New findings published in Nature found the reason why the early onset of puberty. Basically, getting your period before the typical age of 10-15 can lead to chronic health problems in later life like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and breast cancer – which is just one more utterly unpleasant thing to lump on top of the generally utterly unpleasant business of getting your period early.
I came on for the first time, aptly enough, listening to my teacher read my class The Witches by Roald Dahl. I was nine. The fact that I was listening to someone read a story about women who want to obliterate childhood as Mother Nature brought the obliteration of my own childhood had (in hindsight) a pleasing symmetry to it, but at the time, the whole thing was just completely harrowing. I went from thinking I’d shat myself to thinking I’d had a very serious internal injury and was haemorrhaging blood. Both of those things are a bit much for someone who’s main priority outside of school was deciding which Disney Princess had the best outfit – Jasmine or Belle (obviously the clear winner here is Jasmine. She’s super sassy).
After stuffing huge handfuls of toilet paper into my underwear at five-minute intervals for the rest of the day – even though I had no idea what a period was, I knew what was happening was somehow shameful and didn’t want to tell my teacher – my mum finally arrived at the school gate and I was able to inform her I was hemoraging blood and warn her that I’d probably be dead by the time we walked the 10 minutes to her Ford Fiesta. My mum looked knowingly at me and hurried me home to introduce me to the utterly baffling world of the female reproductive cycle and sanitary pads. She had been the same age when she got her first period, she told me, and explained that while it might all be a bit of a shock, it was perfectly natural and not something I need to be worried about. I remember feeling a bit dirty and ashamed and like I didn’t want to see my brother and/or dad for the foreseeable future. But other than that, I didn’t really think anything much was going to change. Boy, was I wrong.
All of a sudden, my mum was cancelling my sleepover with my (male) best friend from down the road – a sleepover we’d been meticulously planning at school all week. It was out of kindness because she didn’t want me to have any ‘accidents’ during my first period, but it felt like I was being punished for my burgeoning adulthood and I just wished the whole thing would piss off. Then, a letter did the rounds from my school informing parents that some sanitary products had been found in the toilets and advising that the school should be informed, which felt like my (literal) dirty laundry was being aired in public. When I couldn’t go to swimming the next month, everyone in the school knew why and I felt like a massive, swollen, hormoney freak. With rock-solid tits.
But it’s not just us poor sods who get their periods really early who find getting the painters and decorators in for the first time completely harrowing – it’s no picnic being the last in your friendship group either. A friend of mine didn’t get hers until she was 17 years old, which meant that she still felt like a child even though most of the girls around had got their period years ago and were losing their virginity like it was going out of fashion. She used to lie to us every month, telling us she’d ‘synced’ with the rest of us and even popping Feminax when her non-existent ‘cramps’ were getting out of control. She’s now 27 and has only just admitted her deception, which is an indication of how tormented she was by having to wait for her first period was.
Perhaps the main problem with both me and my friend was the fact that no one had every really spoken to us about what was going on. I’d never heard of a period when I came on, which meant I was terrified and ashamed by what was happening to me when I should have just been aware that it was something that (eventually) happens to all girls. If someone had explained sanitary towels to me slightly earlier on, I might have avoided that embarrassing incident when one basically fell out of my underpants in the middle of a sports field. And if someone had spoken to my mate about how long they had to wait to come on, she might not have been terrified – as she was – that she didn’t actually have a womb and would have to spend her life in pre-pubescent hell when everyone else would be able to snog a boy, marry him and eventually have his babies. So we implore you to share your stories with your little sisters lest they still be as traumatised, as I am, by the whole thing – there’s no reason they should find coming on for the first time as scary as we did.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.