The other day I looked up from my laptop at a coffee shop and saw that everyone was bent over a screen. I wondered what someone from 1971 would think about this “1984″ business. Each day by mid-afternoon my body aches from this ergonomic failure, but I’ve learned to remedy it with some stretching and yoga.

Yet on this afternoon, when I check the schedule and read the instructor’s name, Matthew, I start making excuses. Would I feel different if the instructor were named Melissa? It isn’t just yoga. I am like this with male dentists, doctors, massage therapists, therapist-therapists….Why am I scared of men?

A home video labeled Christmas 88’ shows footage of the family celebrating at my parent’s house. When the door-bell rings, I open the door to find Santa. I scream and run away, a bevy of cousins following me. Santa was an old man– old men were not to be trusted!

I’m not sure when the transition to adulthood is. It used to be 18 then it was 21 but now it seems to be whenever you stop sleeping on a mattress on the floor and spend more than $15 at a time on marijuana. When that happened for me, I started making my own appointments too: Dentist, Gyno, Doctor, Therapist. I googled for female names.

I would have said this was about supporting female professionals–gender egalitarianism! But then, a blip.

I was getting an IUD but then the female doctor wasn’t going to be able to do it. I had to see a male gynecologist. And here, I realized there was real fear. But I made the appointment, I was an adult now. I wouldn’t scream and run out of the doctor’s office.

The morning of the IUD insertion, I was greeted by the doctor–an older guy with a gentle demeanor. He was really nice and asked lots of clarifying questions, probably trying to make up for the fact that he was a male gynecologist.

As we talked about the IUD procedure, I kept expecting to notice some sexual undercurrent. When no sort of tension arose,  I began wondering what his sex life was like, what he thought of me sexually. I wondered if I was the one sexually objectifying here.

As I waited on the crinkly paper, I began to face my male-gyn fears. I thought about the cultural messages about men. Messages about the “natural and brutal nature” of men. Messages that said every man was a potential predator. Messages like “men only think about one thing”. This wasn’t fair to men. This seemed to only shame men and make women distrustful of them.

Tuning into these messages, had I turned men into an object? A sort of tooth-y, hairy thing concerned solely with sex? Was I the one being sexist here?

“We are going to insert the IUD now” the doctor said. Suddenly I remembered what I was there for and felt nervous again. My cervix cramped and my body, anxious, went into a sort of shock mode. “She is going pale!” The nurses ran to get me some water.

My pondering about gender was gone. I would not have fond memories of this gyn-visit. I would not want to go out of my comfort zone again with male doctors, masseuses, whatever.

But now, in front of the yoga-schedule here I am. I watch my cat stretch into a perfect down dog. Okay, fine. I’ll go. I will explore this. When I get to class, Matthew is talking to a guy outside. I go in and sit on my mat pretending to be zen-like.

Matthew comes in and I sit up straight. “Sorry my boyfriend forgot his keys, I had to give them to him!” Oh. He is gay. Did I mention that negates the anxiety? I close my eyes again. That was close.

Adapted from a Frisky post!

What is up with the fear of men? Is it reasonable? Is it not? Do you know what I am talking about?

I was at bar in Manhattan for a magazine-networking party. The place was decorated for Christmas and crowded with name-tags that read “Elle” or “Marie Claire”. After ordering a glass of white wine (I’ll have what everyone is having) I hovered among the editors and beauty writers. They smiled and looked into their glasses or turned back to conversation.

Usually I am good at networking. I tried again, lingering near conversations. When a guy bumped into me then apologized and winked, I realized that everyone at this event was a woman. Was that why it was hard? I smiled wider and said things like “I love those earrings.” I was still standing alone.

I looked at my phone and composed a text message: “r u okay?” I let my hand drop and a moment later my phone lit up, “r u okay?” it asked, sounding concerned. I do this sometimes. I text myself and then answer myself. “I was just feeling anxious….I think it is getting better” I replied. “love you” it said back.

The man who winked at me came back. He asked if I wanted a drink. He was not an editor or a writer. He was the bar manager. I tilted my head and balanced on tip-toe. “I’ll have one cigarette with you.”  He put a hand on my back and opened a door to the back terrace. I think, “I will give myself this. I will give myself five minutes.”

