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Where did it start? The pill is probably as good a place to begin as any. Suddenly, pregnancy was an option. Every act of intercourse was not a dice roll with fate. For a woman under 50, it is hard to imagine the fearful count that began after a night of young love before the first signs of your period or the fateful conversations with girlfriends, “I’m a week late,” began. The middle-aged women of today knew to a level of precision their daughters will never understand exactly when their period was supposed to start. The rise and fall of the menstrual cycle pulsed through the culture of the young like a secret beat that parents could not hear.
As the tension built to two weeks, everything else in a girl’s life faded into a gray mist. The hours. The minutes tolled, until someone had to be told. And then, if there was mercy, the release: “It started in gym class.”
And for some it didn’t, and then there were the furtive conversations “to find someone.” The trip in a car, sometimes with the boyfriend, but often not. The brown sandwich bag on the seat of the car in which $200 in crumpled bills, donated by friends, or achieved by selling the “adda-pearls” your grandmother had given you at birth and added to each year at your birthday, like steps through childhood.
Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
May 2006 (Vol. 2, Issue 3, Pages 198-199)
