����No one told me about the bleeding business. No one told me about anything.

����It was right about this time of year, school had just started. I was in Grade Eight wearing my favourite dress in the world, a very soft blue gingham cotton dress with a full skirt that buttoned up the front. It was a hand-me-down from a cousin in Ottawa and I loved it to pieces.

����So I'm sitting there and I notice that the back of my dress feels warm, wet and kind of sticky and I can't figure out why. I ease up and tug at the skirt and I almost faint right there because the whole back skirt of my dress is covered with bright red blood.

����I thought I was dying.

����This, of course, would be the ONE year in elementary school when I would have a MALE teacher, because the cosmos is set up to exact the maximum amount of pain and humiliation from any given situation in my life.

����A female teacher would probably have seen my panic and had the foresight to take me somewhere, tell me what had happened. Mr. Johnson was so freaked himself that he just told me to go home. I walked the eight blocks home, waving a very red flag behind me.

����I couldn't confess my fear that I was dying, and my stepmother didn't pick up on that. All she saw was a laundry problem. She handed me the standard equipment of the day--one of those elastic garters, some safety pins, a sanitary napkin (pad), and the Kotex pamphlet called, You're A Young Lady Now. (I got the 1960's version, but it wasn't much different from the one on this site.)

����Welcome to puberty, Marn.

����When I think about the black hole of ignorance that surrounded my body and how it worked, the sense I was given when I was a kid that it was all vaguely shameful, I just want to cry.

����I'll be 50 next year, so sometime in the next few years this monthly bleeding business will stop and I'll pass through another transition.

����I've often thought how much harder all this must be for men because they don't have the same physical changes in their lives that women do, their bodies don't mark the life transitions so clearly.

����Almost all my life I have hated the mess and cramps of my periods. But you know, now that I'm coming towards the autumn of that, I've come to realize I will mourn their passing.

����Look, I never claimed to make sense, this is just how I am.