Adventures of a Little Big-Nosed Girl

I'm 13 years old, in a hotel bathroom in Sydney, and I've just gotten my period for the first time. On the other side of the wall, my dad is sawing logs asleep in bed. My mom is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, because it's hard for LAPD Sergeants to take a lot of time off work, and it's before the constant access to the internet. It would be hours or days before we'd reach a library or net cafe where I could try to email a friend, but who even has personal email addresses in the year 2000? I'd hate for one of my friends' parents to read it. I MacGyver'd a solution to get me through the night and went to lay awake on the pull-out sofa. Usually I'd stay up at night while traveling with dad to make sure he kept breathing, because his sleep apnea scared me. I figured it was the least I could do after he, a Coroner's Investigator, stayed awake by my crib when I was a baby, afraid of SIDS. But on this night, I was awake thinking about my dumb period. I read the newest Harry Potter book as a welcome distraction.

The next day, we had lunch reservations at the revolving restaurant atop CBD's Centrepoint Tower. As I sat rotating slowly, eating meat of the national bird while high above the city, I wondered how many of the Sydneysiders below were also menstruating. Could they tell that I was? Perhaps the surfboard-sized accoutrement I'd purchased in a public bathroom's vending machine would give me away. Would some woman notice a new adult way I was surely carrying myself and pull me aside to tell me it would be alright and give me a sanitary napkin from her purse? No. I had to ask my dad to take me to a chemist. "Why?" "I just need some stuff! That I uh, ran out of." Once he noticed the aisle I was headed for, he said, "Oh honey, menarche is a normal thing!" Ewww.

A couple of years prior I'd celebrated my 11th birthday in a Maori Hangi in Rotorua, New Zealand. There I watched men and women dancing and singing and it made me feel like I was part of something bigger, just by being human with them there, surrounded by natural hot springs of sulfuric water. But it was while doing the most boring chore of buying pads in a pharmacy in Sydney that I realized I was the same as every woman before me and every girl to follow. Somehow, being a part of this continuum made me feel special. At the time I was embarrassed by my dad's reaction, but now I am proud of how he supported me in the situation.