“Sometimes, I just I feel so grateful for male attention.” I said aloud, afterward, to a female friend.

“Yeah you aren’t supposed to say that” she said, “But I know. I totally know what you mean.”

On g-chat, a friend sends me a link to a YouTube video called, “Can men and women just be friends?” I roll my eyes. I hate that question. It is heteronormative and sexist, and yet I click anyway.

The video has 5,208,458 views. In it, women on a college-campus answered, yes of course men and women can be friends. But the college-aged men weren’t sure. They always want “something more.”  Then the women admitted their male often friends had crushes on them.

I blame the male film-makers but squirm in my seat. It is a phenomenon, isn’t it? The friend who is in love with you, who you maybe loved too? But perhaps… led on?

In college I said a lot of things like “I love being single!” but looking back, I wasn’t so single-y. I had Elliot for boyfriend-y things.

I’d go to his dorm-room and we’d lay on the floor, smoking pot and painting. Or we’d have picnics, drinking wine and talking about poetry– once, while sick, we read The Little Prince aloud in bed. Poetry! Wine! Things I’d previously only imagined doing with boyfriends.

When people asked if we were dating, I’d say, “no waaaay! Just friends!” I wasn’t exactly interested in Elliot , and yet, somewhere inside of me was a voice that said– keep him around!

The first time Elliot told me he loved me it was in a letter. I wrote him back. (Of course I love you, you are my best friend!) In a MySpace message dated 2006, he wrote: “I have no idea how this is all going to play out. Or even if it should play out (even though i want it to so badly…sometimes you just aren’t supposed to get what you want).”

When I came by Elliot’s frat-ish apartment, the roommates shot me a look. They knew and I knew too. He loved me and I was not going to date him…but I was also not going to let him date anyone else.

In that MySpace letter he had written: “Remember when you showed me that comic in the coffee place? It was a joke about girls only liking the guy (maybe they were bears?) when he is 30. I thought maybe you would like me in 10 years…”

One fall, I brought Elliot to visit my parents. We drank mini-bottles of red wine during the 7-hour train ride, patches of gold and turquoise blurring past. When he stood in my childhood kitchen that night, smelling like bonfire and pot-smoke, I felt safe. And there was that voice–you could marry this man.  I wouldn’t have admitted it to my friends, but maybe?  Someday?

It wouldn’t happen. I would meet someone, and then so would he.

Later, when he re-appeared, I was married. In the kitchen I fussed with a salad, and I could hear he and my husband laughing–getting along.

My husband elbowed me in the hallway–“He is great!”

Like the women interviewed in the video,  I would probably say that men, women and people of any gender can be friends, of course. But then what is the difference between platonic love and romantic love? I’m not sure that any friendship is completely platonic.

I guess the difference was, now, in our dining room with Elliot  I wanted to be a good friend. We talked about the past and in an instant, I saw it– our friendship, that line where it could easily cross into something more. Maybe the real question has nothing to do with lust and love in friendship, but rather, can you be a friend to someone whose heart you are hurting?

Adapted from a Frisky post.

I wanna hear from you! Tell me your stories of friendships that have bled into more.

What do you think of that terrible question–whether or not two people can *just* be friends? 

The front half of Reverend Jen’s apartment is the “Lower East Side Troll Museum.” Hundreds of them, naked and bejeweled, line the walls. Further inside Jen’s paintings of unicorns, aliens and fairies swirl in pastel psychedelia.

Reverend Jen is a sort of New York celebrity “I don’t have my ears on,” she says collapsing next to her chihuahua, Rev. Jen Junior on a pink couch. Jen told the New York Post she wears her pointed elf ears (attached with stage glue) daily and when they fall off she buys another pair and the cycle repeats.

This ritual is inspiration for the title of her new memoir, Elf Girl which is full of art world adventures, acid trips and love letters to New York City– “New Yorkers don’t just want to kiss the sky, they want to fuck it”. The memoir is a follow-up to Live Nude Elf, which tracked Jen’s work a sex writer for Nerve’s I Did it for Science column.

As we sit drinking Budweiser tall-boys, this is where the conversation inevitably turns. “What are the wildest things you’ve done in the name of experiential-sex-journalism?”

