“If you jump on a trampoline, does your period fall out of you faster?”

—Actual quote from my husband.

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Periods are apparently an off-limit subject. Which means, for me, they are one of the most interesting topics in the entire world. I’m fascinated by other people’s discomfort with them. Why, if billions of women are getting their periods, are we not allowed to talk about them? And more importantly, WHY DO MEN THINK THE WAY THEY DO ABOUT PERIODS? My wonderful husband, a very smart man, once told me he assumed it was like continuously peeing for seven days straight. Does he not realize how much liquid that would be?

Anyway, this is the story of how I learned what a period even was and the existential crisis that followed.

I was ten years old, sitting in my fifth-grade health class, when my teacher wheeled out a television and turned off the lights. The class had been divided into two groups. All the girls were to stay in the classroom, all the boys were to head off to another.

Had I been more intuitive to my surroundings, or hung out with older, more sophisticated children—like the sixth graders—perhaps I would have known the adults in my life decided it was time to throw on a movie about my changing body and then dance around the subject for the rest of the year until we became another teacher’s problem.

It’s one thing to explain where babies come from to a bunch of ten-year-olds. It’s another thing entirely to explain, hey, you’re going to leak blood out of your vagina for the next fifty years.

When the television screen began to play the movie (a movie I assume was titled something like Aunt Flo: Out for Blood or The Great Flood of Your Lady Blood), a girl and her mother appeared on screen. The two were folding laundry together, smiling up at one another periodically, as mothers and daughters tend to do (I guess?).

In the middle of all the folding and smiling, suddenly the girl stopped short with a dramatic gasp. I had once made a similar face a few years earlier, when I pooped my pants playing hide-and-seek. So I began to laugh, thinking the girl in the video had done the same.

“Oh no!” the girl cried.

The screen flickered. Not from dramatic effect. The VHS tape must have gone through ten years of fifth-grade health classes. It was a miracle such technology was still working.

The chattering in the classroom died down. Something about the way the girl on screen grew so pained and clutched her stomach drew us in. It was like we knew this movie was sending us a warning.

“What’s wrong?” the mother in the film asked.

She kept folding the laundry. Yes, her daughter may have been sick right in front of her very eyes, but every Christian woman knows it’s blasphemy to stop doing laundry mid-fold.

“My stomach…”

The daughter looked down at the kangaroo pouch on her overalls.

“Something is happening…”

The mother took a minute to assess the situation and then, all knowingly, gave her daughter a gentle smile that said, oh sweetie, you stupid idiot, that’s not a stomach ache.

“I think someone just got their first visit from Aunt Flo!”

The daughter’s face twisted into confusion.

“Who is Aunt Flo?”

For the creators of the film, it was decided that continuing to discuss this issue of feminine puberty would be too, I don’t know, graphic. This is why the scene cut to a cartoon uterus, the colors of the internal female organs a dainty yellow, purple, and orange. An anatomically correct depiction, as it’s pretty standard knowledge women’s insides look like a lava lamp.

In a Disney-theme-park-guide type of enthusiasm, a voice-over explained to the class that each month, a woman gets a visit from Aunt Flo, otherwise known as “her period.” This entailed a shedding of the uterine wall. This was all part of a process called “puberty.”

I didn’t know what shedding of the uterine wall meant. The only shedding I understood came from dogs. Was I going to leave fur around like a dog? But the fur came from my uter-what?

I was lost, looking around at my friends, all with similar expressions of bewilderment on their faces. I knew I wasn’t going to get an explanation from them.

Once the gross science part of periods was over with—cue an audible sigh of relief from all the men working on the film—the mother and daughter were back on screen.

“What does this all mean?” the daughter asked.

She was no longer clutching her stomach like she’d been shot. Now, she looked tired and defeated, like she desperately needed a cigarette—as if she’d aged from a youthful young girl into an angry, disgruntled diner waitress mere seconds after getting her first period.

