Messy Menstruation

Is there a way to menstruate without making a mess? Particularly at menarche, when one's first period begins, a sort of natural anarchy, striking a girl's vulnerable frame at any unknown moment? When I first got my period I believed that a drop of blood would come out of my vagina - supposedly a hole from my insides to my outsides - and that would be that. Mama and I had had a little communication glitch and I did not comprehend the weight - or volume - of the situation. She was actually away at the time, and so I managed the mess myself. She had foreseen the inevitable, however, and left some maxi-pads in the cabinet. They were mega-maxi. I took out the box, careful that no one was lurking around to discover - oh no oh no oh no me with a big weird not-cereal box of "feminine napkins" - and I crept back into the bathroom. But hold on! It was like a diaper. It was huge. Super-duper-deluxe-extra-double-bundled. It was a napkin I could have used for innumerable dinners. How the hell could I fit the behemoth into my pants? (A variation on that question would come up later in a much different context, but that's another blog.) In addition, the stuff coming forth from my alleged vagina looked like blood but also, clearly, had other stuff mixed in. This was not a paper cut or even a big scrape with nice thin red blood. This was something akin to perhaps a female pudding. And, and, well, yuck. I was not yet at one with the complexity of the female body, and I found the materials leaking out of my female body to be repugnant. My menstrual distress also came with diarrhea.

I did stick the pad into my pants and I walked around, even had a stilted conversation with my dad, and then proceeded back to the bathroom, and took the thing out. I examined the box all over. Something was wrong. The blonde box lady smiled, and the helpful diagram showed how the tape worked, but surely this creation was intended for a different use - perhaps a different species? It felt like a massive wad of diaper in my pants, and I was sure that other people would actually see that there was a massive wad of diaper in my pants. I spent a lot of time working my neck muscles to check out my ass in my corduroys. I had to be sure the pad was lodged properly in the very center.

Eventually, months later, I experienced the joy of first leakage: two big brown spots on the back of my beige pants, discovered after school; also, the thrill of being exposed: a maxi-pad I'd hidden in my sock fell out, directly at the feet of a boy in my class; and catharsis: in college, when I opened my dorm-room door for my straight-laced brother and his even straighter friend, one of my female cohorts had left a pad stuck - eye-level - to the door. Fortunately, it was unused.

Mama gave me a big hug when she returned from her overnight away. I felt disgusted with myself. She told me that I was a woman now. She did, mysteriously, tell me that I would need to shower every day henceforth. She did not say why, though, and I did not ask. Was it because of the pudding, or had something else occurred, too, which had to be soaped away daily? Before my little sister got her period, having grown my ovaries a bit, I directed my mother to tell her everything. Not convinced that she would, my best friend and I sat my sister down, with a tampon, and held forth with the facts. Fact number one: you don't wanna walk around in a diaper, so learn how to use a plug.