We, the Bleeders

So it's Women's International Day, where my products at?

This is a story that requires referring to my teen daughter as “Little K” since I don’t think she’d appreciate being named as the main character in a period-themed post by her dear mama.

Vulvani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

So Little K, 14, is pretty new to the madness of menstruation, and isn’t always the most prepared for the exciting surprises that come with it. Recently at Sleepy Hollow High School, she bled through her period panties (which are generally amazing, by the way, and I wish they existed when I was coming of age). But nothing’s perfect, and some days are heavier than others, so she bled through and had no back up. I had just arrived back to work after a week vacation and needed to pick up the pieces when her text arrived, shouting in all caps: “MOM HELP IDK WHAT TO DO,” going on to describe the situation in her pants.

I text her my apologies, I can’t come, but can she excuse herself from class and get to the school nurse and ask for a pad. Twenty or so texts later, the saga went something like this: the nurse doesn’t have pads and sends her back to class! I ask her if the restroom has a dispenser and can she go to it. “I can’t, I already left class once.” Then after class when she is able to get to the restroom, she asks again if I can come bring her a change of clothes. No, I really can’t, I’m sorry. [Insert some tough love here. I also want to see if she can find her way through this mess without a mom-rescue.] Can she make do with the supplies on hand and get through the day? No, the day has gym in it. Can she ask her gym teacher to be excused? No, he’s a guy. Can she get back to the nurse to ask for an excuse from gym? “No, I already went once and she knows I’m not sick.” And so on.

Part of the problem is admittedly my daughter’s own shyness about being able to advocate for herself and her needs—we know we need to work on that, but the other part I’m frustrated about is a lack of the kind of support I would expect from any (female!) school nurse or teacher of a 14-year-old girl in this situation during this day and age. Couldn’t the nurse have pointed her to the restroom, or gone and gotten her something there herself? Or better yet, had a supply of products on hand? There’s a whole free wardrobe corner students can “shop” in, couldn’t there be a change of clothes available to her in there? Not to mention, reports Little K, when you get to the restroom dispenser—which does at least promise free supplies—they are bad quality or…empty.

How is it possible having your period in 2023 is still this hidden, treacherous, mysterious thing when there’s a statistic like this:

From the The Economist: “At any given time, about 300m of the world’s women are menstruating.”

This was in an article lamenting not enough being known about the science of pads and tampons, so there’s that for starters. But also there’s just the fact that we even have to remind everyone about this female shared experience across continents, countries, communities and households. Why is this statistic so startling?

I’m starting to exit menstruation-land as my daughter is entering, yet we’re both adrift in a similar sort of lost boat. Years back, I wrote an essay on getting my first period in a collection edited by an intrepid college student at the time called My Little Red Book, which I handed to my daughters as a gift lately. They were embarrassed and refused to read it. Despite my goal of creating daughters more informed and confidant in the reality of their female bodies than I ever was in the late 1980s, they don’t want to hear about any of this from me. And I’m not sure if anyone else is filling in that gap. My essay in the Red Book recounts such extreme awkwardness and shame when “it” happened to me, all starting with a stain on my white skirt that I rotated when I thought I sat in chocolate milk. At least Little K knows what it is that is happening to her, but she is not the prepared Girl Scout she should be, and she was not on this day able to get the very simple and basic things she needed, including some kindness.

Today is National Women’s Day, a day to celebrate female achievement, but also take action to push for gender parity. In this incident, a long day lost at school, Little K couldn’t contemplate crashing through any glass ceilings in her future—let alone focus on the equations of math class—when her underwear had her so distracted.

Some hard lessons she might learn and ACTION we all might take:

• You’re alone! The world will not have what you need, and people won’t necessarily be there to help, so pack appropriately.

• Speak up! We need to ask for exactly what we need, and be clear about it. If the answer doesn’t work, try again.

• Much like being in a theater or on an airplane where you map out your emergency exits, you need to establish a period plan. Where do you go, who do you ask, what do you have on hand, where do you get what you need.

• Can we all quickly advocate to make this better? Here’s advocacy links from the Aunt Flow site (a certified WBENC women-owned company based in Columbus, Ohio, whose founder, at 18 years old, dedicated her life to developing a solution to ensure businesses and schools could sustainably provide quality period products, for free, in bathrooms). They have ready-made email templates to send requests to schools and elsewhere for free dispensers stocked with better products.

I’m checking if the dispenser in my work restroom is empty, and I’m calling that nurse.