19/05/2020
It’s a little vague but I remember being at home and my Gran (Mum’s mum) was staying with us. Gran was a qualified reflexologist but she only practised on friends and family. Whenever we saw her my sister and I would shout ‘do my feet Gran!’. We loved her pressing our feet and telling us which parts of our body were related to the tender points on our feet.
I think I must have felt like I had constipation or a sore tummy because she did my feet and when I went to the toilet, my period had started. I was 14 or 15. She enjoyed taking credit for bringing it on with her reflexology which was quite sweet but how I felt about it was a bit lost in it all!
After that, it’s a bit of a blur and snapshots of memories. A book about periods from Mum called ‘Have you started yet?’, horrible thick sanitary towels that everything used to just sit on top of, trying to use tampons and not being able to get them in (I didn’t know until much later in life that I had a retroverted womb), going to school and feeling so awful with period pain and dirty because of the horrible towels and ending up in matron’s office with her suggesting that moving around would help - she wasn’t wrong in some ways.
My Dad’s wife said to me recently that she remembers I always had bad period pain but I don’t remember maybe because I blocked it out. Apart from the very first moment when my Gran was there, the whole thing felt quite a lonely experience and something I had to figure out and worry about for myself.
Karen, in her 40's, UK
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