I wrote this piece at my first Girls Write Now workshop this fall. It is about my grandmother, who continues to be an inspiration to me, and always finds her way into my writing. She and I are both Generation F.
My cousin Zoe got her first period in the summer of 2008. My relatives and I were at my great-aunt’s farmhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when we got the call. I didn’t know much about periods at the time because health class didn’t start until fifth grade, and I was still four years away from my own defining moment as a woman, anyway.
I sat at the head of the table, not because I was the most important, but rather because it was the seat closest to the stove, on top of which sat the eggs I was scrambling. My grandmother sat opposite from me at the other head—however, as the leading matriarch she was rather important, with or without eggs to monitor—her body turned out, legs crossed, one arm resting on the flat linoleum surface.
From her plaque-ridden brain cells somehow rose an anecdote of her own first period, which she began to describe in vivid detail. My eight-year-old mind was not mature enough for this discussion, and I sat there squeamishly, legs tapping uncomfortably, with millions of questions in mind but zero balls to ask them.
She was walking through a field when she felt the warm blood trickle down her leg (that’s how I imagined it; however, it was probably through the busy streets of Manila). As the oldest of four siblings, with each in tow, she had no frame of reference as to what to do, no one to ask help of or even for a tissue. Confused and embarrassed, she led her pack back to the house, where her mother’s explanation awaited.
I remember being shocked by the ending to my grandmother’s story, the not-so-grand finale. I knew period talk was, and still is, taboo, but did her mother think that never warning her meant that she would never experience it? That by keeping her in the dark meant she would somehow be pardoned from this natural phenomenon?
Compared to my grandmother’s story, Zoe’s—which was already filled with horrors about clots and tampons—seemed like a dream. However, I didn’t truly appreciate it until I was twelve and experienced my period for the first time. I was lucky to have friends who carried buckets of pads with them, but what I truly had taken for granted was the preparation I had received in the years leading up to that moment. I was blessed to come home to boxes of pads, tampons, and liners that had been sitting at the top of my medicine cabinet for years, “just in case.” I was blessed to have a health class that taught me not just what periods were, but why we got them and how they worked. I was blessed to have a mother who embraced the awkwardness to give me “the talk”—multiple times—as early as she could. Most of all I am blessed to be raised in a country where girls are educated about their bodies, and I hope to live to see the day when that ideal spreads across the pond; how can a woman love her body if she doesn’t know about all the amazing things it does?