Letter #1 to My Period
Early Arrival
To understand how I got to where I am today, I’m starting with my relationship with my Period—a relationship which has morphed and flip-flopped throughout my life.
Dear Period,
I’d been wondering about you since I was 8 years old, ever since I started reading Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume books the year before. Friend, Enemy, or Pest—which one would you be? I must have been thinking about it a bit too much because you came when I was in 4th grade at the age of 9—two years earlier than I expected you. After all, Margaret, Nancy, and Gretchen were 11 when they got their periods (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, 1970), and Beezus got hers when she was 12 (Ramona Forever by Beverly Cleary, 1984).
So when I first saw a dried red-brown stain on my underwear, my first thought was that something I ate must have escaped my pee hole or my poop chute. Red bean dessert soup? Chocolate Vitasoy? Chocolate milk? Soy sauce? Oyster sauce? Whatever. I’m way too old to be having embarrassing accidents like this. Just throw my undie in the laundry hamper and grab a new one (I’d been doing my own laundry since I was 7). Nobody has to know my holes are leaking. Especially not Mom, she’ll freak. I decided I’d avoid having any red or brown food for the next few days but each day, the same stains appeared. I’d started to wrap toilet paper around the gusset of my undies, in case the mysterious staining might soak past the thin fabric. I failed to connect this mysterious leakage to the sore little rocks that had started forming under my nipples some months back. On one of those days, I was peeing in a school washroom, and decided to bend a little lower to take a look at what colour my pee was. It was normal coloured, but to my astonishment, there was a slow-moving dark-red stretchy drop coming from somewhere behind my pee stream. FASCINATING! I knew it wasn’t coming from my bum hole. But it wasn’t coming from my pee hole either. Since WHEN DID I GROW A HOLE between the two? I finished, wrapped more toilet paper around the undie gusset, and decided I should gently ask my mother about this…tomorrow…or maybe the day after that. The mysterious leakages stopped the next day—no doubt because I stopped eating and drinking red and brown things—SUCCESS! I was so happy! I don’t have to tell Mom after all!
Somehow, Mom came across my stained underwear a couple days later. We had an enlightening chat, confirming my suspicions that I had THREE holes “down there”—not two—just like all girls and women.
She showed me how to use pads, and the varying sizes. How to discard them.
How lucky we had pads with sticky backs—that back in her teenage years the pads weren’t sticky and they had to wear a thin leather belt under their clothing, with little notches to attach the front and back end of cotton pads to, that were always leaky.
She gave me a little calendar—the size of a checkbook, enveloped in a red plastic cover—to mark days when blood appears, and told me this is something I’d need to do ALWAYS, to learn about my period patterns.
She told me that some days might be heavier bleeding and some days there might be…pain in my belly (WHAAAAT?!). I needed to note this on the calendar too.
That I might feel heavy emotions or feel really tired a bit before, during, and after my period.
I’d need to tell her every time my period came, so that she can make me pork liver soup and more beef dishes to help my body replenish the iron and blood I’d lose during my periods.
Then she gave me laundry advice on blood stain removal.
⏳Flashback…
I’d already known about how babies are made by the time I was in 2nd grade. It was a combination of my own sleuthing and reluctant awkward conversation with my mother. My YeeYee’s (姨姨 maternal auntie) pregnancy sparked many questions that I posed to EVERY adult in my life at the time, who, to my 7 year-old mind, all gave me annoyingly patronizing and highly unsatisfactory responses:
Mom and Dad said they’d tell me when I’m older.
Some relatives joked that I…
exploded out of a rock.
was found on the side of a street.
was found in a pile of trash at the side of a street.
was bought at the outdoor food market.
was found in a pile of trash at the outdoor food market.
(all typical Chinese colloquialisms about where babies come from—note how opposite this is from Western colloquialisms involving beautiful gift-bearing storks and magical cabbage patches.)
Auntie J, my babysitter, told me to ask my mother.
My teacher told me to ask my mother.
The school librarian told me to ask my parents.
The recess teachers on duty told me to ask my parents.
(It was the early 1980s, and I was in Catholic school).
None of my friends knew. Not even my BEST friend, L, who was the smartest friend I had—but we conjectured that since it’s such a BIG SECRET, it must have something to do with BOYS (ew) and HOLDING HANDS (ew! ew!) or KISSING (EEEEEEEW!).
So the next time I was at YeeYee’s house, I looked it up in my cousin S’s Charlie Brown Encyclopedias, and learned about sperm from a man going inside the egg from a woman, and fertilizing it in her womb. But the encyclopedia had NOTHING to say about HOW a man’s sperm got inside a woman’s body, never mind specifically into her egg. S (age 5) and I discussed this, agreeing that there had to be some sort of touching between a man and a woman for sperm travel, but we couldn’t figure out this puzzle beyond that. We vowed NEVER to touch boys, and to only tap their clothes when playing tag.
Later at home, I relayed my findings to my parents at dinner, and asked some pointed questions about sperm travel. A silence descended. Mom and Dad shared an uncomfortable look. Then Mom huffed, “I’ll tell you after dinner - sik fan la! (食飯喇—eat your dinner!)” Pretty sure I saw Dad trying to hide an amused smile as he picked up his rice bowl with one hand, his chopsticks with the other, and put them to his mouth. “FINALLY!” I thought, “This is gonna be gooood!”
It was NOT good. It was downright GROSS. The KEY THING here is that Mom told me that all the action happened in the VAGINA—“where your pee comes from”, and then the embryo finds a cozy spot beyond the vagina, in a woman’s womb, and grows in there for 9 months. Then when the baby is ready to come out, it comes through the vagina or there’s a caesarean operation that a doctor does on the woman—which is why Mom has a big thick scar on her belly that I had seen and touched. There was NO MENTION OF A SEPARATE THIRD HOLE for this. All of it sounded gross and painful. After all, a pee hole is small, isn’t it? She told me about blood that “will come out of your vagina once a month” when your body is ready to have babies—“probably when you’re about 12 to 14 years old”, and that breasts would also start to grow around the same time. Hair in more places too.
I let all this new information roll around in my mind for a few days. This was the first time I thought God and Mother Nature, although very wise and creative, were also kinda silly. Because why would any 12-year-old be a suitable mother? Wouldn’t 20 years old be a better age? Why make the female body able to carry babies at such a young age? Why steal our childhoods? I posed these questions to Mom, who didn’t have any answers for this, but did tell me that our Chinese ancestors had babies in their teens, and that there was a time when having a 4-generation mega-family living under one roof was a prosperous blessing.
She also told me never to call God or Mother Nature “silly” in public.
I mentally filed all this information for future review, for when I turn 12, and decided that being a kid meant freedom from all that gross weirdness. I did a quick mental calculation—if I’m 7 now, it’ll be 5 years until I’m 12. I only have 5 years of childhood left, and as much as I wanted to speed my way into grown-up-hood, I realized how precious these next 5 years would be.
🚀Back to Reality…
So imagine my deeply dumbfounded disappointment when you, Period, showed up as a red-brown undie stain when I was only 9. You were THREE YEARS early. You STOLE from me. You really PISSED. ME. OFF.
JiaHui
Your turn!
Were you caught completely off guard by your body, too?
Were you dreading or looking forward to the onset of your period?
What did your period mean to you?
Was your period your friend, enemy, or pest? Or something else?
Feel free to drop your early period stories (and childhood coping logic) in the comments below!