"Shirley , How Naive Were You?"
I was about 11 when I got The Talk from my mom, who is extraordinarily uptight in a Old World/ Victorian Uptightness Manner. The words, Period. Blood. Cramps.Bloating have never been issued from my mother’s lips. She refers to her Gyno as “The Lady doctor for Down There. (Where? I ask, Australia?”)
She explained to me that " A friend would be visiting"…
My extremely immature brain latched onto that line and thought,
“Oh, who is it?” No name was mentioned. And I missed most of the rest of the talk. I only got one and it was longer than the sex talk, lemme tell you.
So, in 8th grade, when I had already grasped the concept of what This Friend was from other girls, my period arrived. Brownish and not alot. I told no one and used toilet paper in my panties to make clean up easier.
Also, we never had the sex-ed girls-becoming-women talk in my school. That would have been uncouth. Yeah for uptight catholics! Well frighten you about the firey depths of hell or the uncertainity of Purgatory/Limbo -Since been cancelled - but we won’t discuss a natural occurence in a body.
I did this for the next visit from The Friend, too. until one day, totally mortified, I realized I came home from the local store to go into the bathroom to find that my toilet paper improv pad wasn’t there and it was more than likely *laying on the floor at the grocery store *. Needless to say, I was mortified.
So, when the red stuff really kicks in, ( again, I was exceptionally immature not like I am now 
I figured that if I didn’t drink red HI-C fruit punch that The Friend wouldn’t be red, but clear. ( I thought it was more like a mucus discharge. Feh.)
That clearly was wrong.
So, eventually, I break down and tell my mom, who is menopausal and she gives me her stash…the belted kind.
Oh.Dear.God.
I was sure everyone could see the belt lines and didn’t my mom know about the pads with the sticky things on the bottom of them and couldn’t she just go get them for me…pllllleeeease?
Did I mention we had to wear a uniform skirt?
My Mother, being astute, had never head of the beltless pads and naturally, doubted their existence and probably couldn’t find them anywhere because, in her mind, they were a fluke. Or, more than likely, did not trust them because it was something NEW.
So, I had to pedal my green banana seat bike ( complete with streamers hanging the U shaped handle bars and the baseball card in the spokes for the click-click-click noise), down to the local store and peruse the highly visible, under glaring white light row of Feminine Hygene Products - located next to the strange belts for men with hernias. (That looked dirty, to me.) Naturally, every eye on the store was on me, I felt.
Wore pads for years until I got the courage up to try tampons when I figuered the myth from my dipshitted girlfriends that I would lose my virginity to a peice of cotton, was indeed, a load of crap. ( This was pre-internet, kiddies, all we had to go one were myths and books taken out of the library on the subject- which we never did because that mean two things: the librarian would know and our parents would find out and that would be worse because then we’d have to confess about it to a Priest. No. Frickin’.Way.)
I was so naive.
Now, being the trend setter that I am, use a menstural cup and home made flannel pads to screw the tampon industry. Every one of my aquaintences thinks I am Out There Man, Like Fucking Pluto, and frankly, I like the view just fine.