How I started talking about menstruation with my son
“Now don’t keep knocking on the door while I am inside the loo. My periods are on and I will take some time to have a bath and come out. So don’t keep doing ‘Aai Aai’ like you always do,” I warned my 10 year old son. My son made an immediate face at the mention of periods and declared, “Shee, don’t touch me. You are bleeding. Yuckkkk.”
I immediately retorted, “Oh please, it’s not like I am going to explode in a burst of blood all around me.” My son burst out laughing at that and perhaps for the first time since he was born allowed me to be in the loo without needing me for an impending emergency. While bathing, I laughed thinking of that interaction. I know that my son had had his introduction to menstruation class a few weeks ago and I was glad that we had somehow broken the ice over this subject.
Later in bed, my son asked idly, “So does it hurt? We were told that periods can hurt women.” I replied, “It doesn’t hurt much but maybe at your age, for maybe girls in your class, it could be more painful. So please don’t make any fun of them or ridicule them in any way.” My son nodded understandingly before going to sleep.
Since the first time he had asked me about sanitary pads and I had brushed him off with some lame excuse about adult diapers, I had been thinking about how to explain menstruation to my son. I didn’t want it to be a hush-hush awkward conversation that both of us would immediately want to put behind us forever. I wanted it to be an easy dialogue that would keep the door open for any questions in future as well. One that would make it easier for us to have these conversations with my little daughter later.
Over the next couple of months, I made it a point to inform my son when my periods were on. Not in deliberate ways but casually. And each time, he would make outrageous faces and sounds full of disgust. To which, I continued to outrage him further with more information.
“Aai, why don’t you wear your white salwar kameez?”
“Can’t wear white. I have my periods. What if it stains?”
To which he made a disgusted face.
I immediately retorted, “Listen, you don’t have act so appalled. In fact for nine months you were covered in this very blood in my tummy. And you were happy to be there too. Samjha na…”
“Yuck…how disgusting,” he reacted while looking like he was choking and puking at the same time. But questions came fast enough a few hours later. Why are babies covered in blood? How does the blood help in baby-making? What happens to all that blood after the baby comes out?
Most of these I could answer effectively enough. The rest I just Googled right in front of him. “Aargh, why can’t we just lay eggs instead of having babies like this?” he pronounced with disgust.
These interactions have made me wonder about the yuckiness that is so common around anything related to women’s reproductive health. Much of the mess in menstruation in women’s lives is a shame, a secret that they struggle to hide from the world. A shame they live with every month. So ashamed that women fear going to a gynaecologist and sharing their medical problems. They go for years without discussing breast lumps, irregular bleeding, incontinence, lack of sexual desire or other troubles. Sanitary pads packed in newspapers, or individual pads in smaller hideable packaging before being taken to the loo, period stains on dresses hidden with dupattas, jackets — can someone explain why we are hiding? Who are we hiding this universal truth from? Why are we protecting the world, mainly the men in it, from the gory, messy, lumpy, squelchy blood that is so routine for us?
Look at our ads. Sanitary pad ads have women wearing white and newborn baby product ads with squeaky clean mums and babies in crisply ironed maternity wear. Tell me: which sensible woman wears white during her menstruation? Or which new mom looks so crisp and fresh after delivery?
I remember hiding a post-partum breast infection for days till it became so dire that it had to be operated upon. Why are we protecting the world from post-natal depression, leaking breasts, stretch marks and C-section scars? Almost everything about menstruation or childbirth is messy and gory and it’s unfair that we have to hide our battle-scars from this world. When we hide them, we discourage discussion and dialogue around them. And lack of dialogue is the cause of lack of solutions; it is why a basic right like sanitation and hygiene is still not available to many many of our sisters in India.
These days I show my kids my stretch marks, my mastitis surgery mark, and my C-section line. I tell them stories about their birth, about breast-feeding. Surprisingly, there is no awkwardness in these chats, just curiosity and questions. Lot of them, all that I happily answer with humour but also gravity.
With today’s kids it’s not the lack of information that is the problem. It is the interpretation and processing of the information that requires work. Much of the nature of interactions on this subject have therefore changed in our household.
Recently, after I was done with my period cycle, I had immersed my menstrual cup in hot water and kept it in the loo, forgetting to put it away before I left for work. I returned home to find it missing. I panicked thinking that either my maid must have thrown it away or my daughter must have misplaced it or something. I asked all the grown-ups at home but to no avail. When my son returned from playing, I asked him, “Did you see a small plastic cup when you were bathing today?”
He just smiled and opened my cupboard with a flourish, pointing to my menstrual cup placed in my cosmetics box saying, “I guessed this must be about your periods and kept it safe. Your daughter would have taken it to play along thinking it was a toy.”
I asked in amazement, “How did you know that this was related to my periods?”
“Simple,” he smiled, “anything I don’t understand around the house, I automatically assume has to do with your periods.”
I laughed. Clearly he has a lot of questions to ask still. But I guess I am not afraid to answer them anymore.
A version of this piece has appeared on Gynoveda.com.