I was 8— just a tiny, little girl in the grand scheme of time — and I found a speck of red on my panties. I still remember that tight-fitting, pastel pink cotton singlet I wore: the material stretched over the barely noticeable slight swelling of my breasts and sweat-clung to my back from the merciless heat of my parents’ bedroom in the tropical haven otherwise known as Singapore.
When I stripped off my panties and handed it over to Mom with imploring eyes, she quite honestly panicked.
Wait, so soon? She asked hurriedly, before she rifled through her personal belongings in the grey cabinet of hers whose door never failed to creak every time it was opened.
Here, use this, and on that day, I received my very first sanitary pad. Mom offered no explanation as to why I was suddenly bleeding from down there, but I could tell she was perplexed from the crease in her eyebrows that was present for the rest of the day. I later heard hushed discussions from the back of my parents’ bedroom in the evening.
That speck of blood — just a teeny, weeny dot, really — meant a whole lot more to her than it did for me. It signified that I was no longer her little girl — I was a grown-up, fertile woman now. I didn’t understand her disconcertment at that point, but I do now and that day has become so much more precious because of it. But after a whole night of having the sides of the pad irritate, scrape and scratch me in my nether-regions, the pad turned up spotless the next day.
Turns out — you haven’t yet come. Ha, you got us good: joke’s on us!
I was 13, enrolled in an all-girls’ school where tampons and pads were readily available from the hands of helpful classmates, and you’d finally made your actual, grand arrival along with a raging case of acne across my jawline. Thanks for that, by the way: the scars, coupled with a few fresh surface pimples, are still prominent on my face to this date.
I learned all about you, what you were — the shedding of my uterine lining — and your little intricacies. There were many times you came unannounced (how rude!), stained my…
