My Grandmother’s First Period
PILAR REYES
I wrote this piece at my first Girls Write Now workshop this fall. It is about my grandmother, who continues to be an inspiration to me, and always finds her way into my writing. She and I are both Generation F.
My cousin Zoe got her first period in the summer of 2008. My relatives and I were at my great-aunt’s farmhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when we got the call. I didn’t know much about periods at the time because health class didn’t start until fifth grade, and I was still four years away from my own defining moment as a woman, anyway.
I sat at the head of the table, not because I was the most important, but rather because it was the seat closest to the stove, on top of which sat the eggs I was scrambling. My grandmother sat opposite from me at the other head—however, as the leading matriarch she was rather important, with or without eggs to monitor—her body turned out, legs crossed, one arm resting on the flat linoleum surface.
From her plaque-ridden brain cells somehow rose an anecdote of her own first period, which she began to describe in vivid detail. My eight-year-old mind was not mature enough for this discussion, and I sat there squeamishly, legs tapping uncomfortably, with millions of questions in mind but zero balls to ask them.
She was walking through a field when she felt the warm blood trickle down her leg (that’s how I imagined it; however, it was probably through the busy streets of Manila). As the oldest of four siblings, with each in tow, she had no frame of reference as to what to do, no one to ask help of or even for a tissue. Confused and embarrassed, she led her pack back to the house, where her mother’s explanation awaited.
I remember being shocked by the ending to my grandmother’s story, the not-so-grand finale. I knew period talk was, and still is, taboo, but did her mother think that never warning her meant that she would never experience it? That by keeping her in the dark meant she would somehow be pardoned from this natural phenomenon?
Compared to my grandmother’s story, Zoe’s—which was already filled with horrors about clots and tampons—seemed like a dream. However, I didn’t truly appreciate it until I was twelve and experienced my period for the first time. I was lucky to have friends who carried buckets of pads with them, but what I truly had taken for granted was the preparation I had received in the years leading up to that moment. I was blessed to come home to boxes of pads, tampons, and liners that had been sitting at the top of my medicine cabinet for years, “just in case.” I was blessed to have a health class that taught me not just what periods were, but why we got them and how they worked. I was blessed to have a mother who embraced the awkwardness to give me “the talk”—multiple times—as early as she could. Most of all I am blessed to be raised in a country where girls are educated about their bodies, and I hope to live to see the day when that ideal spreads across the pond; how can a woman love her body if she doesn’t know about all the amazing things it does?
memory exercise
AMY ZIMMERMAN
Inspired by Pilar’s piece and by Pilar, I recalled fragments from when I was around her age—moments when I felt myself becoming aware of my body, or when I grappled with what a woman was.
I remember the rainbow-sprinkle cookies that looked better than they tasted every single time, I still buy them for myself sometimes—to prove something?
I remember sitting in the park the night before Thanksgiving, it felt like we would never have to go back to school
I remember my polka-dot push-up bra from Target
I don’t remember my first cigarette
I remember the doorknob falling off the door at the party; music cut for an announcement: “Did anybody take my knob?”
I remember winter in the city like it was the only season
I remember the exact time the McDonald’s by my high school switched from hash browns to french fries: 10:37
I remember visiting my great-grandmother and hating it and knowing that I was supposed to hate myself for hating it
I remember the shop teacher flirting with me and knowing that I wasn’t supposed to know that
I remember visiting my grandparents on Long Island, so much grass and fresh air I felt like I was about to fall off the planet
I remember trying to wear a tie to school one day but I got too embarrassed and hid it in my bag before homeroom
I remember always having the messiest uniform
I remember walking my dog with my mother on the West Side
I remember the Upper East Side on a Sunday night, far from home, black velvet sky and muffled paws on pavement
I remember the smell of thirty girls straightening their hair in one walk-in closet
I remember the feeling of a boy grabbing my ass through a pair of Abercrombie & Fitch jean shorts—before then I didn’t know I had one
I remember eating so many SweeTarts my taste buds stopped working
I don’t remember losing my virginity, I just remember the noise around it
I remember the story of your hurts like they are mine but I have others
I remember time stopping on the highway into Manhattan
I remember refusing to get out of the car
EMILY RINALDI
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Susan E. Wagner High School
BORN: Staten Island, NY
LIVES: Staten Island, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: This year has brought about some challenges. Despite one of us traveling anywhere and everywhere writing (is that a dream job or what?!) and the other simply trying to survive junior year, it hasn’t always been easy to have our weekly catch-ups . . . yet Molly and I still find a way. Whether we are thousands of miles apart in different time zones or in a local café, every week we get the chance to chat, write, laugh, occasionally drink some overpriced coffee, and write some more.