“It means once a month you bleed from…” The mother pointed at her daughter’s you know what from a distance (you never want to get too close. Vaginas have a tendency to bite. Write that down).

I sat in my seat for a moment, piecing together what I was hearing.

Bleeding? From my…?

I looked down at my own jeans where the pant legs met in the middle.

I bleed from in there?

My head felt like it was attached to a balloon, drifting up toward the ceiling.

“How long does it happen for?” I remember hearing the daughter ask, despite my concerns that I was melting onto the desk.

The mother, still all smiles, told her, “About a week, once a month, until we’re basically dead!”

Okay, well, she probably didn’t say that, but I mean, is that really that far off the truth?

I stood up from my seat in a panic.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This obviously had to be some sort of lie. Why would they make this up? I cried inside my head. Why are they doing this to us?

I was about to ask to go to the bathroom when the video cut back to a cartoon demonstrating the proper use of a tampon.

It all became too much for me.

I vomited all over the floor.

---

The school called my mother to pick me up early, thinking I had the stomach bug. I didn’t want to tell her I’d puked because of the female body. I didn’t want her to think I was a Republican. But I still had pressing questions. One of them being why the public education system was poisoning my young mind with deceitful ideas of blood coming out of my vagina.

“Today in school I was told about periods,” I stated from the couch.

It was much like the conversation the mother and daughter were having in the puberty movie. Only my mom wasn’t folding laundry and wasn’t smiling.

“Oh?” she encouraged.

Not full encouragement, like she wanted to press for more info on my thoughts and feelings on the subject. More like a half-encouragement, like she was pretending to listen but didn’t really care.

“It’s not true, though. Right? It’s a lie?”

This was a time before emojis, and yet my mother still perfectly embodied the emoji with the wide, nervous eyes paired with the “oh shit” full-teeth grimace.

“Well,” she began carefully. “It’s true. It happens to all women.”

Quick PSA: I now know this isn’t true. Not all women get their periods. But when talking to a young child, I feel like it’s probably okay to say what my mother said.

I was shocked. My own mother was in on the lie? What kind of horse shit was this?

I wondered what the long-term goal of the lie was. To get us to do our homework with less complaining? To stop eating all the groceries out of the fridge when she wasn’t looking? Whatever it was, the adults had won. I’d do anything to avoid using a tampon during this conspiracy theory called a period.

“No,” I reiterated. “It’s not real.”

My mother sighed. Maybe in that moment she wished she were folding laundry, giving her something to do with her hands to ease the awkward tension.

“I’m sorry, Shauna, but it really happens.”

A second wave of nausea crashed upon me like a tsunami.

“It might not happen for a while,” my mother bargained. “You’re only ten. Some people don’t get theirs until they’re sixteen or seventeen. Everyone is different.”

This beamed a little bit of hope into my otherwise lifeless body.

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

Sixteen or seventeen? I had six or seven years left of rocking my hairless, bloodless little vagina. What was I worrying about? Nothing!

And because I wasn’t yet totally convinced it wasn’t all some bullshit lie contrived by the period companies to sell more periods, I considered the possibility that I would one day be laughing around a group of adults, all of us drinking cocktails on a rooftop—aka the epitome of being an adult, I imagined as a ten-year-old—where we’d all laugh over the similar lies of a so-called period.

“How is your stomach, by the way? Still feeling nauseous?”

I picked up the ginger ale my mother had gotten me when I first came home with my “stomach bug” and smirked.

“I am much better now.”

Of course I was better. I had time. I had the day off from school. I was going to go into my playroom, act out a dramatic divorce scene with my Beanie Babies, and chill hard. I was living the dream.

---

In gym class about one week later, I was running around in a pair of shorts when, out of nowhere, my underwear felt wet.

That’s odd, I thought. A little pee must have come out when I was running. This wasn’t typical, but I told myself these things happen. Occasionally you pee your pants. Life be like that sometimes.

