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I was in art class sitting on a high stool–one leg was up on the seat and the other was off. That's when I felt the whoosh. I thought it was discharge so I went to the bathroom and wiped.
When I saw blood, I froze in shock wondering what just happened, I wiped again to make sure I wasn’t crazy so I ran to my locker to get a pad as I had been prepared. I walked around uncomfortable all day because of how annoying it was rubbing on my thighs!
When I was in grade 4, I was 8 years old and during my recess, I went to the bathroom. There were clots in my underwear and I was like "what is happening here?!"
I told my sisters and they told my mom and she came and handed me a pad. I was still like "what... this is so not happening!" Then I took a shower and there we go, first period down.
No amount of preparation can really prepare you for being twelve years old and bleeding through your white corduroy pants on picture day hundreds of miles away from what you knew to be home, in foster care. I wasn't allowed to call my mom and ask her what the Hell was going on down there, and why she hadn't better prepared me for this.
So when something unfamiliar and warm and sticky was running free between my legs, I panicked. My panic scooted me down the hall to the bathroom, where I sought refuge in my favorite stall, third one down. I couldn't tell you why it was my favorite. Just was. I stared at my blood stained underwear for what felt like an eternity, in shock. My initial reaction was fear that I was dying, because, ya know, blood. But something eventually went off in my brain that went something like:
"Oh. OH. Ohh. This is...What if it's...This must be...Wow. No way. How cool. Holy fuck.
It was an initiation. A portal.
Without knowing at the time the depth of the change taking place in me, without cognitively recognizing the incredulous process I had become host to, something within intuitively knew I was irrevocably altered. Every cell of my being tuned in to an even higher frequency. I felt almost high for a moment. It was euphoric and terrifying simultaneously.
I was in awe of women.
How our bodies were designed
to create.
To carry.
To release.
To grieve.
To endure.
To survive.
I was perplexed at how anyone expected girls to just go about a routine day to day operations with a phenomenon like this occurring inside them.
Then the ego hit a wall and I felt…shame.
I instantly went from wanting to tell the whole world what happened to wishing my bleed away. Ugh, “Take it back!” I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in. Back then, because of my fearful conditioning, part of me still clung to early teachings of the insidious story about a woman named Eve biting the forbidden fruit and condemning all her descendants to this bloody curse. What kind of sick joke have we been telling ourselves?
And for how long?
How could this precious miracle be a punishment?
It was as if I could hear my ancestors screaming through my ovaries just how much bullshit was laced in the depiction of women since time immemorial.
Drifting in and out of states of consciousness…the present moment returned.
Had anyone noticed?
I was mortified at the thought of the entire student body roaming the halls laughing at me, while I bled out there in that stall,
Third one down.
I glanced up in agony, tearing my gaze away from the peach pit size bloodstain that had me so enraptured.
I don't know how else to describe it besides the truth: My menstrual blood was the prettiest color I'd ever seen.
It was ancient.
It was sacrifice.
It was bold, and vulnerable, and courageous.
It was me.
All that I am, and all that I no longer needed.
All I was shedding from childhood,
And all I was becoming.
Gazing up, I took in the poster on the back of the bathroom door.
It read, “30 years from now,
No one will remember what jeans you wore.
They will remember how you made them feel.”
