Autobiography of a Period in Five Irregular Chapters

Chapter 1: February 1972

The brown stain in my white, cotton underwear looks like a crime scene. But it has to be a mistake, a trick of the fluorescent lighting in the bathroom. I wash my hands raw and clunk back out into the dining hall, my rented ski boots slamming against the cement floor.

It’s not hard to pick out my family of six from across the dining hall. They are like the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Some kind of freaky show is going on in one of the rings at all times and right now it’s my youngest stepsister shoving french fries up her nose.

“What, did you fall into a toilet?” my oldest stepsister, Felicia, snickers.

“None of your business,” I say, lifting one heavy boot over the bench affixed to the lunch table and then the other.

“Asshole,” she says.

“Bitch,” I say.

“Girls!” My mother slams her hand down and sends our plastic food trays shuddering. “Enough!” She is doing double duty this vacation week because our father, my stepfather, is not with us. Somebody has to work.

After lunch, I beg my mother to let me stay inside the lodge. “My head hurts,” I tell her. “My stomach too.” I don’t tell her about my underpants.

“I didn’t raise you to be a marshmallow,” she says, which is a joke, because my mother is the biggest marshmallow of all. The most outdoorsy thing she’s ever done is grill a leg of lamb in our suburban backyard.

For the rest of the day, I slide and fall down the intermediate run while snot hangs from my nostrils like stalactites. The warmth gathers between my eleven-year-old thighs, and I try not to think about that. That, I tell myself, is not really happening.

But when we get back to the house, which is not even our house since we’re guests, I run to the bathroom. Like an archeologist at work, I carefully peel down snow pants, pants, long underwear, underwear. The evidence is now the unmistakable bright red of blood. I am either dying or I’ve just gotten my period, a concept I first got introduced to two years earlier on an educational family trip to Washington, DC.

The most exciting discovery of the week, though, wasn’t anything we saw at the Smithsonian. It was the metal disposal container in a public restroom. “Open the lid,” Felicia ordered.

I tipped open the lid carefully. “Gross!”

“Lemme see.” Felicia shoved me out of the way. “Gross!”

We ran out of the restroom screaming like we’d been attacked by a perv. Once our mother was satisfied we were unharmed, just mildly traumatized, she told us about this thing called “menstruation.”

“It’s natural,” she said. But we knew she was a liar. There was nothing natural about what we’d seen in that container.

It wasn’t until the next year, when I was in the fifth grade at Greenacres Elementary School, that our nurse, Mrs. Holmes, wheeled in the film projector cart and sent all the boys down to the gym. We girls knew what was up because our older sisters had warned us. “You’re going to learn about the curse,” Felicia told me.

And now, I probably had it.

“Can I come in?” My mother calls through the bathroom door.

“No way!” I shout. Then I start to cry.

My mother opens the door, sees me on the toilet, and knows exactly what’s up. She grins, looking just as idiotic as that mother in the period movie. “Congratulations,” she gushes. “You’re a woman now!”

I stick my finger down my throat and make like I’m gagging.

When my mother and I finally leave the bathroom, me with a pad the size of an oil tanker strapped to my body, Felicia is waiting to pounce. “No fair!” she shouts. “How come she gets her period before me?” Like our six-month age difference gives her automatic first dibs on everything, even our biological destiny.

“Well, you can have mine!” I scream. “Because I don’t want it.”

That will be our relationship for the next eight years, me and my period. She will show up uninvited every twenty to twenty-eight days so it’s like a surprise shit show every time. She will ruin many a pair of white carpenter pants. She will cause depression. And cramps. Did I mention the cramps?

Chapter 2: December 1979

I beg for her. I’m eighteen years old, kneeling on the floor of my freshman dorm room at Oberlin College and praying, please show up, I’m sorry I ever said I didn’t want you.

But my period is a heartless bitch.

During winter vacation, my Catholic boyfriend takes me to the abortion clinic in Silver Springs, Maryland, and a few weeks later my period comes crawling back like a repentant sinner. Of course, I take her back. The cramps, the moodiness. All of her.

Two years later, I’m crazy in love with a bass player and after a night with a defective condom, my period splits again. The wearer of said condom splits too. I am so not going to tell him I’m pregnant. Abortion number two. Boston, Massachusetts.

Chapter 3: December 1988 to August 1990

The next time my period deserts me, I’m twenty-seven, newly married, and think I’m ready for this unplanned baby. But it turns out my period only took a short trip around the block. I call my husband from my new job at the publishing office in Manhattan. “She’s back,” I whisper into the phone at my desk. “And it’s not pretty.”

The doc who cleans my insides out with a vacuum the next day says we were lucky my body “knew what it was doing.” Okay, I tell him because I sure as hell didn’t. All I’ve ever done is take orders from her.

But two years later, I give my period her first real vacation. Neither one of us sends postcards. A month or so after my first son is born, she’s back.

Chapter 4: October 1993 to June 1994

At the age of thirty-three, I have sex without birth control on purpose. It’s a high-wire, improvisational act entitled: “Can-I-repair-this-shitty-marriage?” Incredibly, it only takes one performance. My period is a slut. But in her absence, son number two is born.

For the next sixteen years, my period is faithful. I cannot say the same for my husband. Our marriage only lasted ten years.

Chapter 5: February 2011

Weeks before my fiftieth birthday, I think my period is really and truly gone. She leaves without a single decent hot flash, too, and I’m proud of her. I think of B., an older teacher I work with, who has to run out of the classroom at the most inopportune moments to strip down to her panties and bra and throw cold water all over her body.

The man I still think of as my “new” husband (though we’ve been married for fourteen years), is relieved. He will never have to use a condom again.

“Wow, unprotected sex without worrying, wouldn’t that be something?” I tell him.

But then my pert little thirty-year-old ob-gyn bursts our happy bubble. “This might not be the end. It happens. Women think they’re done, and they’re not.”

What about me? What if I’m done? Why doesn’t anybody ever fucking ask me?

My period comes back. But just for one last cycle. Then she rides off into the sunset like a cowgirl, never to be seen again.

Epilogue: November 2020

I’m chopping vegetables in my kitchen and my chef’s knife is midair, hovering over the ginger root, when I hear “Period Equity”—two words I never thought I’d hear spoken in the same breath on any news outlet, though it figures it would be National Public Radio. I don’t know a thing about “Period Equity” (as a card-carrying member of the post-menopausal club I haven’t thought about periods much in the past ten years), but right away, I get a picture of this Weiss-Wolf woman being interviewed. I imagine that when she looked down at her underpants and witnessed the first sign of menstruation, she didn’t see it as a crime scene, she saw it as the start of a revolution!

I raise my knife high above my head and do a little jig. That’s for you, darlin’.

-Charlotte Adamis

Charlotte Adamis is a post-menopausal, recently retired, middle school library teacher. She lives in Kingston, New York, with her husband and their two very badly behaved, miniature, wirehaired dachshunds. She fought with her period for forty years and has only recently begun to wish it had been a more congenial and adult relationship.