Let's back up

I've recently been walking down memory lane and thinking a lot about who I am as a person, a wife and a mother. So while I don't update this blog often, it is my story...and I'd like to back up to before my first date and my first kiss, before my parents moved me away from all the friends that I knew and that I thought were important to me. Let's talk about a first of a different kind, that first time I officially became a woman. The first time I realized that my life would never be the same again.

I was 11 or 12, I don't remember exactly. I know I was in 6th grade. I'd started shaving my legs the summer before when a friend of mine, a few years older, commented on the forest that was my legs. I'd seen my mom shave in the shower, I knew that this is what women did but it hadn't dawned on me to do such a thing. I mean I was just a kid. At any rate, I was embarrassed and that night when I took my shower I lathered up with whatever soap we had handy and swiped one of my mom's razors from the medicine cabinet. I didn't ask for help, I didn't even want anyone to know I was doing it. I mean, that would just make it even more embarrassing.
As I got out of the shower, my legs stung and I had several tiny little cuts all over them. I wore pants the next day and couldn't figure out why this was so much better then just letting it go. I have to say, as an adult, I sometimes wonder the same thing.
Later that year I would go in to the bathroom and discover red. Yep, this is what they told us about in health class. This is what it meant to get your period. I was terrified, again, I just hadn't expected it to happen so soon. Sure, some of my friends had gotten theirs but some of my friends were also having sex and giving their boyfriends blow jobs. I wasn't one of those girls and for whatever reason I associated a period with the same sort of growing up.
I again went and found my mothers stash of pads. I would put the long super absorbency mini diaper on and then hide in my room, certain that you could see it under my jeans and everyone would know. The horror!! I took my neurosis one step further. I would wrap the used pads in toilet paper, stick them in a plastic back and then hide them behind the tub. We had an old claw foot bathtub that sat against the wall. At the time I'd planned on sneaking them in to the trash when I would empty the trash cans from all of the rooms (my weekly chore) but I would soon forget because, hey, I was 11 (or 12). I did this for the first probably 3 months. I actually don't remember how long it was. I couldn't bring myself to tell my mother, it was humiliating and we just don't talk about those things in my house.
At some point my parents decided to remodel that bathroom, this was around the same time that my dad decided he was going to move us out of that house. Of course I didn't know or realize this. He started to take apart the bathroom and I remember hiding in my room in a complete panic, there was no way for me to get my dad out of there so I could confiscate all those little plastic bags. He would know that I had gotten my period and he would know that I was hiding it. He would tell my mom, she would be hurt and upset and she would probably cry and want to know why I didn't tell her. Then, OMG THEN, she would want to TALK ABOUT IT. Oh no, I couldn't have that. It was much easier to hide out in my room. To pretend it wasn't happening. (I'll later in my life realize I do this with a lot of things...from the every day to the big stuff)
At some point, my dad did tell my mom what he'd found. She came to me and asked if I'd started my period, she asked when and why I hadn't come to her. I gave her short 1-2 word answers, I played the annoyed sullen pre-teen card well and she backed off. *sigh of relief*
The upside, she started buying me age appropriate pads so I didn't have to hide in my room wearing my mini-diaper. I still walked around for that week every month feeling like a freak, wanting to hide and using every excuse in the book to get out of gym class.

I realize now as an adult and as a mother, how upset my mom really must have been that I didn't come to her and tell her.