MOLLY McARDLE
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Freelance Writer, National Geographic; Travel + Leisure; GQ; Rhapsody; Oxford American
BORN: Washington, DC
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I’ve heard other mentors talk about this phenomenon: The more time you spend with your mentee, the harder it is to find time to write. Emily and I can’t help but talk about everything and anything. It’s always the highlight of my week, whether we’re chatting over a cup of coffee on Staten Island or laughing on our laptops via Skype. The writing still happens, by hook or by crook, and when it does it is astonishing. That’s why pieces like this one—confident, funny, smart, swift, and surprising—are the highlight of my year.
The Burgundy & Gold Stitched Chair
EMILY RINALDI
This piece represents Generation F because in today’s society the older generation tends to underestimate the younger one, when in all reality we are the change, whether or not those who come before us see it.
A majority of my adult life has been spent sitting in a burgundy-and-gold stitched chair in a secluded office on the corner of some sketchy block in Houston, Texas. Being one of the only reliable psychologists in town, I have heard it all. From petty boy problems to fourth-graders’ rape stories, I have comforted people through some of their darkest times right from that chair. Not only do I comfort those who seek my help, I help them battle their demons, and I must say, I am pretty darn good at it. Every single time I have some sort of game plan and pretty quickly, too . . . or at least a diagnosis. Then one day Alex Marshall came along.
The star athlete on his football team with a beautiful girlfriend and a large group of friends: a typical high school teenager. He began coming to me two weeks ago on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he began hearing voices and having “thoughts that seemed to be coming true.” Initially, I thought it was schizophrenia, but he didn’t show any “normal” symptoms, so I was skeptical. The following weeks, he just became more of an impossible puzzle. I was getting pieces, but none seemed to fit. He told me last Tuesday
that his dream vividly happened in real life. Apparently, a kid on his football team got diagnosed with skin cancer and he dreamt about it. I figured it could perhaps be a coincidence or all in his head. He also said he had these “visions” and when he had them he would go into paralysis mode. He mentioned that he’s had sleep paralysis, and it was similar but this was real. He had a vision in the shower one night about receiving a test back and the next day it happened in real life exactly like the dream, everything down to the questions they got wrong. At this point I figured it was completely in his head but what exactly was IN his head? Schizophrenia? Too many football concussions? The fact that I couldn’t figure it out was irking me, but I was determined to—even if it was the last thing I did.
Then he came in on Thursday for his second appointment of the week. Earlier that day there was a massive terrorist attack in a church in Rome, Italy. He came in, sat down, and said he had another image of the attack. He said he caused it. He wouldn’t go into details about his image because “he never wants to relive that again.” (Taken from my notes.) The rest of the session was silent. I thought he was making it up or having really bad schizophrenic or anxiety-induced false memories. But still, nothing seemed to add up. Until last night around six p.m. he texted me asking the nearest time he could come in. I told him that I had off and was in the office so he could come by whenever he needed to, free of charge. About five minutes later I heard a voice.
“I had an image.” I looked up and across from me was Alex Marshall. He was shaking as the words left his mouth.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was called down to the main office in physics saying that I was going home. I went down and this FBI agent posed as my uncle told me I was going with him and the ladies at the desk didn’t even question it. He said to come with him and I went outside and into his car and he didn’t say a word to me and then my phone went off with a loud alarm. Like really loud. Like Amber-Alerts-on-steroids loud. I looked at my phone as I read: ‘INCOMING MISSILE: YOU HAVE APPROXIMATELY THIRTY MINUTES TO FIND SAFETY.’ I looked at him and he said, ‘We are getting you to safety with your family; we know your secret, you won’t be harmed.’ Then the image ended,” said Alex with tears welling in his eyes and his face as pale as a ghost.
“Alex . . . it’s just a thought, it won’t happen,” I tried to reassure him.
“I know it sounds ridiculous and like I’m losing it, but I’m not.”
That is the last conversation he asked me to record to prove he “wasn’t losing it.” I didn’t believe him. Quite frankly, I thought he was losing it. Then this morning I was sitting in my chair after my patient had just left. And then alarms on my phone started and they were loud. Like really loud. Like Amber-Alerts-on-steroids loud. “INCOMING MISSILE: YOU HAVE APPROXIMATELY THIRTY MINUTES TO FIND SAFETY” was displayed on my phone. Now here I am, in the basement of a secluded office on some sketchy block of Houston, Texas, writing perhaps the last thing I will ever write. Maybe the FBI will find this. In the meantime, I am going to complete his diagnosis, which might be the last thing I do. Alex Marshall, seventeen, can actually predict the future.
