Breaking the News

As I was saying, I just told my daughter about menstruation.

She took it pretty well. Except for when she said, “You have got to be kidding,” and ‘Okay, now you’re really grossing me out.” and, “You mean this still happens to you?”
 
She’s only nine. I hadn’t planned on talking to her about all this yet, but a friend of hers (who is ten) just started, and I’d rather have R. hear about it from her own mother than from someone else. I’m trying to break a generation-old family tradition of disseminating this kind of information “too little, too late.”
 
And besides, I didn’t have a copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret handy.
 
We had our conversation in the pantry. I hadn’t expected to tell her all this in the pantry, but that’s how it worked out. Part of my oh-so-clever strategy was to keep the conversation light. (You can stop laughing now.)
 
I thought that a big sit-down lecture with a scientific book would make the whole thing loom too large in her sensitive pre-adolescent brain, and that it would be better to say, “Oh by the way, you should know something…”
 
We were only near the pantry at first. But then when I said it was something that her 4-year old sister shouldn’t hear, she moved us farther next to the spice rack and shut the door so S. wouldn’t find us.
 
Years from now, I expect that the setting will be prompt much eye-rolling when she tells the story to friends or her own daughters. If she gets over being grossed out and has any daughters. 
 
I didn’t go into too much detail. I didn’t discuss sex. I know it’s too soon for that.  I just explained that when a girl’s body starts to get ready to someday be able to have a baby, the uterus, which is where babies (when there are babies) grow, needs to have blood in it to help the baby grow. This is where her exclamations started.. And then I said that when there isn’t a baby – as is usually the case – the body doesn’t need the blood, and it comes out.
 
She really did accept it pretty well, considering. I’ve assured her that she probably won’t need to worry about it for a couple of years at least. She’s had some follow-up questions. Her first was, “Does it change how you feel or how you act?”
 
I told her it doesn’t have to, and it doesn’t always, but that for some people it does. Sometimes. And I also said that other people say it does more than it really does. But we don’t go too far down that path. There’s a balance to maintain for ya. How to allow her to feel it’s okay to be emotional because of hormones without giving her another big gun in her already well-stocked arsenal of reasons for wild mood swings?
 
When R. was about 6 and a half, she burst into tears one January afternoon because, as she put it in a wail, “Now I know three people who have died! Nana, Abraham Lincoln, and that other man!”
 
 It was Martin Luther King Day.
 
And now, she’ll have to bleed once a month on top of all that.
 
Last night, though, she said, “Mom, about that period thing. Do men get it?” And I said, “Nope.” and bless her little heart, she said with obvious pride, “Oh, cool. It’s just a girl thing, then.”
 
Yeah. Cool. I hope she can keep this positive attitude. I think attitude counts for so much.
 
Today in the car (before we got her sister), she said, “Mom, about that period thing. Do you think I’m the kind of girl who will be able to handle it? Or do you think I’m the kind of girl who will freak out?” I assured her that based on everything I already knew about her, I was sure that she would be just fine with it. I almost said, “You know how you clean out the bottom of the bird cage without making a fuss about it?” but I caught myself in time.
 
Sometimes analogies are better left unsaid.