasons.
** No need for name change.

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Stacy Feder is my sister, and I am better for it. She lives, works and writes in Portland OR –  which is great because it’s a favorite place to visit, but also bad because it’s just so darn far away.