Periods

Third stall down - real story

Not exactly a full length chapter but still, I didn't have much to work with. I tried to keep the story the same while adding more words.

Person asked to remain anonymous.

No amount of preparation can really prepare you for being twelve years old and bleeding through your white corduroy pants on picture day hundreds of miles away from what you knew to be home, in foster care. I wasn't allowed to call my mom and ask her what the hell was going on down there, and why she hadn't better prepared me for this, because she was always too high on whatever drug fulfilled her need for a euphoria she found when I was eight to be my mom. I should've known this would be how my first period would be.

But I wanted to hold onto a strand of hope and say that it wouldn't be.

So when something unfamiliar and warm and sticky was running free between my legs, I panicked. My panic scooted me down the hall to the bathroom, where I sought refuge in my favorite stall, third one down. I couldn't tell you why it was my favorite. Just was. I stared at my blood stained underwear for what felt like an eternity, in shock. My initial reaction was fear that I was dying, because, ya know, blood. But something eventually went off in my brain that went something like:

"Oh." 

I was sad, I don't know why I was. Maybe because in this moment so many girls had with their mother, my own mother was hundreds of miles away from me. Since my mother was an addict, I had to grow up fast and do a lot of things myself, but "becoming a woman" without her by my side was just too much. I felt a tear fall down my cheek. It was an initiation. A portal to an unfamiliar world I didn't want to go to. Strangely, it felt like when CPS took me away from my home.

I didn't understand how I was supposed to just go on with my day with a peach pit sized stain on my white pants, especially since it was picture day. Another tear slid down my face. I was in awe of women who could do this every month and not show it. I'd wondered if maybe I'd become one of those women one day, but I was only twelve then. Not even a teenager yet, but I had gone through too much to say that I was still some innocent child. 

"Take it back!" I prayed to a God I wasn't sure I believed in. Back then, because of my fearful conditioning, part of me still clung to early teachings of the insidious story about a woman named Eve biting the forbidden fruit and condemning all her descendants to this bloody curse. Who made up that story?
How have people not updated it to include what we know now?
Why did my fifth-grade teacher back home tell all the girls that this was the epitome of woman?
I stared up at the ceiling of that bathroom and flipped off God for doing this to me. Definitely not going to heaven now, but I don't care. 

I came back to the present, and fear set in.
Had anyone noticed?
I was mortified at the thought of the entire student body roaming the halls, laughing at how clueless I was, while I bled out there in that stall.
Third one down.
I glanced down and felt that stain taunting me for how unprepared I was. I tried to see it like all the adults in my life did, but I couldn't. 

It wasn't ancient.
It wasn't sacrifice (well, it kind of was but you know)
I don't think natural processes could be considered bold, and vulnerable, and courageous.
It made me feel like I wasn't me.
Screw anyone who says this is all that I am, and all that I no longer needed.
I didn't want to think meant shedding my childhood and becoming something totally different, an adult.

I knew I couldn't stay in there forever, so I rolled up as much toilet paper as I could and braved myself to get back out and have my picture taken. Gazing up, I took in the poster on the back of the bathroom door.

It read, "30 years from now,
No one will remember what jeans you wore.
They will remember how you made them feel."

It made me feel a little bit better.