Megan S. • California • 34
In fifth grade, my school broke up the boys and girls and gave us all “the talk” about puberty. It all felt really abstract to me at the time, my parents hadn’t officially given me any sort of talk before then. Spring of sixth grade, my first period arrived. None of my close friends had gone through it yet. Conveniently, my mother had recently moved cross-country for a work gig, so I was stuck figuring this out with my socially awkward, stoic father (I did call my mom, she cried- I had no idea how to react to that). I felt so weird asking him to buy supplies for me, I tried to ration them for as long as possible. This helped lead to a super-embarrassing leaking incident in seventh grade, a literal pool of blood on a chair in my sixth period class.
After that, I realized talking to my dad about this stuff maybe wasn’t the worst option. In seventh grade, we had a “reproductive ed” unit, and, things felt a lot less abstract. Down the road, I ended up teaching ninth grade health; At first I was surprised by some of the questions I would get in our anonymous “ask anything” box, especially questions that seemed to come from girls. But, I realized quickly that I shouldn’t be- back when it was happening to me, I was pretty clueless about puberty too.
