My Cycle: A Tampon Story

Men think they have it bad! Of course they have never endured what we women have, both as adults and as young girls. I remember starting my menstrual cycle, and my mother’s comment about me becoming a woman.

From where I was glancing down, it didn’t seem like I was becoming a woman; it seemed more to me like I was dying. Then she gave me this huge, bulky pad and told me how to use it. She never mentioned any alternatives.

Men, so your voice changed and you got a little hair on your chin? So what?

For the next couple of years, I grew to hate that pad more and more with each passing month. I dreaded my period; if only I had been able to hibernate for those four or five miserable days. I became paranoid about my enemy, the PAD.

Did I need to wear loose pants because tight pants would make people see my pad? Were dark pants my only option when my cycle started? Did I smell differently? My pad leaked a couple of times, and I was left with embarrassing stains on my pants. I took to wearing my father’s shirts so that I would have extra protection. These were the questions and issues I dealt with each month.

Of course, changing the pad was the worst. I couldn’t stand it. Looking at your own collected blood made me ill. My mother would always say, “Don’t look at it, then,” but how was I supposed to avoid it? It was the PAD, and I believed it hated me too. The cramps, with a little Tylenol, I could deal with them, but not the PAD. It was the bane of my existence.

If Men and Women are equal, then Men should have Menstrual Cycles, too.

This whole period thing threw me for a loop. I actually went into my shell for a couple of years. In time, I became brave enough to talk to my friends about my “red” time, and I learned about tampons – a true gift from God. Several of my friends preferred them to the Pad. I remember rushing home to tell my mom about tampons, and she went insane. You would have to know my mom to understand. Anyway, she basically said tampons came from the devil and that I was going to lose my virginity to “the Devil’s Stick” (I didn’t even bother to tell her that my virginity was already gone). She refused to have tampons in her house. After that front door hit me on the way out to my freshman, college dorm, I bought my first box of tampons – and I’ve never looked back.

At first, I was kind of nervous about sticking it up there. But guess what? It wasn’t a big deal. I really didn’t even feel it, and since it was made to absorb, blood wasn’t everywhere. I could wear my tight, sexy clothes again, and I didn’t feel like everyone knew it was my time of my month. Now, finally, I truly felt like I was a woman.

You can always tell when you have found the right guy (at least for a few months, maybe even years) when he only stares at you once when you ask him swing by the store for Tampons. You know that he’s a keeper when he’s like mine and is willing to take the old box into the store with him and then compare it with all the other brands to make sure he has the right one. When that man refuses to have his tampons put in a plastic bag because he refuses to kill a tree for one tampon box and proudly walks out of a busy Wal-Mart carrying his tampons, then marry him. I did. That’s real love. Real love transcends tampons.