At 48, I Was Still a Little Embarrassed to Buy Tampons
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The first time I ever used a tampon was, poor me, right before gym class, freshman year of high school. At 14, I was a late bloomer compared to all of my friends and, I figured, probably everyone in the universe—the last to finally get my period. (Margaret, 12, had nothing on me—apologies to Our Patron Saint of Girlhood, Judy Blume.) I’d been shocked and scared and a little thrilled to see the blood the day before, late one spring afternoon as I languished in a mostly deserted building, waiting for my ride home from the small private high school I attended thanks to a generous scholarship. No girlfriends remained on campus for help, and of course no cell phones existed to text one of them, or my mom, for advice.
More than 34 years later, I can viscerally summon the queasy anxiety that tripled with every mile between the tony hills of San Rafael and the—at the time—decidedly un-tony hills of my hometown. For a good 45 minutes of rush hour traffic, as the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Civic Center and BMWs gave way to the falling-down barns and weirdly splayed oak trees and rusty pick-up trucks with KQED bumper stickers and ethereal cows of Sonoma County, I prayed the wadded-up toilet paper I’d stuck in my undies would to its job: ensure I didn’t bleed all over the back seat in full sight of my seatmate, my friend of many years who was and is the closest thing I have to a brother but who is and was also, horribly in that moment, a boy. If the wadded-up toilet paper failed, I knew I’d have no choice but jump out of the car and run over our un-tony hills straight into the Pacific.
It did not fail! I survived the drive and did not have to disappear into the sea, but the very next day I upped the mortification ante by deciding at the last minute to experiment (!) with a tampon (!!) as I changed into my dreaded gym shorts (!!!) before heading down to the field to play soccer.
The experiment was not a success. Rather, it quickly became a painful impediment to movement of any kind, let alone zooming about fielding soccer balls. But most salient is the fact that I simply suffered for the entire gym period because I would rather have died there on the spot (running to a handy oceanside cliff unfortunately being out of the question) than tell Dave, my health teacher, why I needed to hobble back up to the bathroom ASAP.
This mortifying memory came flooding (surging? pouring?) back a few days ago, when an imbecilic/genius (?) meme popped up on my feed: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s cheerful dad-next-door face beaming from the front of a Tampax box emblazoned with the words, “TAMPON TIM.”
Without getting too into it, this moniker is supposed to be an insult lobbied at the Dem VP-pick because last year, he signed a bill in Minnesota requiring public schools there to provide free menstrual products to students in grades four through 12. Real a-hole, right? What’s next, feeding all schoolchildren lunch so the ones who wouldn’t otherwise eat don’t feel the proper amount of stigma and shame? But what really seems to be whipping thoughtful, even-keeled folks like Megyn Kelly into a right frothing frenzy is the notion that the bill could allow for tampons and pads to be placed in boys’ bathrooms as well as girls’. (To be clear: It doesn’t mandate this; it simply requires school districts to develop plans to ensure all students who menstruate can access free period products. Again, I say, diabolical!)
So anyway—this whole thing triggered first that memory, and then this thought: “I can’t believe I was ever embarrassed to buy tampons.”
And by ever I mean as recently as last Tuesday, when I popped into the Walgreens down the street to pick up some prescriptions (a fun thing about this current age—48—is that I’m apparently always in need of a restock on something or other). As I made my way past the anemic magazine display on my way to find a giant bottle of Advil (another item on permanent restock), a bold end-cap sign caught my eye. Tampons, buy one box, get one 50 perfect off. Hey now!
I rustled through the options, frustrated to find only a single box of “Super” amongst the annoying and useless variety packs. As I pondered whether I should try out a package of “Super Plus” (doesn’t the risk of toxic shock increase with every superlative? Is that the science?), I felt a tinge of embarrassment to be standing right in the central middle aisle of the local Walgreens rooting through tampon boxes like a feral raccoon. But it was nothing compared to the full-on humiliation I felt as a teenager, or the red-faced awkwardness I felt even into my 30s. That embarrassment has been enough that I’ve left boxes of tampons behind rather than face a male checker at the grocery store; enough that I’ve hidden pads and tampons up my sleeve countless times rather than be caught with one out in the open on my way to the loo.
Grown woman that I am now, increasingly low on fucks to give, I breezily dismissed this tinge the other day, reminding myself that I am a 48-year-old lady and there’s nothing wrong with being Seen In Public Buying Sanitary Products!!!!!! But. I also knew that my next stop (after the giant Advil) would be to the pharmacy counter, where I could comfortably pay for my tampons along with my prescriptions. In other words: no risk of enduring a teenage boy checker awkwardly pawing my buy-one-get-one-half-off boxes down the conveyor belt.
So, despite having endured all various indignities that come along with being a midlife woman, including but not limited to menstruating for more than three decades, giving birth, and breastfeeding in public, I was still, at least as of this very week, a little self-conscious buying these completely boring, basic necessities.
In the name of Tampon Tim I say, never again! Upon seeing that meme and the ensuing nonsense, I felt the last vestiges of pointless embarrassment leave my body.
There was, of course, nary a sanitary pad in the bathroom of my liberal do-gooder high school, this sort of thing not having yet permeated even the progressive mindset of a very forward-thinking institution. There were certainly no tampons laying around the boys’ bathrooms, where the sight of them might have, after about 12 seconds, become entirely commonplace and unremarkable.
And if they were commonplace and unremarkable, good golly, what then? How different might my early mortifying experiences have been? Certainly not totally un-embarrassing—nothing to do with being a 14-year-old girl is embarrassment free, I know that! And how different might so many experiences involving my period, or my body in general, have been? If we weren’t embarrassed about tampons, or periods at all, might we also—gasp!—not be embarrassed to talk about perimenopause, or our pelvic floors, or symptoms like abnormal discharge or peeing when we laugh (haha, just another “normal” thing we have to live with!)—symptoms that are distressing at best, signs of something deadly at worst?
I almost can’t imagine it!
Almost.
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Originally Appeared on Allure