Jen’s first column was about nude house cleaning. It was snowy and she trekked to the Upper East Side. “I was ceased with terror over the thought that he would make me do laundry. I don’t know how!” she says, “But I washed his dishes, and he was like, ‘you are jiggling enough for me!’

Jen spent the rest of the session hanging out on his couch, naked — save for the dish-washing gloves — drinking red wine and talking about his ex-girlfriend. For the sake of a good story, she did one more shift with a different guy but it wasn’t as fun — “he just watched Pokemon the entire time.”

What else?

There was the 70’s style key-party ala The Ice Storm. Jen dressed like Sigourney Weaver and everyone got into the vibe, until it was time for keys. “Straight people were pulling gay peoples’ keys and the two hottest ones there pulled each others. They totally cheated.”

Tantric sex was also among her favorites, “you start with meditation and aligning chakras. By the time you are including body parts, it feels like tripping on acid.”

While writing the first memoir Jen was hanging out with Jonathan Ames, an author whose stories were later turned into an HBO show, Bored to Death. Pre-fame Jonathan was acting as her agent. Post-fame, Jen became the inspiration for an elf-ear wearing character on Bored to Death.

Jen tells me she just finished a novel, not yet published, based on the luxurious Manhattan dungeon, Pandora’s Box. Jen describes wandering into the gold-and-cream Versailles Room, with its rococo mirrors and plush carpeting and feeling like Alice walking through the looking glass.

Pandora’s has rotating walls like a Scooby-Doo haunted house, and Jen explains “if a session goes bad you push on the wall and are in the next room”. She chalks this up to writers curiosity, “I had to go to the darkest place I could”.

Similarly, while Jen was writing Elf Girl, an ad in the Village Voice caught her eye: “Sex therapist looking for a pretty girl. Must be smart, compassionate and open minded sexually.” The ad was for a sex surrogate.

In the Park Avenue offices, Jen learned that as a sex surrogate, you start with touch. “Premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction basically stem from the same thing, men are sexualizing the situation and thinking too much.” Later sessions involve deep breathing and masturbating, asking constantly where they were on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being orgasm. When they reached a 4, you stop, take a break and start over. “The whole thing sounds very 1970’s but it works,” says Jen.

The sex surrogate experience became fodder for the book Jen is working on right now. The inspirations for her paintings, however, seem to come from somewhere otherworldly. I point to a painting of cloaked aliens surrounding a Chihuahua, “I like this one.”

“That was inspired by a dream. Rev. Jen Jr. was abducted by aliens and I had to go to outer space. When I got there, she was floating in the air and they were worshiping her like a Goddess. I was so happy.”

It isn’t all sex and aliens. We also discuss Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. “In Delta Venus she discusses her feelings about the war as well as shopping, like, I feel guilty because I bought this fucking thing. And Anaïs writes about her cycle–no one does that!”

Jen’s writing is also political while being grounded in a sort of domesticity– the bodegas and open mikes of the Lower East Side. I devoured Elf Girl, reading her sequence about 9/11 twice. I underlined a section about the trade with New York City– living in uncomfortable squalor, getting the world in return.

Outside the windows of the pink  rent-controlled apartment, it is growing dark. Jen is going out tonight, and will wear a new shiny catsuit. “What are you going to wear it with?” I ask. “Six inch heels” she responds. The elf-ears are a given.

Watch more new videos on Tumblr, where if you have a question you can ask.

I am drawn to the idea that changing one’s look could transform other areas. I personally mark time by hairstyle– “was that during the platinum blonde disco phase? Oh no it was the long black hair/gypsy era”. There is something about the new year that has me craving all of this.

My friend Kate and I had a conversation about it. She has been dressing like a  pirate-queen and I’d been going for some kind of Courtney Love meets High Priestess thing– draping myself in lace-y items and burning candles all over my apartment.

What did it mean for our lives?! Of course, in film, it is much more clear-cut.

For TheFrisky, I wrote a round-up of my favorite movie make-over moments.

Here are some of my faves:

Jawbreaker: The scene in which Fern is “transformed” into Violette is a  little out of place. Why the sudden “Weird Science” setting? She’s spinning around in a laboratory while a creepy voice says things like, “Lashes, thick! Magenta!” But the result is the best of  teen movie makeovers — the girl with the believable “before.”

