A friend's niece recently got her first period, and the friend was looking for menarche stories. this is:

My First One—

I noticed it when we were driving home from Grandma’s house, a trip that took about 45 minutes. Five kids in the car and mom driving. It just felt wetter between my legs than usual. I was almost 15, had been sure that I was going to be the freak that it never happened to, sure that it would be a lifelong embarrassment.

I didn’t tell my mom. I didn’t want her to know. But she always had tampons, so I stole the tampons from the box on her dresser, shook up the box so she wouldn’t notice a few were missing. She had bought me a giant box of poofy kotex 2 or 3 years previously, and a couple of those white stretchy belts to clip them on with. Ewww. We put them on the upper shelf of my closet. Then she never talked to me about it again. I never talked much to my mom about anything.

We had had the usual uncomfortable presentations in school—the school nurse showed a movie to all the girls at our school in 5th grade, and then again in 6th grade. Mrs. Milford the nurse was very frank about things, standing in front of us in her crisp white nurse’s uniform and 1950’s style bob haircut (this was 1972, the era of longhairs, bellbottoms and love beads). But she didn’t have a very wide base of experience. And the movies were silly and lame.

So in the summer after 9th grade, I finally got my period on that car trip. I knew instantly what it was. So I stole Pursettes tampons from my mom that week, and for a week a month later, and pretty much thought I’d never have to have that discussion with her.

Fast forward to late September. We had moved to the Boston area with my new stepdad who was practically a stranger to us. Then my mom flew back home to Minnesota for a couple of weeks to complete her job back there. So my stepdad Charles was doing all the shopping and cooking and parenting for that month. He was a Greek lawyer, about 5 foot 4 and hairy. I was a sassy, embarrassed Nordic Minnesota teen, already 5 foot 7.

When I got my period again, I somehow wrangled to be with Charles, this stepdad I barely knew, on the next grocery shopping trip. He kept asking me about apples and hamburger and milk, and meanwhile, I was scoping out the aisle with the tampons, walked up and down it a few times, pacing, pretending to look for something else. But then, finally, as we were about to go, I grabbed the tampon box off the shelf, and put it in the grocery basket. I thought Charles had barely noticed—and I wouldn’t have to deal with it.

The next night my mom called me on the phone long distance from Minnesota.

But sometimes
births are silent
and still the stars obey