I was glad that my Mom was so sensible and never raised us to be ashamed about our bodily functions. I knew about women's cycles and monthly blood the same as I knew about all the other facts of life that Mom explained easily and in simple although clinical terms to each of us as we got old enough to ask. Having periods, per se, wasn't so bad. I didn't seem to get cramps like Cassandra and I bled for only two or three days, a slight show one day, a veritable flood the next, petering out to a trickle. But, I hated Kotex, hated the straps and the pins and the muss and fuss.
I hated the way Kotex never stayed put but migrated around in my underwear, no matter how diligently I attempted to pin them in place. There is no worse feeling of imminent social disgrace than the sensation of a loose Kotex working it's way up across one's belly or down one's leg. I still have that nightmare, too, that a Kotex is heading South and if I move it's gonna fall out bright red and unmistakable at my feet while I stand there fat and dumb with a look on my face that's trying to say, "Well, where did that thing come from?"
I hated the blood smell, too, not the hot bright red blood of the flow but the old blood which turned rapidly rank and dead brown when it hit the air and hung out for hours in the Kotex, pressed up into my private parts. It seemed to me that anyone could smell this a mile away, a suspicion that was validated by every dog around, all of whom cannot help but develop an inordinate interest in the crotch of any bleeding female. The blood wasn't a problem. Actually, I liked it. Bleeding was always a thrill to me, a sign of being involved in mysterious life forces of which I am usually unaware. But, I couldn't abide those stupid Kotex and I really hated the little sweetsie-poo printed inserts that came with each box, decorated with butterflies and flowers and silly "Today, my daughter, you are a woman," sentiments ensconced in decorative Victorian scrolls. It was with decidedly mixed emotions that I took my first reluctant steps into Womanhood.
I also hated the horrible Health units that had been inflicted on us yearly since fifth grade. The boys and girls were separated and trooped off on different days to the gym where the bright chirping Nurse would show us the same bright chirping film, The Secret of Life, which should have been called For the Birds and Bees, I thought. It was replete with snappy diagrams of male and female reproductive organs voiced over by a sterile scientific monotone male explaining how the sperms come from the father into the Mother to fertilize her egg. One would presume, from this jerky ancient film, that females were little more than hatcheries where eggs floated around waiting for some Daddy to inject them with The Secret of Life whereupon ya better watch out because a baby is gonna grow up in there.
That was the hardest part for me to figure out. I looked at my female parts, squatting over a mirror. Oh, come on now, we all did this, didn't we? How the hell can something as big as a baby come out of that little hole? That's what we all wanted to know. It wasn't the idea of men and women screwing that made us snicker and giggle and act like squirmy fools during the lectures provided by our schools to try to explain the facts of life to little boys and girls. We all knew that stuff. We learned it from our parents if we were lucky, or from our friends. But, what had the girls baffled and truly horrified the boys was the sheer logistics, the engineering, of getting a thing the size of a large football out a hole the size of a pea.
"Mama, did it hurt you when I was born?""Darling, would it hurt you to shit a watermelon?"
Mom told me that in the course of labor the vagina stretches and the baby pushes down the birth canal and pops out, no problem. Still, I couldn't imagine. When I had my first period, I thought. "Oh jeez, now I really have problems." I had often said I would have six or a dozen kids but I didn't like the idea of sex and the prospect of birth was unimaginable to me. "I think I won't have any kids," I started saying, now that biologically, apparently, I could.
I solved the Kotex problem one day when I filched one of Mom's Tampaxes and put it in. Mom had told me that young women can't use tampons; the hymen intact, the Tampax couldn't get up into the interior of the vagina. My friend Linda Sanchez said that was bull, she wore Tampax and she was still a virgin. Well, the way Linda flirted and carried on with boys, letting them put their hands inside her clothes and running around with monkey bites all over her neck and shoulders, I kinda doubted her protestations of purity but I thought, "She might be right". She certainly acted more knowledgeable about sex than Mom.
Imagine my surprise when, one leg up on the toilet, braced for all manner of difficulty, I slipped the tampon right up, slicker than a whistle, no muss, no fuss, and no discomfort whatsoever.
"So, where's my hymen?" I wanted to ask my Mom. But, how the hell does a girl bring this up in the conversation. If I didn't have a hymen, I am sure my Mom would want to know, by God, where I had put it. I was always getting into trouble for losing things I forgot I was supposed to keep track of: sweaters, glasses, binders, library books, now this, my maidenhead. I had absolutely zero experience of matters sexual, a condition that would persist for years, but I felt a vague sense of uneasiness, nonetheless. I kept this piece of information to myself for a long time and still haven't a clue.
Now, my only problem was getting my hands on Tampax on a monthly basis, knowing if I raided Mom's too often she would notice. This was in the bad old days. While Central Junior High School did have a Kotex dispensing machine in each of the girl's johns (is that an oxymoron?), there were no Tampax. Even buying a box of my own, my three dollars clutched guiltily in my sweaty little 13 year old hands, was a heart-banging task. I expected the matronly store clerk to seize them from me and demand, "Why are you buying these? You aren't old enough to use Tampax. Well, are you a virgin or not, young lady? Speak up! Exactly what do you have to say for yourself?"
Where to hide them was my second problem. Mom was in and out of all us kid's drawers all the time. I shared a bedroom with Cassandra. We had moved into a new 3 bedroom trailer Jay had bought by this time, another traumatic jolt to me. Cassandra was a nosy room-mate and I knew she would find the tampons if Mom didn't. I finally stashed them singly in a row between the mattress and the box-springs and Cassandra and Mom neither suspected why I became such an enthusiastic volunteer on cleaning day when it came time to change the sheets on our bed. Now all I had to worry about was one coming back up into the toilet after I flushed the bloody tell-tale conveniences down and I became almost neurotic about this, flushing three and four times, sometimes, just to be sure.
Lastly, my budget strained by the furtive purchase of a steady supply of Tampax, I became the most conservative user of this product in the history of it's existence, I am sure. I used them so sparingly, in fact, that now I lived in fear of accidently bleeding through and facing the perhaps worse social nightmare of walking around with blood having leaked all over the back of my skirt.
This meant that sometimes I was forced to literally dash to the bathroom at school in mid-class, after enduring the hassle of first, of course, obtaining a hall pass from the teacher. "Why didn't you take care of that between classes?" they always wanted to know and dancing around, trying to locate the internal vaginal muscle that could prevent blood from gushing down my leg, I always mentally murdered them. Shades of Miss Cornbreast. Bathroom business is none of your goddamned business, I wanted to scream. But, I just said, "Sorry. I know. It won't happen again," even though it did and I knew it would. I still use fewer tampons per period than any other woman I ever knew, a fact that drove my daughter bonkers when the Secret of Life started happening to her and the Nazi Bitch Mama kept haranguing, "What in the hell do you do with these things, eat them? Pass them out like party favors? That's the second box you've gone through this month!" to which she could only reply meekly, "Well, you use some, too." Poor Bryn.
I never did figure out what happened to my mythical maidenhead. The Mystery
of the Missing
Hymen. And why don't we call them hywomen? More Stuff That Makes No Sense. I
don't know which
bike accident or what tree I fell out of or which exact other accident of my
wild, misspent childhood took care of that, unbeknownst to me. All I know is I
about split a gut laughing when my friend from Seattle, Laurie, remarked, "All
this issue about a little tissue," to her mother's frantic inquisitions about the
state of her daughter's hymen or lack thereof.
Kat McElroy is busily working on several writing projects.