While still beautiful, Judy Greer nailed the “strange girl and not in a cool way” thing in Fern. And post-makeover instead of being owned by popular girls and looking to others for approval, Violette becomes a strong character who owns her new found power. Apparently she was a narcissist all along! “Jawbreaker,” you make me yearn for the days when hot pink plastic skirts and glitter makeup were in.

Prozac Nation: Near the beginning of the film, Christian Ricci’s character, Elizabeth, says to her college  roommate, played by Michelle Williams, “We’ll be like these beautiful literary freaks. Brilliant and dark, sexy.” A signal to you, dear viewer, that a makeover is about to happen. And what ensues is the most realistic kind of makeover– the self-makeover. A visual representation of the character’s emotional and psychological transformation. And isn’t that what it is always about?

In “Prozac Nation,” its Elizabeth’s freshman year at Harvard. She goes from living a sheltered life with an over-protective mother, to throwing a “loss of virginity” party for herself while draped in pearls looking very Madonna-goth-chic. Someone, steal that idea!

 Thirteen: When we are introduced to a 13-year-old Evan Rachel Wood, she is in pigtails and pastels. Remember that awkward phase between being embarrassed about wearing deodorant to talking loudly about blow jobs in homeroom? No? Okay, that’s who ERW is playing here.

First comes the cool, tight-fitting clothes, then the thong underwear, then the piercings and–climax–the drugs and sex. The whole thing feels so public school, I feel like I know these girls.  I know this make-over! I remember distinctly the tube-top I bought at age 14, it was tiny and I wore it with low slung jeans and body-glitter. And then I just get stuck there. I guess the easiest cultural proverb to pull from this film is maybe there was a good reason moms didn’t want us to wear eyeliner in middle school. But not that they could have stopped us anyway.

Ghostworld: Sometimes, makeovers aren’t about going through a powerful transformation. Sometimes a new look just happens because you are bored or confused or want to be someone else for a day. Fashion is a way to play with new personas, to reflect your inner mood, hence why Enid is always inspiring.

This film captures the tenuous moment between teenhood and adulthood, but does becoming an adult have to mean giving up the decision to dress like a granny one day and an “original 1977 punk” the next? Puh-lease, Enid is totally still exploring different looks, wherever she ended up after getting on that bus. Tidbit: the film recently turned 10 years old and the “weird” outfits still look like they could be ripped from any fashion blog.

**Bonus

Me Without You: I didn’t include this one at TheFrisky, but the make-over Marina gives Holly in Me Without You feels significant. Marina (Anna Friel) and Holly (Michelle Williams) are childhood best friends, performing a ritual, promising to be friends forever. Me Without You has major intense girl BFF vibes–this make-over is all about the bending we do for those  friends.

Flash-forward from the child-hood montage and the girls are bored teens in 1970′s England, laying in bed, smoking cigarettes with their toes (see above photo for logistics!) And now in order for introverted, bookish Holly to keep up with wild, outgoing Marina, she must dye her “virgin-looking” hair and don a garbage bag as a dress–which I actually feel inspired by, very punk rock.

Read the rest of my 10 picks at TheFrisky!

Do you have any favorite make-over moments– from film or your own life? 

All photos by Alicia Vera (and of no one interviewed)

I recently became obsessed with stripper blogs. I was staying up late, reading about “musical theater” strippers, female customers who jump on on the pole and dressing room drama. In order to pretend that this was somehow productive… I decided to interview these bloggers.

I centered our conversation on music. I knew that music in the strip club is an in-depth topic– as a dancer, you choose your song onstage (fun!) But when giving lapdances–the way strippers actually earn money–you dance to whatever the girl onstage chose. This can be painful (imagine giving a lapdance to Adam Sandler singing “play with my balls and tell me how big they are.”)

