I think the whole “have a happy period” thing was a pushback against the attitudes common in my youth, where your period was considered a generally horrible thing, something to dread….the curse…
I’m reminded of a scene from the sitcom The Golden Girls. I’m paraphrasing, it’s been a long time….but Blanche is talking about how, as a teenager, everyone was telling her that someday she would get the curse. But she didn’t. So her Mom took her to the doctor, who said something like “so, you haven’t gotten your period yet?”
Her reply was:
“Of course I have periods, I’m not a child. It’s the curse that I haven’t gotten yet.”
Usual age of diagnosis is 25-40 (a wide range), but 70% of those people had symptoms since their teens, so the usual age of onset is actually your teens. It’s just that it’s notorious in being fobbed off by doctors as just women’s trouble and takes a very long time to get a real diagnosis.
You’re not kidding! I didn’t have endometriosis, but I did have excruciatingly painful, crippling cramps. When I asked my doctor for painkillers for 2 days a month, he said, “Do you know how long you’re going to be getting cramps for?” I said, “I imagine a very long time.” He said, “Well, you’d better start getting used to them now, then!” Never bothered to check if there were other problems going on. I switched doctors.
I was also one of the very last girls in my class. My mom thought I got my first period the month before I turned 15. But that was actually my second. The first had been a tiny coin sized dark smear in my underwear 4 months earlier that looked nothing like blood, and I’d shamefully decided I must have done a very poor job wiping after a BM to end up with a skidmark like my little brother sometimes did, and kept it to myself. It was only when it happened again and there was more of this sticky still mostly brown stuff did it ever occur to me to ask mom if it could finally be my period. I never said it had happened before because I felt dumb.
Granted, this was the early 90s and it’d be another 3ish years before I ever logged onto the internet, but I read books about ‘our changing bodies’, my mom and aunt weren’t prudish, we had pretty comprehensive health classes all through middle school! so how come not one damn person ever warned us as young girls it might not even look like blood at first? Even now you can read questions where girls are unsure because they still apparently aren’t told. grrr
There’s a name for this; it’s apparently a completely normal thing to experience after you’ve first started. No one told me about this either, but I was too embarrassed to mention it to anyone because everything else I had seen as part of my flow looked like blood, and this stuff definitely did not.
Menstrual blood is different from eg bleeding from a cut in that it’s not only blood but slouched off epithelium and sometimes clots as well. Different stuff. And that also explains the brownish goo, AFAIK.
Plus, it takes time for the menstrual cycle to actually become functional, by which I mean that it’s not abnormal to not be actually ovulating the first couple of times. Of course, don’t bet on it.
Same as with periodic bleeding while on the Pill, that only happens because you stop administering hormones for a week, not because there’s an actual cycle going on. The lining of the uterus is being formed but no actual ovulation is taking place.
You are somehow overlooking the fact that pooping is sort of stigmatized too. One of the rules of “polite society” is that bathroom habits etc. are referred to as little as possible, and there are plenty of euphemisms when discussion is necessary.
Well…I am not talking about discussing it with friends over dinner.
I mean teaching kids about what to expect. We teach kids about pooping at an early age because it is a biological fact of life. Indeed, there are books to help un-stigmatize it (the famous Everyone Poops book but there are others).
So why should it be different for menstruation? It is a biological fact of life for nearly all women. Parents and/or teachers should teach young girls about what is coming and how to deal with it same as we potty train them when they are toddlers. It’s not like staying quiet about it will make it go away or not happen (as some may believe about talking about sex with your teen kids…that’s stupid to not do as well but that is a different discussion).
I think it tends to be thought of as different for menstruation because it is thought of as being about sex. Everyone shits. Only people with uteruses menstruate; and the reason for that would be difficult to explain without talking about pregnancy; and pregnancy is difficult to explain without mentioning sex.
– I’m giving that as an explanation, not as an excuse: I agree that children should be taught about the basics of sex and gender as soon as they’re old enough to notice, about details as soon as they’re old enough to ask, and about menstruation well before they’re old enough that it might start. Boys should be taught as well as girls – they may not need to know how to use a tampon or pad, but they need to know why girls need to use them, and that this is a normal part of life not to be embarrassed about.
That makes sense; your daughter needs more detail than your son does, at least unless he’s specifically curious about the details in which case getting vague could leave the impression that there’s something wrong about the subject. But the boys do need the basics.
I’m sure we told him the basics. There were tampons lying around in the bathroom he used, I’m sure the topic came up in that context. And, of course, boys need to know the basics of human reproduction.
Part of it might be that babies poop, and babies need a lot of help understanding everything. But by the time menstruation starts, children are expected (rightly or wrongly) to be old enough to be able to understand things without being explicitly told.
Things like ‘bleeding has all your life meant something was wrong, but this particular kind of bleeding means that something is working right’? That’s massively non-intuitive and it most definitely is something that people need to be explicitly told.
To be clear, when I said that that was (rightly or wrongly) expected, I meant that it was wrongly. Of course pubescent children need an explanation of what their bodies are suddenly going through. But it’s too easy for adults to lump them into the category of “everyone”, for purposes of “everyone knows”.
When my son was in 4th grade or so, they started what they called “Family life education” which, among other things, talked about that. My son wanted us to opt him out of this, and we refused to do so.
One of his teachers told us of another family who had most vehemently opted their daughter out of this, and had told the poor girl nothing of it. Sure enough, she got her first period at school, at age 10 or 11, and was pretty well hysterical. The teachers had been forbidden to discuss it with her (though at that point, I’d have broken the rules). The teacher told us that she called the parents and rather truculently told them to come to school right the hell NOW and explain this to their terrified daughter.
A friend had not done as much due diligence in informing her daughters as she should, and one of them got her first period at an early age (maybe 10 or so) and was deeply regretful of it. At least she apologized to the daughter about it. Me: I’d heard about the topic from a slightly older girl at about age 9 or 10, and then we had that dreadful Disney-produced film in 6th grade, plus I’d checked a book out from the library - so my mother was spared that embarassing talk. I think I was 13 or 14 when she asked me if I had any questions on the topic and I was able to let her off the hook.
I think they need to have a class for parents that details some talks they need to have with their kids and good ways and appropriate times to go about having those talks.