period (TMIT)

a tradition, nay a weekly national holiday devised by lilu. all the TMIs are apparently here for your viewing pleasure. my second foray into the awesomely bad TMI. here goes...

my mom is embarrassing. i love her. a bunch. but she can be very, very, very embarrassing. there are certain words that she says that make my skin crawl. example: soiled. eeeeew! gives me the heebeejeebies.

my parents lived in portugal when my brother was born. my mother told me a story about the apartment they were living in being robbed. she said, “they left soiled sanitary napkins,” with such description and horror that i have never been the same again. soiled. bleaheghedck.

so, when she taught me about my period the stage was set for horribleness and embarrassment and general nogoodness. i honestly don’t remember like the exact date and time i got my first period or anything. that whole era is a blur. i do remember how my mom scared me off tampons for a long, long time. she was trying to explain about all things periody and she delved into tampons. i don’t know who said what about anything (i don’t think i said much).

all of the sudden she had her right foot on top of the tub ledge and a tampon in her hand explaining to me about proper tampon placeage. i wanted to die. performing some sort of interpretive tampon dance,* she says, “you just have to do kind of like this or you can sit and do it, too!” unabashed at my face of horror.

i didn’t use tampons until i had to swim for a summer camp where i was a (paid) counselor. now i just use a cup.** that right there, is why we call it TMI jerks.

on a related note, the moment i knew chuck and i were for reals was the moment when he came home from the grocery store with tampons. of his own volition. i mentioned, in passing, on a friday night that i was almost out of tampons because i had forgotten to stop at the store. he came in saturday morning (while letting me sleep in) with tampons. they were the wrong kind (huge and cardboard) but they were tampons. that chuckers had purchased. in a store. for me.


*for the record, we were both fully clothed.
**it’s better for the environment and i wrote a very helpful and informative review here. T… M… I…