But of all the strippers I talked to , I was most fascinated by Story, a traveling stripper who drove across the country, dancing club to club. Naturally, I wanted to talk to her about more than music. On Story blog, she chronicled what it was like, stripping in small towns and living out of her car. In one post she writes:

“i spent the night at jeb’s unexpectedly so i didn’t have my magical stripper bag for work tonight. i went to walmart and bought cheap foundation, cheap mascara, cheap eyeshadow, cheap jewelry and cheap body spray. brown sugar and vanilla cheap. one customer said, “i don’t believe you don’t have a boyfriend, what with this you’re wearing…” he fingered the walmart-fake rhinestone necklace i got for ten dollars and eighty-eight cents before tax. i tell him, like it’s a secret, that it’s fake. he says “yeah, but it’s special, someone gave it to you.” i give him a dance and he bucks and moans under me. he’d be a very bad lay, i think. like a fast selfish rabbit.”

In our (e-mail) interview, Story explained that dancers can move from club to club because most strippers are hired as independent contractors–”there is no resume needed and most interviews are done on the spot, requiring nothing more than an audition” she said.

I asked Story about the music in between demographic regions–did strip clubs play different music in different parts of the US?

“I think the most noticeable musical difference across the country is that some clubs play country and some clubs don’t. Rural clubs are obviously more likely to while city clubs aren’t. I’ve heard a lot of country.” We also talked about the no-rap rules a lot of these clubs have, Story says upper management make those, of course, “a lot of people are still racist” she points out.

I found myself absorbed by the small details on Story’s blog. In one post she writes:

FALSE EYELASHES: i save them. it’s a weird tic. when they become unwearable, i throw them in a little cup and now i have a whole pile of false eyelashes with little crusts of old glue and dots of glimmer eyeshadow.

In another she writes about a rare instance, a customer she would later go on a date with:

i asked if he wanted a dance. i really wanted him to say yes so i could get closer to him. instead, he asked to pay me to talk. getting paid to talk is about the nicest compliment a stripper like me can get in the club. we talked until i was called on stage. i was wearing my white lace dress and he watched like i was an angel disrobing. i knew better than to put my tits in his face and shake my shoulders so in exchange for his five dollars, folded into a heart,  i slid the length of my body, from shoulder to hip across his face. his nose bumped ever so slowly over my ribs.

here’s the breakdown for this month.

Tuesday $300

Wednesday $126

Friday $278

Saturday $414

Tuesday $202

Wednesday $120

Friday $149

Saturday $258

Tuesday $85

Thursday $56

Friday $148

Saturday $358

Tuesday $96

Wednesday $103

Friday $235

Wednesday $31

Total: $2,959 Days Worked: 16  Daily Average: $184  Hours Worked: 94 Dollars per hour: $31.48. There were less lucrative months– working 11 days in April earned her $1,540– and ones in which she earned more– June brought in $4,868. This inspired other dancers to air their earnings too. Susannah Breslin even wrote about it in her Forbes column.

It is interesting, but also helpful to other dancers. And her writing on travel works the same way. On her blog she writes that the scenery of Walmarts and road signs quickly lose their charm, and warns that homelessness wears down on you, it is the things most people take for granted…where you will sleep, eat, shit.

In the interview, she offers, advice on getting stripper ready on the road:

“I’m a big fan of hostels, campgrounds, couchsurfing.org, and once in a while a hotel. When none of these options came together in the right order, I either snuck into a campground shower or headed to a truckstop to use their showers.  I don’t follow the stereotypical stripper regimen. I don’t wax, powder, tan or get mani/pedi’s. I take a shower, shave everything, paint my nails, and put on perfume and lots of make up. General cleanliness, smoothness, and smell-good power are really the basics. Plus a great smile and a good story to tell.”

Oh, wait, and music. This interview was supposed to be about music. What does Story dance to? The first song she requested was Ludacris’ What’s your Fantasy, but now her go-to is to anything by Portishead. Although, in embracing her redneck customers, Story has bent, “my last regular loved watching me move to Kid Rock. The DJ couldn’t believe my constant requests for anything by Mr. Rock but I started to kinda like What I Learned Out on the Road.”

Why isn’t divorce a good thing? When news of any divorce spreads, it is with a certain sadness (even in celebrity marriages, RIP Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon) or sometimes it is with a little smugness (haha, Kim Kardashian). But considering the high divorce rate; or even the fact that divorce was a hard-won feminist victory, shouldn’t the break-up be a celebrated, if not an accepted part of marriage?

