Period Piece
Plus: My Cool Mom
I went on vacation a month ago and asked for words from friends on Facebook. I got 46 of them before I closed the comments. Sure, I could have risen to the challenge and written a 46-line poem, but who the hell wants to read a poem that long? Plus, I wrote it in trochaic hexameter, which is way harder and longer than (is a penis joke coming? no!) iambic pentameter.
Without further ado….
Period Piece In the school gymnasium, where girls like me could not take refuge from our own uncool, in urine- yellow uniforms that groaned beneath our baby fat, unsnapping timely with asthmatic wheezes, I misunderstood the meaning of the blood to be from a humiliating landing on the bars of the uneven parallels, red freshet pooling in my bloomers, but was really shedding innocence at age eleven: sixth-grade fecund prodigy, a leader and a queen and frightened. I went slinking to the nurse afraid someone might see the brick of napkins in my orange, home-made gauchos to forestall the spots of blood that just might run amok and splash a scarlet W for Woman/Weirdo/Witch/Wildflower on my t-shirt. Grammy took me home. I simmered in the bathtub till my mother–with elan!—arrived and taught me how to—you know—push the puff way up inside me. Most girls get the pad, don’t have to agonize on their first day, but god forbid the sharks smell krill, girls.
The poem is as true a story as you can get: My gym teacher was the mean Mrs. Brown, and we all wore snap-up, urine-yellow gym dresses with puffy bloomers. They were not the great equalizer. The popular girls still looked hot. I really did land hard on the uneven parallel bars just before I noticed I was bleeding and was certain it was from the bad form. Mrs. Brown knew better, and I saw a softer side of her for about a minute that year. I really did spend the afternoon in the bathtub, my Grammy beside me on the toilet, waiting for my mother to come home from work. And I really did go straight to tampons—not even the kind with an applicator.
Mom’s brand was Carefree, and I remember they were discontinued during a spate of news reports about toxic shock syndrome. I took to them easily. A few years later, Mom gave the same lesson to my sister, Beth. I’ll quote my book here (yes, my book about cake; it was in a section about things we did in the kitchen).
Once, after teaching my sister about tampons on the day of her initiation into the club, my mother hung a red-marker-painted tampon from the door handle of the kitchen cabinet over the sink. When friends came over after school during the few-week period it remained novel for her, she’d hitch her pants up and buck her teeth out and say, regarding their wide-eyed glares at our ornament, “What’sa matter? Ain’tcha never heard a Christmas?”
Shout-out to those who contributed the words for my poem:
gymnasium (Doreen P.), refuge (Mary B.), groan (Elizabeth M.), wheeze (Lexa F.), misunderstood (Sophie L.), humiliate (Kristi L.), freshet (Anne C.), shedding (Jody S.), fecundity (Susan WB.), prodigy (Kim B.), slink (Erin F.), brick (Ed L.), forestall (Hank G.), amok (Charlet G.), wildflower (Sarah B.), simmer (Julie F.), elan, (Richard D.), push (Susan S.), agonize (Fran K.), krill (Howard M.)
Thanks for reading.