Look Who’s Not Talking

​I thought I was dying. It happened shortly before my 11th birthday, at school. I was a pretty healthy kid but at that moment, I had no idea what was going on with me. Other than a tonsillectomy a couple of years before and breaking my arm when I was 5, I didn’t have a lot of reasons to go to a doctor.

I had trailed blood down the corridor to the girl’s bathroom. I don’t know who said something. I don’t remember who found me. An adult voice on the other side of the locked door told me to go to the nurse’s office. So, I wadded up some toilet paper, shoved it between my legs, praying it was good enough. and headed to the nurse.

When I opened the door, the janitor was right there. He looked so mad at me for making more work for him. I was completely embarrassed.

By then my uniform was a bloody mess; I was forced to choose something from the lost and found box. The school nurse handed me this huge cottony thing with a thin strip of adhesive on one side. She looked at me funny when I asked her what it was. I didn’t know because I had never seen one before then. She told me to put it between my legs and she quickly left the room. With my underwear ruined, I didn’t know I was supposed to remove paper and let the adhesive stick the pad onto my pants. I removed the now bloodied wad of tp and replaced it with this rectangle of cotton. I pulled the bloodied underwear up tight and walked out of the nurse’s office with my legs together.

I was made to sit outside the principal’s office while she called my parents. At least one of the teachers, Mrs. Robinson, sat with me while I waited for my father to pick me up from school. She told me I did nothing wrong, that I would be okay and my mom would know what to do. She looked like wanted to say more but she didn’t. She put her arm around me, occasionally patting my arm as we waited. She was the only adult that day, out of all the adults I encountered, that showed me a spot of kindness, a temporary alleviation of the shame I felt.

I rode home in silence with my dad. He wouldn’t even look at me and I didn’t know what I did that was so bad. I thought I must have been really sick. He told me I should take a bath and wait in my room for my mother to get home. I was still bleeding; I stayed in the bathtub for almost two hours, not wanting to get blood on the carpet, not wanting to make more work for anyone else.

When my mom finally came home, she told me I could get out of the tub. I wadded up almost an entire roll of toilet paper and stuffed it into my new clean underwear, thinking I would create another pad like the one the nurse gave me. Since I was probably going to have to go to the hospital, there’s have more.

My mom was in my room. She handed me a huge box of pads, some kind of elastic belt thing and told me the directions for the belt were on the box. I remember being so confused as I headed back to the bathroom; the pad didn’t look the same as the one the nurse had given me. And there was no buckle so how could this be a belt?

This pad looked weird because it had a tail on each end. It seemed like it took me forever to thread the belt the right way. When I came out of the bathroom, my mother gave me some tea and a set of four books called “The Life Cycle Library” and that was it.

We never spoke about periods or menstrual cycles or halfway sex-related again. The only thing my dad did for a little while was tease me about having to clean his car. His teasing made it hard to bring up the hateful bullying that increased in school because of the spectacle I had made of myself. It taught me well not to talk about what was being done to me at school or at home or anywhere else. I was too afraid everything would come out.

My parents, while very good at keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table, were not so good at communicating or showing compassion to their child going through a natural change in their life. But I’m pretty sure it was because nobody talked to them about their bodies when they were growing up either.

When it was my turn to have sensitive discussions with my kids about their changing bodies, I was determined to be emotionally available and tried to make them aware of the correct, not cutesy names for genitalia and their right to their own body autonomy. Mostly, I just wanted to make it so if they needed to, they could ask questions or talk about how they felt about what was happening as they grew. I was too eager, too open; I still made them feel, well, too uncomfortable to talk. I’m sure I bungled it. Most parents do; even well-meaning ones like me.

The books, the high school health classes they made us sit through were barely better than having nothing at all. They didn’t really help. We giggled immaturely at the pictures, like most kids do, define anatomical parts of our bodies and broadly address parts of the birthing process.

Neither the classes nor the teachers really address the state of our changing teenage minds or make it safe to ask questions about sex or consent or identity or how everything we were feeling was natural and normal.

Parents don’t want teachers teaching their babies about sex while teachers are hoping parents are teaching their children about sex. And who is really doing it? Who is going to do it? Nobody is. According to recent polls, about 20% of the parents never talked to a child about sex or intimacy, and 57% did not talk about gender with their child unless they had to, about half of the teenagers polled felt very uncomfortable talking about sex. And 10% of parents never talk about race… but that’s another conversation for another day.

Why is talking appropriately to the preteens how to handle new sensations in their bodies, or talking with teens making intelligent decisions about when to have sex, what it feels like or the intimate relationship of their feelings to their physical forms or what it feels like to become healthy, fully self-aware, self-actualized beings so difficult?

I think it’s because we don’t know, trust, or want to look to see if we are actually healthy, fully self-aware, fully self-actualized beings ourselves. Because what if we’re not. Why would we talk about experiences that weren’t pretty or past events that were a little shocking? How do we expose our child to our lived experiences, times of uncertainty that we’d rather forget?

My private school teachers didn’t really talk to me on sexual health education. They were too busy telling me babies inside the womb looked exactly like babies outside the womb and only monsters killed babies and if I broke Christ’s trust(I kid you not) and found myself pregnant, I would be doomed to hell for killing one of his flock.

My parents didn’t talk to me; they could barely handle my father roughhousing with me like any normal kid after my period started because now “I was becoming a woman”.

…it’s perfectly okay for them to be who they are or to sit with a child when they need to ask their uncomfortable questions, or hold them when don’t know how to feel about what they feel. 

So, who did?

Books. And believe me, I had a few of the wrong ones but I had a lot of the ban-able ones. What self respecting kid would voluntarily chose the dry, almost sterile encyclopedic ones? C’mon man. 

I looked for unreal, the harlequin romance novels that gave impractical, illogical and totally fictional ways my body worked and how relationships were created. They made me feel hope and I could dream and fantasize about love and connection and acceptance, none of the things I had in real life.

But occasionally, a librarian or one of my teachers would notice my love of reading and throw Alice Childress, Maya Angelou, Alex Haley, Mildred Taylor, or Toni Morrison my way. I understood The Bluest Eye. It spoke to me.  Just reading “wicked people love wickedly…” help me make it through so much. And believe me, at 11 years old, I needed the distraction. 

Today’s kids have the Internet. And we have no idea what they could be exposing themselves to as we ban books or block the adults that could help them feel less different, less alone.

So yeah, let’s defund libraries, let’s stop teachers and counselors from authentically interacting with their students, let’s have kids begin working sooner, get married younger but never say that menstruation can start before the 6th grade. And oh yeah, let’s keep everything heteronormative and pretend the high self-unaliving rate of LGBTQIA+ kids has nothing to do with any of this, nothing at all.

It’s been almost 50 years since my first period and we’re still too afraid to tell kids where babies actually come from or that’s it’s perfectly okay for them to be who they are or to sit with a child when they need to ask their uncomfortable questions, or hold them when don’t know how to feel about what they feel.

We’re dropping the ball with another generation. In the last two years, we have done so much damage to our children. We’re not only not educating them, we don’t even have the guts to tell them the truth about the world we’ve brought them into. 

We have left our children mentally unarmed and physically unprepared to become healthier than we are; all because it makes us too uncomfortable. The majority of us have stayed silent as we let the worst of us de-evolved the rest of us; letting those of us that are incapable or unwilling to say more than “go pee pee in the potty” to lead us. And with every nonsensical law each state tries to put on the books, we put our kids farther and farther behind. It’s going to probably take decades to undo the miseducation of it all.

I just hope it doesn’t take us 50 years to fix it.

Stefanie B.