Blood, guts and glory: Dealing with a period

So of course the first thing I do, little nine-year-old chest all puffed up with the pride of knowing something you think others don’t, is show my new stockpile to my older brother.

I informed him about how women bleed every month and that I could die if I left a tampon in too long. He half listened in that indulgent sort of way that older siblings occasionally choose to bestow on their whiny, younger relations.

Of course this wouldn’t be something I would remember so clearly if it hadn’t been colored with some kind of emotion: In this case it was shame.

My grandmother, an amazing woman who worked as a nurse back when they had to wear garters and worship doctors, complimented my brother on dealing so well with all of my brazen “period talk.” She laughed as she talked about how red my grandfather would have been, and don’t even get her started on my uncle. That day was the day I first learned that I wasn’t supposed to talk about menstruation with boys in the room.

Millions of little and, frankly even big, girls have experienced equal embarrassment all over the world. And it isn’t helped by the societal need for silence that has built up around menstruation. Women aren’t supposed to talk or complain about their periods.

When I first got mine at the age of 11, when sex was still a dirty word whispered to elicit giggles on the bus, it was actually really exciting.

It was what taking your first sip of beer is like. Sure it’s probably a little gross, but it makes you feel like an adult. Of course, there wouldn’t be a need to write this article if it had stayed that happy.

There is a weird dichotomy built up around periods as being both an overt sign of the beginning of womanhood as well as the start of the secrecy surrounding your bodily functions.

In Japan, the family celebrates by eating red bean rice, and my mother offered to pass on her girlhood tradition for me. Nevertheless, it was not something I wanted to announce to my father and brother.

I was beginning puberty with all it’s genderless awkwardness and ill-humour, but on top of everything else, I felt the need to abscond to the bathroom each month, tampon hidden up my sleeve, in order to hide a natural bodily process.

There are little milestones of embarrassment that you have to overcome when you have a period: The first time you bleed on sheets, the first time you have to ask the nurse for a tampon, the first time you bleed through your clothes in public (I was 14 and didn’t notice until I got back from school).

Menstruation makes life a little more difficult. Yet, for some reason it never feels like something I can complain about openly. Women constantly have to toe the line between being open about their periods and not coming off as weak or incompetent.

Another little milestone: The first time someone asks you if you’re just PMS-ing.

Periods aren’t gross and they aren’t something that any girl needs to hide or feel like she can’t talk about with a guy in the room. Periods happen to women but do not define womanhood any more than having a uterus does.

While I do not feel the need to take the Jen Lewis route and literally put my menstrual blood on display, I do support the idea in a more metaphorical sense. We need to be more open about menstruation.

Complaining about your stomach cramps or your PMS doesn’t make you unstable or any less capable of doing your job, no matter what any man or woman tells you. We need to stop asking if a woman’s “time of the month” is going to stop her from achieving what a man could do. News flash — it doesn’t.

We need to start using the words period and vagina and stop being scandalized when Mad Men shows a drop of menstrual blood during prime time.

We can’t sanitize the image of a woman and expect her to feel like a complete human being able to operate without restriction in a world that wants her to pretend she doesn’t have healthy bodily functions.

We need to talk about periods, period.