In the school holidays between primary and secondary school, not long after I turned 12, I started to 'become a woman', to use the words of the sex education lecturer who had been at the 'Mother and Daughter night'. My body was maturing but I was really still a little girl and had been playing with my friends on a pogo stick, boinging around the backyard for ages.
I had a bit of an ache and then when I went to the loo and saw what I had never seen before - nothing like the 'tiny drops of blood' the lecturer had mentioned, I asked my mother. It couldn't possibly be a period she declared, I must have scratched myself somehow and gave me some Vaseline to apply. The Vaseline didn't work.
Reluctantly my mother agreed that it must be a period and showed me how to deal with it. We had belts of elastic that had strips attached which had hooks or safely pins at the end. Sanitary pads were basically cotton wool encased in a soft woven paper, a bit like a strong tissue, that had long ends which were held by the hooks or pins. When wearing the contraption I guess it looked a bit like a modern day G string but not even a teeny weeny bit glamorous.
My mother was 17 when she started her period and she was so ashamed and embarrassed that I was only 12 that she couldn't bring herself to tell my father for about three days. It was awful. When my own daughters started their periods we went out and bought them a handbag - it is a celebration of growing up. You might as well celebrate because it's going to be with you for a long time!
I hated having my period. It made
me feel awful. Also Mutti had all sorts of rules that she had learnt from her mother - you could only wash, not have a proper bath and hair washing was absolutely forbidden because you were vulnerable and would get terribly sick. Eventually I didn't pay any attention and had showers as well as washed my hair. It made me feel heaps better.
In those first few years I used to have terrible period pains and got sent home from school because I wasn't of any use to anyone. I always got into trouble because my mother had never experienced any pain herself and thought I was play acting.
One time I went on a church camp to Boydtown on the NSW south coast. Unhappily my period arrived just at the wrong time so one of the older girls kindly offered me a tampon. I had never used tampons. Tampax came with a special applicator but if you aren't told how to actually 'apply' the tampon things can turn out tricky as they did for me - somehow I inserted the cardboard applicator along with the tampon. Agony! I couldn't understand how people could bear the pain so I resorted to the tried and tested solution.
Many, many years later when my parents were old my father became somewhat incontinent so Mutti decided to get him to wear sanitary pads to ease the problem. She said that things weren't so easy any more and that you couldn't buy the belts for sanitary pads anymore. I agreed. Sanitary belts hadn't been available for ages. Mutti said that that was terribly inconvenient though. After questioning her I discovered that she had been stitching the pads into my father's undies. I couldn't help it. I laughed and laughed before showing her that you could peel the paper off the back and just stick them into the undies. I had visions of armies of women all diligently sitting in the loo stitching and unstitching their sanitary pads. But just like me with the tampax applicator if you don't know and if no one tells you, how do you know. The stick on pads had been around for so long before my parents needed them there were no longer any instructions on how to attach them.
I don't have to worry about sanitary pads any more. Not having a period certainly is a bonus of growing old. But as your oestrogen levels drop so do your boobs. Your skin, no longer tight becomes more of a 'relaxed fit'. Your bones thin as do your eyelashes and hair. All part of ageing unfortunately and I guess I have no alternative but to accept it. At least I have lots of friends in the same boat so we can moan and console each other as well as have a good laugh about how things used to be.
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