*** Trigger Warning – mentions sexual assault and precocious puberty as it pertains to the menstrual cycle which some readers may find graphic in detail
After “Mother”
After receiving help (from my aunt’s best friend that I call “Mother”) to calm down from a crazy ambush by my grandmother and mother, later on, my mother took me shopping. She bought me my first box of sanitary pads and a purse for storing them. I had entered the realm of womanhood that most teenaged girls fawned about, but I was not yet a teenager. I was 10.
There was no talk. My mother did not know how to talk to me in an intimate and motherly fashion. It was literally a task for her to do so. She left the talking to my father, instead – who was ignorant regarding the feminine subject of periods. My dad just gave me a mini lecture about becoming a lady without going into any specific details about reproductive health.
I thought it was comical as my dad struggled his way through what to say to me about my period. I could tell it pained him to talk to me as much as it pained me to listen to him. All I can say is that it was an awkward discussion. I could only roll my eyes in a daze to contain the laughter that wanted to burst through my belly. I had already researched the topic. I still had the book my aunt had given me about women’s bodies, entitled Our Bodies, Ourselves.
A Brand New Bloody Me
The very next day, I went back to school. I remember being inundated by female classmates who wanted to know why I had disappeared from lunch the day before but never returned back for class. One classmate had seen me in the office while I was waiting to go home. So, there was no way to avoid coming up with some type of excuse. I simply said I was sick. Yet, by the purse I was carrying around that appeared to be stuffed, a female classmate explained to me and two other classmates the real reason why I went home so early. “She got her period. Someone said she had a blood stain on her pants,” the girl proudly said as if I was not even present for the conversation.
I remember feeling so embarrassed as heat flushed across my face, but one of the other classmates, a girl a grade level ahead of the group, said that I had just joined the “cool” big girls club, and that no one she knew still in elementary school had begun a period yet. The girl talked about how only girls in middle schools had started their periods, and she would have to let her cousin know she had met a girl who was the youngest she had ever known to start her period. The other three girls – particularly the one who outed me about my period in the first place – stared at me in awe. Suddenly, I became a big deal. I was perceived as “cool”.
Needless to say, I did not feel “cool”. I did not feel cool at all. In actuality, I felt hot, moist, and sick. I remember vividly feeling a strange sensation of movement within my girly parts. So I went to the teacher and requested to go to the restroom. It was a male teacher who did not allow restroom visits during class, but I told him that it was an emergency. He relented and allowed me to go while I heard the girl who had outed me mumble [while some others laughed], “Yeah, she has to change her diaper!”
Once I reached the restroom, I assumed that I needed to change my pad, but when I checked myself I was stunned to see that I was expelling enormous blood clots and a period flow of blood so heavy that I thought I must have cut myself. I literally remember feeling overwhelmed by it. As soon as I changed my pad, I already needed to change to a new pad because there was a profuse amount of blood.
I could not help but wonder if I was experiencing a normal menstrual flow, but I had no comparisons to make regarding it. There was no other person I could talk to except for an adult. I opted, however, to keep my experience to myself. I figured this was a sacred rite of passage. Plus, I was too uncomfortable and embarrassed to share it. The fact that I felt self-conscious when the classmate shined a spotlight on the fact that I had started my period was enough for me never to talk about it with anyone. Ever.
My Bloody Struggles Begin
Needless to say, at the end of the day when I went home from school, I was again covered with a sweater wrapped around my waist because of blood-soaked pants. I felt great humiliation. Four pads throughout the day were not going to be enough to keep me dry and leak-proof. I did not know how to explain this to my mother because she expected me to only use two pads. Forget the fear of the soaked pants. I was more concerned about explaining how I had gone through four pads.
When I did have to explain, my mother simply behaved as if she did not understand and had accused me of loaning at least one pad to a classmate (which in my experience, I had never really been able to do). Despite my pleas with her that I needed more pads for school, she basically told me that I would need to ration out the amount for each day. “Your period should only last no more than seven days anyway. What’s the big deal?” my mother fumed with an attitude. She really did not expect that I would go through an entire pack of 24 pads over the course of the seven days, but I did and needed more.
