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During my first period, at school, I stained my jeans since I had noidea how often I was supposed to change my pads. The school gym teacherhelped me, but I remember thinking that she wasn't very helpful especiallysince the entire experience was horrifying.

I started using tampons about a year later. I figured out on my ownhow to use them - but it took hours of sitting in my room trying to decipherthose damn tampax drawings and trying to figure out how they correspondedto my own body - mirrors helped. I was afraid to ask my mom, because Ithought using tampons was something bad, like virgins couldn't use them(I was brought up in a traditional Italian-American household).


My friend Marcy didn't know that she couldn't go swimming wearing apad. So she got in the pool and the pad totally disintegrated. There werethese little bits of pad floating all over the place and Marcy was swimmingaround trying to gather up the pieces.


One thing I have a clear memory of is the first time I used a tampon.I rode my bike to meet some people and on the way I could only think abouthow much the tampon was irritating me. I forget if I removed when I gotto the place or not. Maybe I had another one with me that I inserted moredeeply into my vagina. Since I was an athletic teenager I tended to usetampons, despite this initial discomfort. And, as an adult, I prefer tampons,even though I think pads cause less health problems.


My mom told my dad when I got my period and he told his cousin ( a nicewoman with whom I used to go jogging), and she said to me one day "SoI heard you started your period." I was absolutely mortified - I didn'twant anyone to know I was menstruating, ever! At twelve, I guess I thoughtthis was realistic.


The thing that really bugged me throughout junior high, was not beingsophisticated enough to plan ahead for leaks. It seemed to me that everyoneat school "knew" when I was menstruating. Probably they didn't,but I felt like all eyes were on me.


One time in band my nightmares of bleeding through were realized ingrotesque proportions. Stephanie Hunnicut had chosen to wear white corduroyjeans to school that day, and during the 45 minute band period she bleedentirely through her pants and caused a huge puddle on the chair. She leftin the middle of class with everyone watching her stain on her pants. Weall turned and stared at the blood on the chair. It was bright red on herpants and on the chair it was already darkening, turning brown and drying.

Her misfortune was captivating to us. As a group of adolescent fluteplayers who regularly passed the Judy Blume book - Forever - behind themusic stand to find out things about sex , we were always grasping at anyinformation we could get about what was happening to our bodies, and whatwe were expected to do with them. After seeing the spectacle of her bloodall over her and the chair, we were sure that we needed to continue ourquest for menstrual and sexual knowledge. She was the lesson that showedus what could happen if we did not manage our bodies properly.


My dad is a gynecologist, so one day after I spent about six hours inthe bathroom sweating and crying and trying to insert an "o.b."(foolishly thinking that it would be easier to insert because it was smallerthan a tampon with an applicator) while my friends Wendy and Jill coachedme from outside the door, I found my dad watching the game and told himabout my little problem. In his typical professional way, he didn't batan eye, took me upstairs to my mom's cache of stuff, and told me to makean "O" with my thumb and forefinger. He ejected a tampon throughthat "O" and said "See? You go try it." I was extremelydoubtful, but did as I was told, and the thing went in so easily that Ispent 10 minutes searching around the toilet for the tampons I had obviouslydropped before I noticed the tell-tale string between my legs. After anentire day of trying to walk in a half inserted o.b., I had stopped believingthe claim "you won't even feel it" -- that's just advertisinghype, I thought. The moment I found the string was such a revelation offreedom that I got dressed and ran downstairs to give my father a big kiss.I think he just grunted and motioned me out of the way of the TV., butI was so grateful.


One thing I have a clear memory of is the first time I used a tampon.I rode my bike to meet some people and on the way I could only think abouthow much the tampon was irritating me. I forget if I removed when I gotto the place or not. Maybe I had another one with me that I inserted moredeeply into my vagina. Since I was an athletic teenager I tended to usetampons, despite this initial discomfort. And, as an adult, I prefer tampons,even though I think pads cause less health problems.


My mom told my dad when I got my period and her told his cousin ( anice woman with whom I used to go jogging), and she said to me one day"So I heard you started your period." I was absolutely mortified- I didn't want anyone to know I was menstruating, ever! At 12, I guessI thought this was realistic.


I was worried about telling my boyfriend, Howie, who also went to myschool (but boys and girls were separated, so I didn't see him much duringthe day.) I told my brother, who was friends with Howie, and of courseKarl told Howie immediately even though I swore him to secrecy. I was reallyhumiliated by this, because at the time I was quite aware that this wasthe first experience in my life that Howie and I could not share and thatI couldn't even comfortably tell him about. That made me perceive a bigrift between us, even when he kept saying, "Karl told me, you know.You don't have to pretend." I just kept insisting that I was "sick"and couldn't talk about it. One pretty weird thing I should probably addis that school, the Hebrew Academy, was Orthodox Jewish, and as a youngand impressionable girl I had been led to believe that women are "unclean"when they have their periods, as we learned that married women sleep inseparate beds from their husbands for two weeks of every month, and whenthey have stopped bleeding for seven days they go to the mikvahwhich is a kind of ritual bath, in which they immerse themselves naked,and then they may have sex again with their husbands. I was a little mixedup with this -- obviously Howie and I were not married and were not havingsex -- but I remember having a vague conviction that I, too, was unclean,and shouldn't really make out with Howie (fully clothed and only abovethe neck!) when I was menstruating.


I guess being late is its own ghetto -- my friend Leslie Thorne definitelyheld it over my head that she was more "mature" than me (geez,she was a jerk), and at the same time pressured me to shave my legs becauseshe did, even though I was not yet a "woman."


For a while in my early twenties I was having trouble with leaking duringthe night and staining sheets -- my flow was too heavy on the first andsecond day to make it thought the night without a tampon change. I wasgetting pretty annoyed with this and was trying to convince myself, somehow,to wake up in the middle of the night to change the tampon. I didn't quiterealize what my determination would mean... The answer came in the formof a dream, but not a nice friendly dream where the good tampon fairy tappedme on the shoulder politely and suggested I wake up and save my sheets.Instead, I had a dream that I was shot while confronting someone who wasgoing through my mailbox, and woke up because I was leaking my life awaythrough a gunshot wound to the chest. I realized immediately that the leakingwas not from a chest wound, but that it was time to change my tampon. Thenext month I dreamt of being stabbed. After that I decided I was not interestedin being murdered in my sleep every month, and had no more nightmares;however I did continue to wake up in time to change my tampons.


I remember once when I got out of a pool and there was bloodwas running down my legs and my relatives were all looking at me in horror,but I was like "Oh just give me a towel and I'll wipe it off."I don't know why people make such a big deal about it.

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