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The morning of my thirteenth birthday I stood in the family bathroom, my panties in my hands. Frost carved symbols across the window. The mirror weeped with condensation. I stared at the coming winter, at the faint outline of our dilapidated barn through the frost, at my own distorted image in the crying mirror.
I don't understand this, I thought. I know what these stains mean, but they don't look like what I expected. They're the color of rust. They smell funny, like the pile of broken pipes in the backyard.
I didn't have to summon the courage to show my mom. She barreled through the unlocked door the way she did every morning, into the tiny space crowded with my seven-bodied family's cheap toiletries. She noticed my panties, saw my frantic expression.
"Is this the first time this has happened?"
It was a demand more than a question.
"Yes, Mom. I think I just got my first period."
She bent over at the waist. I heard two vertebrae crack beneath her chenille robe. Her fingers worked the child-proof mechanism surrounding the cabinet latch. The warped particle-board door popped open and hit me in the leg but I didn't flinch. My mom reached inside and pulled out an elastic contraption and a sanitary napkin. She pressed one hand into a heavy thigh, grunted as she rose. Her robe gaped open and I saw her breasts, loose and large, mottled with deep blue veins.
"Happy Birthday, Birdie. You're a woman now."
Her tone was almost sarcastic. She didn't tell me what to do. She left the room, left the belt and pad on the toilet tank, let me fumble in confusion and sadness.
I spent my birthday shifting my body at school. The cotton between my legs felt foreign, felt wet and alive. I worried that everyone could tell I was marked with blood. I wore my puffy winter coat tightly tied around my waist, over my plaid uniform skirt, as if I thought a blizzard might fall from the popcorn ceiling covering my ninth-grade English class.
My friends were like me - Catholic, thirteen, afraid. We didn't understand our bodies' natural rhythms. We learned the facts of life at school, flim-strip mythology, sat in darkened sixth-grade rooms three years in the past, the boys shooting hoops at the playground. The school nurse adjusted her sensible glasses and padded to the front of the class in soft white shoes. A solid gold crucifix flapped against her chest in time to her gait. She flipped the light switch. We blinked hard in the florescent blaze, blinked in surprise and discomfort. We would have to bleed every month the rest of our lives?
"Girls, you might see advertisements for something call tampons."
The nurse spoke the word with careful anger.
"Do not use these. You all want to be virgins on your wedding night, and tampons will take your virginity."
I didn't use tampons until I lost my virginity to a slim gymnast, until I gave birth three times, until I turned twenty-four, until I grabbed my babies, two suitcases full of clothes, and left my young abusive husband in a cloud of fear. He hated the change of the moon, the way it swelled my belly, the boxes of pads hidden in the child-proofed cabinet the same way my mom hid them.
The week I left him I attended a yard sale and bought two pans, bought two rough Army blankets, a set of chipped plates, bought a dog-eared book with a fertility goddess on the cover. A book about menstruation. I turned the pages at night, while my children slept in our one-room apartment. My mind resisted the words, the simple discussion of female blood empowerment. My mind resisted.
I am not like these women. I'm Catholic. These things are sinful, I murmured to myself as I read about women who painted with their blood, who sewed their own pads, who let men do things to them while they bled, sexual things. I am afraid of these things. I don't want to go to Hell.
I left the book under the sink with a box of pads and didn't open it for a few months. The moon grew full and waned, grew full and waned. My body responded to the tide, my breasts and belly ached the days before new moon. The bleeding would start, I would stick a fresh pad to my panties, wish it were five days later, wish the flow would hurry, would end. I had to carefully dole out my