The first “marriage counselors” in the US opened their doors in the 1930′s. A couple would come in separately–often it was just the wife who came in at all. Marriages needed to be saved, and apparently the key was in “fixing” the wife. If she was beaten by her husband, the question would be: “what did you do to cause his behavior?”

In her book, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, Rebecca Davis Marriage traces how this happened. This  counseling spread rapidly after World War II, a time of upheaval for gender-roles. “Mass unemployment created a crisis in masculinity for men who could not find work. Then during World War II with men in the services, many women (even married women) got jobs,” says Davis. When the war ended in 1945, women were pushed out of the workforce and magazines and radio got busy telling women how their domestic roles were most important.

Davis says counselors focused a surprising amount  on homosexuality, it was about women who were “too masculine” or men who were “too passive”. And at the time, marriage was actually seen as a way to “cure” homosexuality.

This is the landscape in which Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was born, a 1963 feminist text about the ennui of middle class wives. As feminism reached the mainstream, divorce rights were granted. Wives soon had a stake in their husband’s earnings with rights to divorce and marital rape was recognized. In turn, the rates of suicide in wives and homicide of husbands declined sharply.

There was almost a virtue to divorcing in the mini-skirted 1960’s and 70’s; the woman who divorced was the stereotype of a woman getting what she wanted out of life. “It was about fulfilling your dreams and ‘personal growth,’” says Pamela Haag author of the book Marriage Confidential.

The way we viewed infidelity also changed. “In the 1950′s, we were somewhat tolerant of covert affairs, more for husbands than wives it was a double standard, though Kinsey found that a fair percentage of wives had affairs as well” says Haag. In part, feminism and divorce-forgoing-taboo changed the view. Why stay if he is cheating?

“Then the family values of the 1980′s arose. This was about regulating behavior and being monogamous instead of having the illusion of monogamy” says Haag.

Today, the altruistic divorce has become a thing of the past. The New York Times devoted two articles to the subject this year. In How Divorce Lost it’s Groove Pamela Paul writes that divorce has become rare among the college educated, liberal set (those same women Friedan was once addressing). She says when these women do divorce, they face judgment and isolation from their communities. Perhaps it is the “family values” effect–those who came of age in the 1980′s are vowing to not divorce like their parents did.

But also fewer people than ever in the Unites States are marrying (poorer people and people of color are especially marrying at lower rates). Yet marriage is everywhere in the news — with the fight for marriage equality for LGBTQ people. And despite the low rates, The United States remains one of the “most marrying” countries.

“Thanks in part to marriage counseling, Americans over the last 80 years have learned to prize marriage as the lynchpin of fulfillment and social cohesion. We end up with a contradiction, a society that both esteems marriage and has an unusually high divorce rate” says Davis.

Perhaps, as we move forward with the institution of marriage, one of the things that might need to change is how we think about divorce. One solution would be to entertain different kinds of marriages– more options.

In the Netherlands, there are multiple types of domestic partnerships. According to Kevin Malliard, a professor of law at Syracruse University who specializes in marriage, those partners even have pet-names like “wife”, a Sardo is a partner you live apart from, a Sambo is a partner you live with. And in Alberta, there is the “Beyond Conjugality” registry in which any two people can apply for benefits–whether romantically involved or not. It is not hard to imagine a domestic registry in which multiple partners apply could be next.

Marriage researchers point out that Americans consider their partner their best friend. Davis traces this back to the 1920′s when people began to describe marriage as a relationship that should meet all of a person’s needs:  sexual, emotional, and so on. And the spousal best friend has been helped by feminism, men and women have more of the same opportunities, and experiences, they have more in common.

But the spousal best friend isn’t necessarily a good thing–expecting everything from one person can clearly lead to failure.

So what is the future of marriage, of divorce? Haag hypothesizes we will have more conversations around monogamy, rather than assuming life-long monogamy as the default. Others speculate there will be a return to more of the ‘wink-wink’ approach to cheating. Or maybe the future of marriage holds stronger ties to people outside the relationship in other ways, a return to a more communal style of living.

