Bitch.

The day my period comes, I’m thirteen, and I can feel it. I feel an unfamiliar tickle in my vagina and I rush to the bathroom. I’m worried it’s going to be a bloodbath, like the girls at school who’ve already gotten theirs and forgotten tampons because they’re not used to preparing yet and they end up having to tie a sweatshirt around their waist to hide the stain. I don’t even know if the stain is that big, but the terror in their eyes when they realize they might embarrass themselves at school makes me assume their whole asses must be red.

I snap the door shut in the little powder room next to the kitchen and I pull down my underwear. Nothing. What was that? I know I felt something. I flush the toilet so my family doesn’t assume I’m doing something weird in the bathroom. The something weird, in this case, would be attending to my body’s needs.

My mom had talked to me about what it would be like to get my first period, and I mostly just nodded and looked at the floor. No one ever said the word “period” openly in our house, and my dad sometimes grimaced at tampon commercials on TV. A period seemed like this strange, disgusting, secret thing that would one day take over my body and make it do different things than it did before.

Ten minutes later, I feel another tickle and go back to the powder room. I pull my underwear down, but still nothing. This time, I just wash my hands.

Then ten minutes later, I feel it again, and I go back to the bathroom. This time there’s a barely-pink blush on my white underwear. I instantly feel bad that I’ve stained my clothes. Then I remember there aren’t any pads in the powder room. I pull my underwear back up, and I make no pretense of flushing the toilet or washing my hands, I just go straight to the upstairs bathroom and root in the cabinet for a pad. It’s thick and puffy and feels like a pillow is giving me a wedgie. I instantly hate being a “woman.”

My mom notices all my trips to the bathroom. She’s probably been on the lookout since she started trying to prepare me for what my body was going to do. As soon as I tromp down the stairs, grumpy from my pillow-wedgie, she gives me a warm hug.

“You got your period, didn’t you?” she says softly. My brother and dad are in the other room watching the news, so I don’t want to talk to her about it. I just nod. She tells me the next day we’ll go to a fancy coffee shop for lunch and cake to celebrate. I smile and say thank you. Maybe being a woman isn’t so bad. 

At lunch, she sets a little black box on the table and says, “It’s just a little thing to mark the moment.” Inside is a simple choker she’d made from leather, with wine-dark garnet beads that sit right over my collar bone. Because I am a teenager in the nineties, this dark choker is one of the most beautiful pieces of jewelry I’ve ever seen. I put it on immediately. As we eat our cake, I roll the beads back and forth between my fingers. I am a woman now, and my mom and I are joined together in a biological pact. We are blood sisters.

I try not to listen to the anxious thought that insists this is nothing to celebrate. Your body just did this on its own, what kind of accomplishment is that? You haven’t done anything, the anxiety insists, as if my body is not part of me.

The next day, or maybe a few days later, our whole family went out for dinner. In the car, we were having one of those discussions about some divisive topic that starts out with sarcasm and turns snide and then turns into a heated argument. I don’t remember what we were talking about, or what I said, but I remember we got to the restaurant and we all piled out of the car in a huff and my dad said to me, “Being on your period doesn’t give you license to be—”

My ears were buzzing so loudly that my anxiety drowned out the last of his words. To this day, I have no idea how he finished that sentence.

But what I what I said to myself was: Being on your period doesn’t give you license to be a bitch.

I don’t have any memories of him ever swearing at me, and this memory is really fuzzy. But I do know he called himself names when he made a mistake. He’d cut a piece of wood too short on a project, and he’d call himself stupid. It was never serious, always in that I’m-just-kidding-around-with-myself tone. But I took his inner voice and ran with it. I lived in fear of him ever thinking of me as a stupid, crazy bitch. A dividing line was drawn in my brain. In a day I’d crossed from girl to woman, sweetheart to bitch.

I was wearing the choker my mom had given me, and it felt tight around my throat. My cheeks felt hot. Whatever might have been welcome in the world of women, there were clearly things that were not welcome in the world of men. I understood in that moment I was not allowed mood swings. I was not allowed to struggle with handling my emotions in front of my family. I closed my car door and slid my eyes away from his face, down to the pavement.

Anger = crazy bitch.

I wanted my dad to hug me, to save me from the mental churning that was taking me under and making it hard to breathe. I wanted him to help me figure out how to handle my anger if I wasn’t supposed to handle it with snark or jabs below the belt—which, it seemed to me, was how the rest of the family had handled their own anger in the argument in the car. Instead, he walked into the restaurant.

That memory stuck with me because I was afraid of being left behind.

Throughout my life, when I felt emotional, I automatically wondered if my period was about to start. Having a period became my go-to excuse for doing something as irrational as feeling my feelings. When I felt angry, I worried about acting irrationally. Anger and fear started to knit themselves together in my body. Grief wove its way in there, too, because I stopped letting myself feel anger—and some deep, subterranean part of me knew I was cutting off parts of myself, shoving them somewhere in the dark that no one was allowed to see. There was the part of me that did the shoving, and there was the part of me that watched and cried.

Today, I still get really afraid when I bring an angry part of myself out of the dark. When I try to describe something I’m angry about to Jordan, I can sometimes do it—and sometimes I crumple into tears. Or I get so overwhelmed that all thought and emotion seems to fly out of my body and I just sit there numb, staring blankly at a corner of the floor, waiting for some feeling, any feeling, to come back so I can try to describe what’s going on inside me.