When I was about 8 or 9, I was in a convenience store (too high falutin to say 7-11) with my mom, when I started feeling sudden sharp pains going across my belly. I bended over in pain and my mother, worried, gave me keys to her car so that i could go lie down
once we rushed home (and i was obviously feeling a bit better), I went right into the bathroom and pulled down my pants. Splattered on my panties and thighs was dark red blood stains. My mother, a nurse, said not to worry. It wasn’t that uncommon and helped clean me up. She gave me a maxi-pad and showed me how to take care of it myself.
My mother was pretty liberal in those days and when the bleeding didn’t stop after the first day, she defended me in school when the teacher assumed I had been lying as to why i had to go to the bathroom. The probability in 1980 that an 8 year old girl could have her period just didn’t jive with her. The old bat died from alcoholism sometime after that, so again proof that karma works.
Anyway, my own body has been growing significantly since I was 8 years old (and anyone who declares that childhood is a wonderful time is full of crap and needs to stop seeing new age therapists) and just as my friends bodies have also changed. We have grown hips (or not), grown breasts (or not) and gotten taller (or not) and our faces have matured. when i look at pictures of me at the ages of 8, 14, 17, 21 and now 26; i still see the same “face” but i’ve also seen how it’s grown.
however my body has grown in different ways. I’ve gained and lost close to a few hundred pounds since I was about 15. My hair has changed color so many times that even I can’t remember what it was originally. My bra size has grown from a 34b to a 36d. My period, however, has been the only constant thing since I was 8 years old.
It has always been fucked up, and this is why it’s been constant.
After that incident when I was 8, I never was regular again until I was 13. My body, mature enough to have children, started dropping eggs once a month like clockwork. Then I started getting bad cramps, thrown in with severe depression before my period, and then stopped getting my period for months at a time. I wasn’t sexual active and knew I wasn’t pregnant. I wasn’t under any real stress other than “normal”, yet for some reason I wasn’t having my period.
We went to the doctors and found out I had some version of juvenile edometriosis and further testing from the “doctor” showed I “may” not be able to have children in the future. He put me on birth control pills and left me be.
Over the years, I’ve been on birth control as if it were life saving medicine. Without taking the birth control, the cramping would start, the heavy bleeding would begin and I would sink into a pms-induced depression that made no rhyme or reason. And! If I even so much as skipped a week or two because of I had forgotten to…
Okay, it’s now 11.12.98. This is one of the lamest and most tooth pulling chronicle.
The point being:
I got my period. I haven’t gotten it in three months. Now I feel all squeaky clean.