Memoir Blast 17: Sanitary Protection (Protection)

 

🌺 MEMOIR BLAST 17: Sanitary Protection (Protection)

I woke up thinking I was bleeding to death — pain, blood, the shock of it, like I’d wet myself but sticky.

That’s the honest truth of it. No gentle introduction to womanhood, no whispered warnings, no secret stash of products hidden in a drawer. Just me, thirteen, standing in my bedroom, bewildered, staring at the sheets, trying to compute and feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach.

It was the one morning my mum was at work. She tried, she really did, but four children and a society and era that always favoured the divorced man meant she was stretched.

So I went downstairs and told Paul — Mr V, as everyone called him.

The man who raised me.

The man who taught me love and taught me to trust men, even though later I’d realise there were many layers to that story I couldn’t see at the time.

But for my teenage years, he was safety. He was the steady one.

He didn’t panic.

He didn’t make it weird.

He didn’t make me feel ashamed or embarrassed.

He just said, “It’s okay,” in that calm way of his, and sent me for a bath while he figured out what to do. We weren’t prepared, so I padded myself up with tissue — the universal teenage emergency solution — and came back downstairs with wet hair and a knot in my stomach.

And then he did something I didn’t appreciate until decades later:

he blow dried my hair.

I sat on the floor between his legs while he shook out my curls and blow dried them.

He used to do it sometimes, when I let him — a small act of care disguised as love.

His huge hands lifting the curls at the back, the front, the fringe, shaping that big 1986 swoop, spraying it into place. Curls I never let run free back then, curls I didn’t yet understand belonged to me.

Then we walked to Waitrose. (Middle class we were not.)

Just the two of us, into the aisle I’d never noticed before. Rows of sanitary products, colours and shapes and words that meant nothing to either of us. We stood there scanning the shelves like we were trying to decipher a foreign language.

And then I remembered the advert:

Bodyform. Bodyform for you.

(He reassured me my choice was a good one — a huge deal for this era and a no experience dad.)

So that’s what we bought me and a cake to soften the blow from the bakery.

We paid, walked home, and that was the day I got my period. I probably took some paracetamol because the pain was sharp and confusing and no one had ever explained what cramps were. And then it hit me — this wasn’t a one off. This was an every month, forever thing. Utter devastation.

It wasn’t a happy day.

But the kindness in it was.

A man standing beside me in an aisle, trying to read packaging he didn’t understand, helping me choose something neither of us had a clue about.

A man blow drying my hair so I didn’t feel like everything was falling apart.

A man doing his best in a moment he was never taught how to handle.

And for that, I will always be thankful.