When class was over, we all went to the locker room. I was on cloud nine because 1) I’d just kicked ass in soccer, taking no mercy on the field, and 2) the following day was my eleventh birthday.

Every kid knew the only day of school worth going to was your birthday. You got to act all “oh my god, I don’t even care if it’s my birthday” while discreetly writing down the names of the bitches who didn’t wish you a happy birthday on a hit list.

Because life is a series of checks and balances, I was swiftly knocked off that cloud when I changed my shorts.

Inside my underwear sat a deep red stain, spreading out like a glob of ketchup on a napkin.

What. The. Shit.

Clearly, the period fairy had made a mistake. I was only ten years, fifty-one weeks, six days, and twelve hours old. Not sixteen. Where the fuck was the time I was promised?

Yes, PROMISED, by my mother, who had distinctly sat me down and said, “Don’t worry, this period bologna isn’t even real, and if it were, you aren’t legally allowed to get it until you’re in high school. I had this conversation typed and notarized for your records.”

I did the only thing an almost-eleven-year-old in denial would do.

I started crying and ran into a bathroom stall.

Inside the stall, I quickly balled up toilet paper and rested it between my underwear and my under there. I took a minute or two more in the bathroom to wipe my eyes. I didn’t want the other girls to know I was crying. That would ruin my flawless reputation.

I didn’t even cry (in public) when my boyfriend that year dumped me in front of everyone via a poem that went:

Roses are red, violets are blue, trash is dumped and so are you.

So I wasn’t going to risk looking weak over this.

The entire rest of the day at school I couldn’t focus. I was too nervous. Like an enemy waiting to strike, I assumed my period was going to start spewing out uncontrollably like a faucet without a knob. I’d overflow my pants, my classroom, the entire school, until we were all washed away by my unruly period.

So far, though, I only had that tiny little stain from gym class.

It’s a fluke, I decided. I must have wiped too hard this morning? That’s where this blood is coming from.

After school, I got off the bus and raced to my room. I removed the wad of toilet paper to reveal I had bled more without noticing.

“How did that happen?!” I asked God, or Jesus, or whoever might be listening who could answer me.

I was beside myself. I didn’t know what to do. Would I ignore what was happening—a family tradition I’d picked up over the years—or tell my mother?

Luckily, after I’d retreated to my room to cry—not raiding the snacks in the cabinet, as was my usual routine—my mother picked up on the red flag (get it?) and came into my room.

I burst into tears, blurting out how I was cheated.

“Periods are unfair! Why did this have to happen to me?!”

“It’s okay,” my mom assured me. “It’s really not a big deal.”

After several more outbursts addressing my injustices, I calmed down enough to let my mother walk me through the next step.

“I’ll go get you some pads. It’ll all be okay.”

“Pads?” I asked.

“You put them in your underwear. They stop your clothes from being stained.”

“Do I have to…put them…in there?”

I couldn’t even fathom the concept of something going inside my body. Making the word vagina seem overwhelming to speak.

“No, no, pads don’t go inside.”

I sighed with relief for the second time in a week.

“Okay. Fine.” I reluctantly agreed.

“And,” my mother added, “if you want to stay home from school tomorrow, you can.”

My ears perked up. My main goal in life at that age was staying home from school. Sure, I was excited to go on my birthday, but fuck it! To stay home on my birthday, eating cupcakes and watching TV all day? Best birthday ever!

“Okay!” I exclaimed.

Later, in bed, as I was about to fall asleep wearing my new diaper pad in my underwear, I made a decision. I was going to allow this period thing to be a part of my life. Because it was my choice ultimately, right? As long as I could use pads forever, I was fine with it, I guess.

And, as an added bonus, I would get to stay home from school once a month, every month, waiting this thing out.

I learned the hard way the day after my birthday, when my mom forced me to go to school, period and all, that apparently I was wrong about that.