Aunt Flow is a bitch.

I did some math to figure out the odds on when any one female is likely to get her first menstrual period. Let’s say there is an approximate 6 year window (roughly) when a girl can start at any time, so therefore that would mean there is a 1 in 2190 chance that it would arrive at any particular date within those years. ONE IN TWO THOUSAND, ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY! So when did my body choose to start the big flow? When I was 12 years old... and oh yes... the first friggin’ day upon arriving at friggin’ DISNEY WORLD. Friggin’ Awesome!

The first few months, of course, it’s not a bright red colour; neither is it the consistency of that pretty blue liquid that the use on the maxi-pad commercials. It was brown and clumpy and disgusting. It was so dark that at first it didn’t even register that that is what it was– I had no idea what it was. I was pretty freaked out; I called for my mom. She came running in and paused, then tilted her head, smiled with a kind of pity-look and put her hand over her heart. “Awe Cutie, you’re a woman now!” ...SAYS WHO?

She ran down to the gift shop in the hotel and got whatever they had – which were these old lady monster pads that looked more like they were for geriatric bladder control (it IS Florida, after all). I don’t know if it was those pads or that I was just paranoid, but I felt like I was just about to leak through my shorts all day. Then, I would check and there would be the tiniest spot or nothing at all; it really sucked. So, including 2 adults and 2 kids, my parents spent approximately $350 that day for admission into the theme park, in which we spent the vast majority of it in line-ups to the ladies washroom. My father had no idea how to take in this new information, nor how to combine it with being where we were. I think he blew a fuse or two that day trying to process it all.

How ironic that my parents made a point to reserve a room at the hotel that had the giant Mickey Mouse-shaped pool – seeing as that I never was able to use it the entire time. It was a bit too soon to attempt tampons at that point, especially when my mom only had the “O.B. no-applicator” type. At 12 years old? Eww, gross!

So, to conclude with my original point– what the heck was wrong with the other 2185 days for a start date? My mother said that it’s a rule of nature that it tends to choose the most inopportune time, so we remember it. Screw that! I would have much rather enjoyed performing a big cannonball into Mickey’s giant ear.