Perhaps  there is room for the idea that marriage can be a limited partnership, rather than a permanent one; divorce then, would be viewed as simple an end to a relationship that has run its course, rather than a breaking of the vow to stay together forever. If we can entertain the idea that marriage has any “sanctity” is ludicrous, so should we entertain the idea that “till death do us part” may likely, not happen. And why should that be a bad thing?

Read Part One of this story here.

What do you think of the future of divorce and marriage– should divorce be seen as a bad thing?

This weekend is my birthday. Also, I will be on my period during my birthday. But that is not what this post is about. This is about another birthday, my twelfth birthday, when I did not get my period.

Entering the fifth grade, I knew I would have sex-education class in the Spring. I heard about this from the kids on the bus, for the last two years.

One girl showed me the puberty pamphlet with photos of various “stages”– at first little hairs grew, then oddly shaped, puffy breasts and more hair–until you reached step fie with a patch of fur underwear and pendulous breasts. When will that happen again?

The boys had their own pamphlet, which was also passed around the bus: “I’m a five” a gingery boy called out.

I loathed talk of sex as a kid. When I was 4 and my sister asked our Mom where babies came from, I covered my ears and screamed, “noooo!’ At 6, when I found crude drawings of sex, I felt guilty inside for years. And at age 9 when my friends started shaving their legs and wearing training bras, I chose  to be an outsider. Sex was embarrassing. I hated the way adults talked about it.

In fifth grade I had insomnia. I would lay awake until 1, 2 or 3 a.m, worrying about grades or boys or… sex-ed. It was going to come and I couldn’t stop it.

On a rainy gray day, our fifth grade teacher passed out notes, to give to your parents–your child is going to receive a sex education class next Wednesday. I hid mine in a sock-drawer.

Wednesday came. They broke up the girls and boys. There would be boasting boys who claimed to watch the girl’s film in secret, or vice versa. I now realize, the films were probably the same. They starred Dr. T, a talking letter T, the significance of this was never explained. The film was about “crossing the bridge to puberty” and in the last scene, two children and a cartoon Dr. T jump over a rainbow bridge, laughing.

The school nurse pressed stop on the VHS. She was a large, ruddy woman, with a forced smile she told us to ask her any questions.  She told us that men were especially sensitive to the way periods smelled. (What did she mean by this?)  She also wrote IBUPROFEN on the chalkboard, telling us to jot this down because, “this would be our period’s best friend.”

At the end of question and answer time, we were made to fill out a form with our name, date of birth and address. They were going to send us some “free gifts” in the mail. I passed the form back, to avoid the “gift”… but when the form ended at my desk and the nurse stood above me, I scrawled my name.

I checked the mail daily in hopes of snatching the package before anyone else found it. Months passed, and awake at night I now ruminated about this package’s arrival– but it didn’t come. Six months passed with no package and I decided they must have lost my name. I talked to other girls at school, lots had already received theirs.

Then, on the morning of my twelfth birthday in December,  my Dad brought in a brown parcel with a return address from “Kimberly Clark”. He added the brown paper package to the pile of birthday presents from family members.

That morning, the neighbor kids showed up early for our car-pool with a birthday present for me, I opened it. Then my Mom picked up the brown box–“What is this present? Who is this from?” she asked, then pushed it toward me–“open up this one too.”

I felt myself grow hot and pink. “I don’t know who it is from, are we going to be late for school?” But my Dad, sister and the neighbors protested, “open it, open it!” So, I did.

I pulled the tape and removed an aqua-purple toiletry kit from the box, “what is it?” someone said. I opened the kit, which contained tidy sections of pads, tampons and more brochures about pubic hair growth. “Oh” my mother said. “Well, let’s get to school”.

When I finally did get my period I was 13 –and a half. It came on a sticky day in June. I was the last of my friends to get it. I still didn’t want my period, but I was a bad liar, I felt uncomfortable when friends asked if I had it yet.

I wanted my period to fit in, but  I felt uncomfortable and angry when it came. Despite the school thinking it was a good idea to send period kits as birthday presents, and despite adults using flowery language, this was not a gift. But it was nature, it was time passing, it was a new era. Viva La womanhood.

Now, tell me your period stories! When did you get yours? Any horror stories to share?

Consider it a birthday “gift” to me!