Missed Period

“It’s not like I don’t want to go! I just can’t,” I explained to Midge as I stretched out the phone cord as far as it could go just to keep an eye on my brothers in the living room. I remember Johnny was dressed like a cowboy, and the boys were fighting because he kept changing the channel to Bonanza while Billy was trying to watch cartoons.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because of that damn Apollo mission,” I groaned. “My folks have been losing their damn minds over that thing.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah! They’ve been making all of us watch the nightly news as a family since the rocket took off the other day.”

I snapped my fingers and tried silently motioning to Billy and Johnny to knock off their roughhousing on the living room floor. If they rolled into a table, knocked something over, and broke it, it would’ve been my ass on the line.

Midge sighed over the phone and pleaded once more, “It’s just not the same without you, you know? You really are the life of the party, Janet!”

“Then invite me to the next one!”

I watched Linda duck under the cord as she cautiously entered the kitchen. She looked around, fidgeting as she approached me. I pulled the phone away from my ear as she leaned in to whisper something.

“Janet… Um… I think that… I’m bleeding down there…”

“You what?!” I shouted it way louder than I should have, startling Linda and the boys. Billy and Johnny immediately stopped what they were doing, and Linda just stood there with this deer-in-headlights look on her face.

I brought the receiver back to my face as I walked across the kitchen just to tell Midge I’d have to call her back. Then I hung up and ushered Linda to the bathroom.

The way she sat on the toilet, you’d have thought that somebody had died. Though I suppose it was a funeral for her girlhood in a way. They always make becoming a woman sound like this bright and beautiful thing for girls, but it’s honestly just the worst.

When your body starts changing, it’s not just boys your own age who start looking at you. It’s the grown men, too. Then somehow all the grown women in your life make buying your first bra this humiliating experience. All of this on top of worrying you’re free-bleeding during math class because you haven’t gotten the hang of tracking your periods yet.

I took a tampon from my personal stash—mom didn’t like me using them, but I did anyway—and offered it to Linda. Using my hands, I demonstrated how insertion worked.

Linda just looked at it in disgust and shook her head.

“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes. I took the tampon back and started digging through the bathroom cabinet. “Mom probably has some sanitary pads and an extra belt in here…”

“I’m scared…” Linda said, just barely above a whisper.

“Why? You’re not gonna die,” I scoffed. I stopped what I was doing to pat her on the knee. “Look, it happens to all of us. Me, Mom, Aunt Ruth, Grandma—well, maybe not Grandma anymore…”

“Then is it gonna be like this for the rest of my life?” Linda asked, sniffling. Her lower lip trembled slightly.

I put my hand to my forehead and sighed. “Well… Every month at least.”

“What do you do, Janet?”

“I write down when it starts and stops in a day planner so I can track it,” I explained as I went back to digging through the cabinet. I found a box of pads and pulled them out. Then, I leaned in close to Linda.

“The scary part is not getting it,” I whispered.

It was at that moment that a thought occurred to me. A very terrible and terrifying one.

“What’s wrong?” Linda must have noticed how I froze up.

“It’s nothing.” I snapped out of it and handed her a pad. “Here, I’ll show you how to put these on.”

Poor Linda probably wanted to shrivel up and die, as I explained to her how to clamp the pad to a belt. Then I showed her how to wash blood out of her underwear. All I could do was reassure her that the whole experience would have been even more mortifying if our mother were home.

When I got my first period, my mother cried. For her, I imagine she must have felt like she’d lost one of her precious ‘babies.’

She was the type of woman who loved babies. Not because she found them especially cute or endearing, but because she liked being depended on. When each of her four children got too independent from her, she’d have another. By the time Billy was born, Dad was the one who said ‘no more.’

Her eldest daughter reaching menarche didn’t just mean I had crossed the absolute threshold down the path towards full independence. There were larger implications that all women have to grapple with—our ability to create life.

Instead of teaching her fledgling how to fly, my mother became even more protective of me. Every day became a question of where I was going, who I was going with, and what we would be doing. Maybe that was why I got into the habit of sneaking out at night to begin with.

After Linda and I were done, I rushed to my room to grab my day planner. Then I retreated to the bathroom to hide. It was the only place in that house where I could have some damn privacy.

I frantically shuffled through the pages, turning them back and forth. It had been a month since that night, and I’d failed to realize it because of one tiny, but not insignificant reason. My period started during the last week of May, and it was nearly the end of July.

The room started spinning. The planner suddenly felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. My heart was pounding out of my chest, and it felt like I was breathing through a straw.

I snapped out of it when my mother started pounding on the bathroom door.

“Janet! You’ve been hogging the bathroom for too long!” she hollered from the other side of the door. I’d been so engrossed in my own catastrophe, I hadn’t even heard her come home. “Your brother is desperately waiting!”

I snapped the planner shut and stormed out of the bathroom, pushing past Mom and Billy.

“Can’t get any peace in this damn house…”

“Language!” scolded Mom. I looked over my shoulder to see her shaking her head while she ushered Billy into the bathroom. “Remember to wash your hands this time!”

Always a nag about everything. She was the last person I ever wanted to find out about my emergency.