One morning not so long ago I walked into the bathroom and spotted a used tampon applicator fully visible, right at the top of the trash in the garbage can. My breath caught and my cheeks flushed as I yanked a few squares of toilet paper from the roll, wrapped it up like a miniature mummy, and shoved it deep into the bin. I was immediately transported back to my 12-year-old self, when I was new to periods and mortified by every aspect of them. I was determined never to let anyone know I was bleeding — especially my brothers, with whom I shared a bathroom.
Only now I was nearing 40, with a tween daughter new to menstruation. Hadn’t anyone taught her to hide all evidence she was on her period?
It was not the first time I had been catapulted into my own pubescent body as a mother, either. Every phase of my daughters’ childhoods opens a portal right back to that equivalent time in my own life.
Including — especially — puberty and its indignities. Not only because after years of back and forth between which parent she most resembled, my daughter’s changing body has made us near twins. But also because it zaps me back to middle school: my unfortunate perm, T-zone as oily as cafeteria pizza, hormones coursing through a new body I already hated, my mind fixated on an unrequited crush.
Months earlier, my eldest daughter and I went out to buy tampons together, before she had even started her period. We sat together on her bed and opened one up so I could demonstrate the mechanics of it.
It smarts a bit to remember that no one taught me how to use a tampon, or how often to change a pad, or how to navigate either one of them when I was at school. My mom grew up with four sisters, and it’s possible she underestimated how much a girl needs her mother for this part. After all I only realized I needed tampons when I overheard her talking to my aunt, telling her how she didn’t understand why I wasn’t using them.
And even though no one ever said it, I understood that my period was something to be embarrassed of, something to hide. Alone in my room, I practiced sliding wrapped pads in and out of my jeans pocket so I could do it in science class without anyone noticing. I practiced tucking used pads under other trash in the waste bin.
That my daughter was so brazen, so open in her handling of her period felt like a personal affront.
Teenage girls often start to morph into their mothers. That was certainly the case with me and my mom, and now, with my daughters and me, too. Watching my oldest, I realized I had not been misremembering. I really did go from flat-chested to B-cups overnight, hopscotching right past any need for a training bra.
Just like my period, from that first Playtex bra my mom bought me at the mall, which arrived unceremoniously, unannounced on my bed one afternoon, I internalized the idea that a bra should be as close to invisible as possible. My primary objective became never letting anyone see my bra, and I developed elaborate routines for pulling it off from under a shirt at sleepovers or changing shirts for gym class without baring so much as a flash of fabric.
Not talking about puberty was better, in my mind, than how mom gave me my first razor, a pink Daisy, after I told her some of the girls in my grade were shaving their legs. She wrapped it up as a birthday present, and the humiliation of unwrapping something so intimate in front of my whole family was almost too much to bear.No matter how my mother handled the various stages of my coming of age, whether too visibly or too hands-off, it never felt like what I needed in that moment. Going through these phases with my daughter reminds me of all the things my mother did and did not do, said and did not say.
In raising my own girls, I have tried to course-correct, welcoming questions and always answering them as truthfully as I can. Now, I considered how to talk to her about the errant applicator. I thought maybe I could demonstrate the way I usually tucked them back into the wrapper, then used toilet paper to hide the wrapper itself.
But the more I stewed about it, the more I understood that her openness around menstruation meant that no one had yet made her feel ashamed about it. Maybe I was the one who needed a little chat about how having a period is a perfectly normal part of life for women, and how there’s no need to hide its existence from the people who love you.
The next time I saw a tampon at the top of the garbage can, I left it there. I forced myself to sit with my own shame that came up, telling myself it was mine to process and not to pass along to the next generation.
Traumatic flashbacks aside, I am grateful for this stage of life. My daughters’ bodies are like mine, and that isn’t a bad thing. Watching their bodies grow and change and fill into the same shapes as mine has helped me come to appreciate the particular contours of my body in a way I never have before. I never imagined how watching my daughters grow would heal many of my longest-running insecurities that the way I looked was all wrong — that my tummy was too round, my thighs were too wide, my arms were too flabby. All three of us have been genetically coded to look exactly the way we look.
I gave my daughters my body, and they are helping me learn to love it.And, every once in a while, I even feel shameless enough to leave a tampon applicator — in its wrapper—right at the top of the trash can.
Shelley Mann is a writer and editor living in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and two daughters. She writes about food, motherhood and sobriety. You can find and follow her on Instagram here.
This article was originally published on scarymommy.com.