Joy Girls in Salzburg
MOLLY MCARDLE
I’ve traveled, and written about travel, a lot this year for work, all while writing with Emily via Skype and text and email. She’s shown up—obliquely—in my travel writing, too.
Our mothers’ mother, Nana Fitz, used to call Nora and me the “Joy Girls.” The moniker appeared without explanation at the end of her life, around the time Nora and I entered our twenties. I relished it as a signifier of our allegiance, as a sign that we—unmarried and ambitious, avid travelers and social planners par excellence—could be joyful because we insisted on it as a right. In a certain light, Joy Girl could be a critique, connoting immaturity, selfishness, flippancy. But Nana said it with a hint of wonder, as if she couldn’t quite believe the kind of girls we were able to be, or the women we were becoming. She said it having been a Joy Girl once, too.
On-screen on the original Sound of Music tour, a group of nuns shake their heads in similar disbelief. “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” they ask as we drive away from the abbey, following the Salzach River out from the old city center. The young novice’s faults are many: torn clothes, tree climbing, singing in the abbey, tardiness, overenthusiasm for meals. “She’s a headache,” one nun complains. “She’s an angel,” another insists. The Mother Abbess, in a bit of musical theater wisdom that both lifts up and breaks my heart, equates them: “She’s a girl.”
Like nearly everyone else on the tour—the second full bus dispatched this rainy off-season morning—Nora and I have loved The Sound of Music since we were girls. Gorgeously shot on location (there’s a reason we’ve all come to Salzburg), set to unforgettable music (try getting it out of your head), both romantic and antifascist—what’s not to like? As adults we’ve loved doing Sound of Music things together: going to an outdoor sing-along and braiding our hair in a vaguely Alpine manner, seeing a stage revival when it came to our hometown and echoing the words under our breath. I love that Nora and I share this, but I love it even more because, in addition to its beauty, it speaks some sort of truth to me. Maria, when she spins in that Alpine meadow in the movie’s iconic opening—hungry, happy, heedless—is the ultimate Joy Girl.
DALEELAH SALEH
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Baccalaureate School for Global Education
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: three Silver Keys
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: As intersectional feminists, Liv and I almost never run out of things to talk about at our pair sessions. There’s seemingly a new injustice each week. A recurring topic we discuss is how we can implement change within our communities. It’s often easy to feel helpless in the face of systemic oppression. However, there are many actions that can be taken as a means of resistance. One of the most powerful forms of resistance is marches/protests, and Liv and I were able to take part by attending the Women’s March together. It was really empowering, and an amazing bonding experience.
LIVIA NELSON
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Web Designer
BORN: Ridgefield, CT
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I’m so proud that Daleelah chose to share “The New National Anthem,” because it’s so representative of our best pair sessions. When we meet up, we often spend the first half ranting and raving about the headlining social justice issues of the week, and Daleelah has incorporated many of those topics into this poem. This work also came out of a single pair session, where we sat down not knowing how we would tackle the Poetic Forms assignment, and left with a finished sestina. And even better, it won a Silver Key from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards!
The New National Anthem
DALEELAH SALEH
None of us are free until all of us are free—the national anthem is not only hypocritical, it is a lie!
O say can you see: America,
land of the free
if you have enough money,
and your skin color’s the right shade,
you can pay your way out of prison,
home of the brave.
tell me, was it really that brave,
sending soldiers over
from America to Iraq,
to bleed red, all in the same shade,
or was it just a way
to make money?
either way, both sides are prisoners,
the war on terror
leaves no room for freedom.
the Emancipation Proclamation reads,
“All persons held as slaves [. . .] are and henceforward shall be free.”
but this great nation of America
was a system founded on white supremacy,
holding people of color as prisoners
but weren’t we so brave?
to thrive despite
only being seen as a way
to make money.
and immigrants are only acceptable
when they save employers’ money,
doing under-the-table jobs
essentially
for free.
we corrupted
the countries within Latin America,
then threatened to
build a wall
to ensure imprisonment.
so risking everything to cross the border
is the definition of brave,
and yet there’s a constant fear of being detained
if your skin isn’t just the right shade.
under the harsh sun of imperialism, there is no shade—
in North Dakota the need for water
is superseded by the hunger for money, and
Standing Rock protectors continue the fight of generations
before them,
standing fierce and brave.
once upon a time, indigenous people could roam this land freely.
then Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue, 1492,
discovered America,
and what was once a haven
now serves as a prison.
and in our America,
women’s bodies often serve as their prisons.
because you are a girl, you must never take up the spotlight,
always stay in the shade.
and your body has no value
unless it can be objectified
in the name of making money, so
daring to look in the mirror without flinching
makes you brave.
because haven’t you learned by now?
things such as freedom
aren’t so easily attained
Generation F Page 27