I knew I was going to get it in elementary school.
I don’t know how I found out about it.
Maybe my friends from school told me.

I got it in the fifth grade.
During summer vacation.
We had just gotten back from swimming.
It took me by surprise.
I devised a complicated plan to tell my mother.
I told her I had found a pair of underwear in the wash.
“Take a look. It looks like someone might have been injured.”
“Who does this belong to?” she asked.
“It’s mine,” I replied, rather naively.
She laughed.
“Congratulations. You’re a woman now.
I have to go tell your father the good news!”

She gave me a piece of cloth and told me to place it in my underwear.
I burst into tears.
So, she gave me Always pads instead.
It took me about a year to understand how to use them.
I found out on my own that there was a sticky side,
Which prevented the pad from slipping out and falling.

I begged her to not tell baba,
But she was insistent.
I felt like I was going to die of embarrassment.
Stories from female relatives about blood stains on clothes and sheets filled me with terror.

One time my cousin got her period when she was sleeping.
She woke up to find her sheets a mess.
“What’s that?” her brother asked her.
“I was drinking hibiscus and accidentally spilled it all over the sheets,” she replied.
He hit her for being clumsy.

A friend of mine once told me that she got her period one time when she was out with her brother at the club.
The blood seeped into her pants and stained them.
A random guy called her brother to him,
And whispered into his ear that her sister’s pants had a stain on them.
Her brother yelled at her and told her to tie a jacket around her waist.

I used to treat my period like a war secret.
I didn’t want anyone to find out about it.
Not my siblings, not my family.
No one.

I remember eavesdropping on mama’s phone calls and conversations with baba, trying to figure out if she had told him or not.
She not only told my father,
But she managed to tell everyone else as well.

The first Ramadan after I got my period,
Mama told me:
“Girls aren’t supposed to fast when they’re on their period.
Allah allows you to break your fast to make things easier for you.”
I fasted anyway,
Hiding my period from the entire family.
I even prayed with them,
Telling myself that God knew I was pretending because I didn’t want anyone to know.

During Eid, my family would joke around with me,
Asking me how many days I didn’t fast.
I felt like I was going to die of embarrassment.
“Not a single day,” I’d reply to their shock.

I don’t know when it stopped being embarrassing.
But I know nobody educated me about the whole thing.
One time I was abroad,
I wasn’t exactly a young girl anymore,
I bought something mistaking it for something else.
I didn’t know what it was.
I thought they were cotton swabs or something.
Turns out they were something called “tampons”,
And that they could be used instead of pads.

My period blood and pain don’t embarrass me anymore.
Especially since the pain kept getting worse the older I got.
And my mood swings, cravings, and irritability during my period became more and more apparent.
Whenever someone asks me, “What’s the matter?”
I reply with, “I’m on my period, so you’d better beware!”