I read Eric Vance Walton’s post Here and for some reason it slammed me right into one of the more painful memories of my childhood (adolescence).

I’m going to share it with you though it’s embarrassing and painful. I hope I do the memory justice.

Haha! Now I sit down to start writing this, thinking of the beginning so I don’t lose you, I realise just how embarrassing this is going to be!

WARNING! This story is about bodily functions and if you don't think you can cope with the ickiness of menstruation, read NO FURTHER! You have been warned!

I was fifteen years old when my first menstrual cycle started. Yes, I was a late developer. I was skinny – scrawny even – and apparently, the lack of body-fat will delay the start of menstruation. As my grandad said, however, “You can’t fatten-up a thoroughbred.” That theory has been shot to hell and back since I hit 'middle age', however. They don't call it 'mid-life spread' for nothin!

A few days after my fifteenth birthday, just before Christmas, the anxiously-awaited blood flow arrived. I don’t recall exactly where or when, but I think I was at home (that was a relief!)

I went straight to my mother and told her, “I think I’ve come on my period.”

My mother was seriously ‘old school’ and had nothing in stock that was anywhere near what I would deem suitable. She went to the pantry, a cupboard in the kitchen that sloped towards the back of it because of the staircase, and she took out a sanitary towel, or ‘pad’ as my mother called it. 'Pad' is quite apt - it seemed to be the size of an apartment!

‘Towel’ is another apt description – I could have had a bath and dried my whole body on the horrible, bulky thing!

I do remember thinking ‘What the hell do I do with that?’ when she also handed me an elasticated contraption. The contraption was a work of engineering that I don’t recall ever seeing before and I turned it over in my hands wondering how it had any relevance to what I’d just spoken to my mother about.

“You wear it around your waist, the loops on the ‘pad’ go over the hooks and hold it in place.”

I looked up at my mother in bewilderment. Questions that sounded stupid to me in my own head were flying around in my mind and I didn’t voice them. ‘How do I walk straight with that bulk between my legs?’ ‘How often to I change it?’ ‘Will anyone know?’ ‘Do I have to wear skirts rather than jeans?’ and the most important one: ‘Can I go back to being a kid, please?’

I’d been to the shops to buy ‘Dr Whites’ before and some part of me knew that it was an ‘unmentionable’ subject, something to be ashamed and embarrassed about. The shopkeeper seemed to be perverse in his desire to embarrass me because every time I went to buy a pack for my mother, he never knew how much they cost and had to hold the offending pack in the air in front of the other shoppers and shout, “How much are Dr Whites?”

Oh lord, kill me now!

Of course, we’d had sex education (learning about how the body works from the age of 7 I think) so I was totally prepared – in theory if not in practice – and most (probably all) of my friends had already ‘started their periods’ – even those younger than me.

But I was NOT prepared for the whole disgusting, sticky, icky mess! I didn’t know what to expect, but occasional globs of warm, sticky blood evacuating from my body to slowly seep into the hard-packed cotton of the ‘pad’ and remain there was not my idea of fun. Plus I was convinced that everyone knew what was happening.

The pad stuck to my skin so that when I stood up, it peeled away and disgusted me anew. I was compelled to change the pad every time blood seeped from my body. Deep, shuddering revulsion had me fleeing to the bathroom so often that my family must have been worried I'd contracted dysentery.

Of course, the sanitary towels are also exceptionally difficult to get rid of, there was no way to flush that down the toilet, so my mother's advice was to wrap it in toilet paper and burn it in the fire.

The morning after the first night spent wearing one of those ‘Dr Whites’, I woke up and sat on the end of the bed, looking out of the window. 7 am and I was awake.

My father walked past our bedroom door and saw me. “Why are you up so early?” he asked.

What do I tell him? I couldn’t give him the real reason – that I finally gave up on trying to sleep because of the disgusting mess I had to sleep in.

We were to spend a couple of nights at my grandmother’s (father's mother's) house because my parents worked at a night-club and we didn’t have much luck with baby-sitters.

I went through a whole pack of Dr Whites in the day or so we were there. I had no more left and the shops were closed for Christmas.

“Why didn’t you tell aunt Diane or aunt Madeline you had run out?” my mother asked.

Isn’t it obvious? I don’t want anyone to know that I’m sitting in a pool of blood all the time! How have we not made the effort to evolve ourselves out of this predicament? It should be obsolete by now, surely! I'm blaming Big Pharma for keeping us women bleeding every month so they can make profits on their 'things with wings' and tampons that give you the ability to ride a bike or a horse, and swim - whether or not you could do those things before!

See? Use Tampax and play the flute like a pro!

Free horse when you buy 100 packs

Then there’s the stomach cramps – oh boy! I wouldn’t wish that pain on my worst enemy – well, there’s not much point in wasting a perfectly good curse, is there? She’s probably suffering it anyway.

And now to the crux of the story. The memory that sparked this whole embarrassing tale!

We went to visit my grandmother (mother’s mother).

I was just coming to terms with the fact that periods are a thing I have to put up with now when I overheard my mother talking to her mother.

“She’s started her periods,” she said. She spoke quietly, conspiratorially, but I heard her.

I was gutted! My heart felt like it dropped inside my chest cavity. That horrible feeling you get when your world has ended. Betrayed, embarrassed and far too over-emotional to cope with that treachery. I figured my menstruation was a guarded secret between mother and daughter and she’d blabbed about it!

Then another, equally horrifying thought slammed into my brain. If she’d blabbed about it to my grandmother, she’d probably also blabbed to my father! And who else? Oh, my torture was complete! The most embarrassing, personal thing to have happened to me thus far in all my fifteen years was not only out in the open, it was probably the subject of gossip throughout the family and beyond!

That was when I started making plans for how I’d be when I had my own daughter. I’ve said it often – the only thing my parents taught me was how not to parent.

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