The Mysteries of Menses

What Your Mother Never Told You About Your Period

By Teri Brown

Just like clockwork, it comes every month for most of our adult lives and yet many of us don't know the details about how our periods work.

Why do periods occur every month? How much blood do we lose? Should we be taking extra vitamins? How do we know if something is wrong? These are just a few of the details our mothers may not have told us.

For many young women, reproductive education in school too often consisted of being herded into a separate room to watch a 20-minute, 20-year-old film. Those of us lucky enough to have a talk with our moms about our periods were often offered inaccurate information. Several generations of women probably received more information from Judy Blume and her book, Are You There God; it's Me Margaret (Laure Leaf, 1991) than they did from any other source!

Looking back, Nan Fischer, a mother of two from Taos, N.M., wishes her information had been a bit more complete. "I remember going to the auditorium in fifth grade, and there was the school nurse, a movie and a 'talk'," says Fischer. "It was totally foreign to me. When they said you have to wear a belt, I couldn't figure out how you put that thing on the outside of your clothes! Funny to say that now, but that's how obscure it was."

Like many other girls, Fischer got the bulk of her information from older girls. "I wish it had been more of a family thing," says Fischer. "My mother talked about nothing related to being a woman, so I can't imagine her being the one to tell me about my period. I wish I had had an older sister to talk that stuff over with." And she insists that it will be different with her girls.

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