so my daughter biologically became a woman today. yes, at 7:47 am i got the call that all mothers both look forward to and dread. the mom.......i think i started my period yell from the bathroom. so this explains a lot about the last 2 weeks. but i am finding myself having a lot of problems adjusting to the idea that she is now biologically a woman. its just weird....

Good Luck. (I had boys)

There's no boys in my family, so I think if I had one I'd actually have to get a book on the Lifecycle of a Male - I hear some weird stiff goes on

When I was about 12 my mum put some Lady Products in my wardrobe so I wouldn't have to be too embarrassed to tell her when I started And in my parents traditional way of things I got a book about it (this was also how I learned where babies come from).

i got my first one while on an air cadet trip. hee hee hee.

AWKWARD.

oh punk....im sorry.
i was talking to my father about it today, and he wants to take lil larissa and get her something pretty next time we are in st. louis. i was very surprised and said so and he said that he totally fucked up when we (im the oldest of 3 girls) got out period. i said hows that. apparently he handed me an old cotton sock and told me to use that till we could get to the store. we lived 30 minutes from anywhere and mom used tampons and he didnt want me to use it.


any rites of passage that you guys can think of that would be appropriate>? i always wanted to throw her a party but now im not so sure.....

Give her a hug and tell her that this is an important step, and how proud it makes you what a wonderful woman she is becoming. If you haven't talked about pads etc. do so now. If she seems inclined, use the opportunity to have a mother-daughter chat about her life and what she wants to do with it.

I'd advise against throwing a party though - I'd have been dreadfully embarassed as I felt like this was a very private matter.

god, I'd have been horrified with a party! I remember screaming the house down (I was such a charming young woman ) when my mum told my dad what was going on, even though it was perfectly sensible to give him an explanation why I wasn't going swimming with him!

But maybe getting her something nice is a good idea - especially if it's not too explicit "here's your First Period Dress!". It depends, she might be (and probably is) a far nicer child than I was

I'd have been horrified with either a party or even a conversation about "becoming a woman" and stuff. I didn't want to become a woman and other people referring to the period as such made me feel embarrassed and angry. I actually waited a few days till I told my mom, because I thought if I ignored the period, it would go away. When I eventually I told my mom, she handed me a packet of pads in silence and we never talked about it. My sister told me recently when she told my mom she got hers, she burst into tears (ETA: my sister, not my mom). And all the girls in my class were deeply embarrassed of talking about period-related stuff with the parents (and any male relative).

If anything, I'd recommend just a talk about pads and tampons, PMS symptons and what to do about them, and how her period will behave during the first years (lighter at first, then expect the floodgates to open). But, really, I'd say this is something more suited for several talks over time rather than one long embarrassing one. Or some sort of book -it was only through a book that I found out about guys' stuff, like night pollutions, morning erections and such. If not for that book, I'd have found probably embarrassingly late.

(Disclaimer: obviously you might already have the kind of relationship with your daughter where these thigns are talked about very naturally. And most of what I related is probably cultural anyway.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: cloverheart,

Yeah, I really think it depends on your daughter.

I was a late bloomer and my mother knew I'd been waiting anxiously for this to happen. I didn't expect her to get corny and sappy about it, mind you. But I was pleasantly surprised by her, if embarassed, so that's colouring my perception. We had one of our few mother-daughter moments that way.

I'm surprised so many people apparently felt embarassed about their period. At the time, whenever we went on school trips, the girls in their bunk beds would be excitedly grossing each other out by talking about their gloopy experiences.

Yeah, should've mentioned both my sister and me were early -I was not yet 11. I DID NOT want to become a woman. I rejected the very idea of it for YEARS, and I think I probably still now to some extent. So, maybe I'm not a great example

Like Clover, I was also very young, 10 or 11 and unbelievably naive. A party held in honour of it would have been.. weird. I think my mum did me out shopping or for a drive or something like that, but it was just a me-and-her thing.

My current rant about it all is that mine seems to have disappeared. I don't mind it being gone, but it seems to have messed up with *everything else* in my metabolism: blood sugars, blood pressure and digestive tract, not to mention the moods... sigh.

I was late relatively speaking at 14, we got sex ed at school at 10/11 which covered all menstral related stuff, they would split the class boys probably got the class on wet dreams.

I had a friend that got hers at 8! Screw that for a lark I managed to avoid 6 years she had to endure!

My best friend around that time of my life was male and my Mom was HORRIFIED to find out girls talked about such things candidly.

I got mine at 11 and had no warning about it at all. I mean, I knew that women had periods, but I had no idea that they lasted a whole week and that it happened once a month. When I figured out that I'd be spending a quarter of my adult life menstruating, I was seriously horrified. I was so relieved when I found out about menopause.

My Mom got hers at 10, so there's really no excuse.

Haha, Jocelyn, shortly before I got mine, I was convinced you'd get your period only one day a month, but a random day. So you had to go around wearing a pad (which in my mind were like adult diapers, thanks to some particularly obscure publicty) every day for the rest of your life until menopause (which I knew about thanks to an episode of the Golden Girls).

can you imagine having to do that all for one day?

Clover, that's hilarious. Can you imagine if the two of us knew each other then? We'd have managed to confuse the hell out of each other trying to figure the whole process out.

so now boogerbutt is having symptoms of a uti. i never had a urinary tract infection until after i started having sex because no one told me i needed to pee afterwards....what are the odds that she would have a uti right after her first period ended?

At work today I saw the book, "Flow: the Cultural Story of Menstration." I thought of this thread.

that sounds really interesting.....i might have to get that