I do not know why my mother never saw my overuse of sanitary napkins as a beginning problem, but for a 10 year old child, it was a nightmare. I was never one to focus at all during my days of primary and elementary school. I lived in a constant cloud of dissociation before the sexual assault. Almost every moment in class was accounted for in daydreams. I hardly ever knew what was going on in class because I was hardly ever paying attention.
After the sexual assault, dissociation was 10 times worse for me. Paying attention in class was difficult at best. No teacher had a clue. They all just thought I was out to lunch, mute, and riddled with social anxiety. With a menstrual cycle, I could never focus in any of my classes because my mind was calculating when I needed to go to the bathroom to change my pad. Any sensation that I was expelling blood was always a cause for alarm for me, and that was all the time.
I spent more time in class being concerned with whether I might have leaked through my pants. I remember almost no content that teachers presented to me. Education in the classroom was not my focus. I was trying to survive. I educated myself outside of the classroom. I read books that I sincerely doubt that some of the other classmates my age would have even considered simply because I was living and suffering in a state of trauma, and I was trying to understand how to help myself.
Anyway, I would bleed for up to 10 days during every calendar cycle, and then I would have at least a week or two off in between. My cycles were continuously running together. There was no sign of regularity. Although irregular periods are common when the menstrual cycle first begins, there was no way that it was common for me to have bled as much as I did. I recall asking the school nurse how much blood did I need to lose before I actually died, and although she laughed, I was not joking.
Even my childlike view helped me to determine that I was bleeding too much. I had even researched the term for this in the book my aunt gave me not to mention the countless library books I checked out on the subject. I was looking for help, but most help was geared towards adult women in the menstrual cycle area. I was a long way from an adult. I needed to know what medical help could be given to a 10 year old, but I could not find research on this at all. Plus, these were not the kind of topics I would ever hear about in even a health class.
Although I knew there was something wrong, the adults around me, including my mother, did not see the big deal. The women all viewed me as having crossed the step over into “womanhood”, but for me, it was a blood takeover. My thoughts were consumed with my period. My thoughts were consumed with blood. Imagine standing outside at recess with friends and not being able to focus on the conversation because of thinking, feeling, and fearing that blood was going to be all over me. I never had a moment’s peace. I lived my pubescent life always on edge … on the edge of blood.
I Hated My Period
I hated my period. I hated it.
It was not long before I had run out of my allotted pad purchases over time that I had to dip into my mother’s stash. I became a sanitary pad thief to survive. Usually when my mother was not home, I would sneak into her closet and steal some of her pads. Yes, I was reduced to stealing mainly because my mother refused to continue purchasing pads for me until she thought it necessary based on a specified ration that I was to follow.
My mother always had more than enough pads stashed away for herself. If anything, I always wondered why I was not like her. Was not I her child? I had to wonder. She was regular and always on schedule when it came to her periods. She literally bragged to me that she menstruated no more than three days! I absolutely did not understand it. I was baffled and began to wonder what was wrong with me.
Despite my mother already knowing my issues, she continuously hesitated about taking me to the doctor. Slowly, but surely, however, she changed her mind when she began noticing that her own sanitary supply had dwindled down to nothing. The pad thief had struck her, and that was something she had never been accustomed to before. She had not had to share anything with me, and when she found that she was continuously making pad purchases more than what she even deemed necessary, it was the last straw for her.
When I could no longer take the grief and agony of my periods, I screamed to my mother that I needed to see a doctor. I begged and pleaded with her for weeks. When it appeared that she would never relent, I went to my dad and told him. I was that desperate. I was bleeding on and off almost daily with no relief in sight, and there were always lots of blood clots. I literally thought I was dying.
One night, I overheard my father tell my mother that there could be something very wrong with me because he had seen an enormous blood clot in the toilet when I had forgotten to flush the toilet. He told my mother that it was worth having a doctor to check out. He even thought that I was much too young to have a period anyway, and it concerned him. My mother had failed to tell him of my precocious puberty. She and my grandmother were always keeping secrets.
Nevertheless, my mother finally gave in and took me to the doctor. Little did any of us know that this doctor’s visit was a turning point for me. It would open the door to a huge trigger that would set off my intense anger eventually leaking out of me and onto everyone as volatile rage.
Stay tuned for what happens next.
My Voice Unchained 